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7 Savage Emergence Toward a Decolonial Aymara Methodology for Cultural Survival Marcia Stephenson In November 2003, following the terrible violence that took place in Bolivia, the Latin American Weekly Report published a headline article with the title “Is ‘Indigenous Fundamentalism’ the New Hemispheric Threat?”1 This piece referenced an earlier article by Andrés Oppenheimer that was posted on the Internet on November 6, 2003, in which Oppenheimer expressed the following concerns: “The latest nightmare scenario in the Washington, D.C. quarters that follow Latin American affairs: Last month’s bloody Indian-led uprising that toppled a constitutional government in Bolivia will spread to the vast indigenous populations of Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, and southern Mexico. Are we witnessing the start of a region-wide uprising by leftist Indian groups?” (Oppenheimer 2003, n.p.). Such articles appearing in the media call attention to one fallout from “9/11,” which is that epithets such as “fundamentalist” and “terrorist” have been increasingly applied to any group that rejects the latest efforts on the part of the United States and transnational corporations to assert their hegemony in a region. Depicted as the “new fundamentalists” of Latin America, indigenous peoples and movements once again seem to constitute a threat coming from outside of the modern, civilized world. In his response to Oppenheimer’s article, published in the Quito newspaper Hoy, Carlos Arcos Cabrera expressed his concern over the growing presence of “anti-Indian fundamentalism” while pointing to some of the contradictions in Oppenheimer’s line of thought: “If democracy has allowed the emergence of powerful indigenous movements , . . . what should we do? Limit democratic participation, promote dictatorships, or eliminate Indians?” (cited in “Is ‘Indigenous Fundamentalism ’ the New Hemispheric Threat?” 2003, 1).2 Given the violent encounters that took place in Bolivia during 2002–4, it would appear that the answer to Arcos Cabrera’s rhetorical question was provided. Indeed, in a document 196 / Marcia Stephenson that circulated via the Internet during the crisis of October 2003, the Aymara journalist Marina Ari editorialized that far from being a golpe de estado , what the world was witnessing was a massacre of indigenous peoples: the government brought out and used bullets, artillery, tanks, and tear gas against an unarmed people who believed they had the right to express an opinion regarding the use of the country’s natural resources. According to Ari, the problems went even deeper than the political events of the moment: “Detrás existe una reivindicación mayor, es que cese el proceso de exclusión y racismo contra indígenas y afrodescendientes en Bolivia. Esto merece un cambio muy profundo en las instituciones bolivianas. Y pensamos que es hora de darse ese cambio” (There exists an even greater vindication behind all this, and that is to put a stop to the the process of exclusion and racism against indigenous people and people of African descent in Bolivia. That requires a very profound change in Bolivian institutions, and we believe that the time for that change has come) (Ari 2003, n.p.). The aftermath of 2003 reminds us how certain discourses that we thought were overworked, and perhaps even behind us and thus irrelevant, must be revisited because they keep coming back to us. The sustained use of terminology such as fundamentalist, extremist, criminal, primitive, or savage, among others, to characterize and thus repudiate indigenous movements is a prominent example of how ongoing colonialist discourses still today position indigenous peoples outside modern, nationalist projects.3 In his book Disrupting Savagism: Intersecting Chicana/o, Mexican Immigrant, and Native American Struggles for Self-Representation (2001), Arturo Aldama raises the provocative issue of how to contest dominant histories, ethnographies, and narratives that relegate indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups to subordinate roles and to the reified status of savages, or that strive to eliminate them altogether (3). Aldama takes as the point of departure critical theories of subjectivity and the making of meaning to call attention to the politics of representation and the problems of voice and agency in colonial and neocolonial discourse. He asks, “How does one disrupt how one is spoken of by a dominant or hegemonic discourse? and, second, how does one translate one’s subjectivity into narrative terrain guided by rules of language-play that emerge from culturally different epistemologies?” (24). Although Aldama is asking questions within a cultural and political context different from the one that this essay analyzes, the issues he raises are nonetheless equally relevant in a country such as Bolivia, where...

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