Indigeneity and Decolonization in the Bolivian Andes

Anders Burman is associate professor at the Human Ecology Division at Lund University.

Candidly and with respect to those that may think that ‘tradition’ is timeless, this book experiences Aymara politics as re-membering. I think of this word as a conceptual practice, proposed by young Aymara intellectuals-politicians as a de-colonial practice of the self with which to bring to awareness that which denies their possibilities of exceeding the practices imposed by modernity, while at the same time using that which modernity offers to, precisely, emerge against the denial. The book is an ethnographically brilliant and carefully composed work in which Burman does not study the yatiris; he learns with them other ways of knowing and he thereby transforms ‘participant observation’ into experience and proposes a novel notion of methods; not a practice of collecting data, but a practice of knowing through fieldwork.

• ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter 1: Los aymarasChapter 2: Colonialism and Decolonization: Experience and NarrativePart I: The Illness (Ay. Usu)Chapter 3: Strange PatriaChapter 4: Strange BeingChapter 5: Strange WorldPart II: The Cure (Ay. Qulla)Chapter 6: Native BeingChapter 7: Native WorldChapter 8: Native PatriaConclusionsWord listBibliographyAbout the Author