After Servitude: Bonded Histories and the Politics of Indigeneity in Reformist Bolivia

This dissertation examines the ways that histories of agrarian servitude in Bolivia condition the terms and experiences of state reform and political collectivity today. Building from 20 months of fieldwork in Bolivia, the research aims to critically intervene in contemporary debates concerning indigeneity, political subjectivity, and justice. Bracketing the assumption that histories of servitude operate primarily as corrosive or destructive forces, I explore what it means to live in a place perceived as still in the grips of the hacienda past and examine how inherited patterns of exchange and aid condition and are in turn transformed by current indigenous reform initiatives. Indeed, while Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party officials see rural practices of god-parenting, informal adoption, and land gifting as colonial survivals that fuel indigenous dependency and exploitation, many rural families understand these same practices as expressions of former landlords’ obligations to former servants, including to children fathered through rape. Despite aggressive MAS reform initiatives aimed at uprooting rural relations that have grown out of the hacienda system, Quechua-speaking villagers continue to invoke patronage ideals in order to demand resources and aid not only from former landowning families but also from a new gold mining elite. Thus, while bonded histories condition and complicate state reform projects, they also give way to specific rural approaches to indigenous injury and historical reconciliation. By tracing competing approaches to past servitude, my research foregrounds the creative ways that inherited forms are inhabited and imbued with new reconciliatory possibilities, possibilities that challenge normative political analytics that locate justice in the inevitable and necessary superseding of past in present./nMore broadly, the work sheds light on the long-run process by which governmental concerns with bonded labor and agrarian servitude gave way to a particular form of indigenous claim-making, one that shared or at the least echoed reformers’ faith in property as a stepping-stone to modern citizenship. In particular, I show how the reformist and popular focus on land rights as an antidote to servitude and as a means to political inclusion drew from and consolidated a particular political typology, the propertied subject contrasted with and at the same time partially-productive of an appositional figure of the landless, indentured servant. However, building from ethnographic research in former hacienda villages, I show that alongside this focus on property another political tradition has persisted, one concerned not only with land or rights but also with the problem of landlords’ obligations to hacienda servants. Examining servitude both as an object of agrarian reform and as a focus of reconciliatory action today, my research sheds new light on the limits to institutional approaches to justice while at the same time showing how those limits are inhabited by other traditions of moral and reconciliatory practice. Here, rural opposition to MAS reforms stems from the existence of a distinctly post-hacienda mode of collectivity, one whose practices of labor, land use, and exchange do not map onto statist projects of propertied citizenship as well as more recent community land schemes. By tracking the complexities of Bolivian agrarian reform, the work offers a critical reframing not only of bonded histories in Latin America but, more broadly, of the centrality of servitude and possession to modern categories and juridical projects of rights-based justice./nAttention to the ways that Bolivia’s history of indentured servitude shapes current agrarian reform efforts and rural modes of post-hacienda collectivity brings to light a range of questions that are obscured when servitude is examined primarily as an economic system or when political practices are fixed simply to oppositional acts of hacienda resistance or rebellion. Instead, I underline the generative workings of labor histories and consider how various forms of agrarian-based belonging and exchange resurface within or get destabilized by contemporary indigenous reform projects. At its heart, then, the dissertation aims to contribute to the task of critically re-evaluating and potentially expanding the contours of the legibly political. What modes of fulfillment or desire, morality or belonging, can be accounted for within reformist approaches to slave abolition and indigenous justice? While scholars have suggested the limits to reified categories of indigeneity, can we think through these limits without falling back upon an oppositional narrative of resistance, absorption, or inevitable displacement? At stake in this work, then, is an effort to bracket the often-uncritical adoption of rights-based logics as heuristics for understanding political or reconciliatory practices, ones that tend to align justice with the fraught yet necessary disentangling of a subject from an earlier order.

Advisor: Hirschkind, Charles K.
Mahmood, Saba