Indigenous Peasant ‘Otherness’: Rural Identities and Political Processes in Bolivia

Since Morales's election, rural movements have become the new protagonists of Bolivian politics. Previous analyses have emphasised their active role in shaping national politics, often focusing on those organisations as a compact block. However, their relationship is marked by both cooperation and fragmentation. This article provides a narrative of Bolivian socio‐political history over the last 60 years, establishing four main phases of identitarian articulations/disarticulations. It demonstrates the high degree of interdependence and fluidity of ethnic and class identities, as well as their interconnections with the broader socio‐political context and the national legal and institutional changes.     

The Prisoner Dilemma: Britain,Germany, and the Repatriation of Indian Prisoners of War

Abstract

Between October 1914 and December 1915, nearly 135,000 Indian riflemen—known as sepoys—fought in the trenches of France and Belgium at the battles of Ypres, Festubert, Givenchy, Neuve Chapelle, Second Ypres and Loos, suffering some 34,252 casualties. At a prisoner of war camp outside Berlin, Indian revolutionaries and emissaries from the Ottoman Empire attempted to convert the allegiances of the sepoys in their custody with a combination of pan-Islamic and nationalist appeals. Although this campaign ultimately failed, it profoundly shaped British repatriation policy at the end of the war when, cautioned Secretary of State for India Austen Chamberlain, the British could not allow men who had been exposed to ‘strongly hostile influences’ to return home unmonitored. The 1918 armistice and British repatriation policy therefore presented a host of new challenges to Britain’s colonial subjects from South Asia as they navigated the post-war imperial landscape and secured what was most important to them—safe transportation home.     

Debating gender and Kazakhness: memory and voice in poetic duel aytis between China and Kazakhstan

Aytis is a central component of Kazakh oral literature. It is a duelling performance of improvised oral poetry between two aqins (poets, or bards) accompanying themselves on the dombra, a two-stringed plucked instrument. This article analyses contending issues in a transnational aytis between Chinese and Kazakhstani aqins, and explores how gender plays into the complex interplay of transnational identity politics, nationalism, performer positionality, and the preservation of intangible cultural heritage. This article argues that, though minority actors are subject to state-patronized national projects and the gender paradigms those projects entail, they can also obtain empowerment from performing tradition as a way to legitimize their status as culture producers and flexible citizens. Situated as the guardians of a constructed gender balance in society, women performers of oral tradition occasionally find themselves with opportunities to transgress the boundaries of their national and gender norms.     

The Recursive Indian: The Significance of Complementary Ethnic Alterity in the Bolivian Tipnis March

This article explores ethnic alterity in the Bolivian Tipnis crisis, showing how claiming indigenous, Indian and colonial identities was significant in shaping government strategy and responses among ‘citified Indians’ of La Paz and El Alto and highland indigenous social movements. While Kuper claims indigeneity can distract attention from ‘real local issues’, Andean ethnicity is relational, roles assigned and reassigned in a continually shifting political theatre, where the ‘rebel Indian’ recurs historically, challenging colonial hegemony and reorienting the discussion towards issues of territorial autonomy.     

MEDIA,IDENTITY, AND STRUGGLE IN TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CHINA

The experience of international migration is generally found to turn migrants into culturally hybrid communities. Yet, migrant communities often hold on to their religious moorings even as they relocate. From the 1970s onwards, the emerging leadership of Hindu settlers in Denmark consciously tried to transfer with them what they saw to be key aspects of Hinduism as they migrated to Denmark. In 1985, Hindus organized a major conference to position the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) as the umbrella organization for Hinduism in Denmark. Later on they established a Temple of Indians called Bharatiya Mandir to provide a place of worship for local Hindus. The philosophy behind the temple conformed to the nondenominational Hindu nationalist vision of Hindus as a unified community. This article, which contrasts the aim of Hindu nationalism with the on-the-ground realities of Hindu mobilization in Denmark, reveals that two major factions spearheaded Hindu nationalist endeavors in Denmark from the 1980s until 2006. The two factions successfully launched several projects, and even collaborated in their execution, but the initiatives were beset with rivalries that hampered the communal unity they had set out to achieve. The authors analyze this factional rivalry as an expression of Indian political culture, arguing that tensions among Hindu activists in Denmark is an instance of the political factionalism prevalent in the Indian subcontinent. The unintended emergence of such factionalism represents the successful transfer of a core element of Indian political culture to a new locale through Hindu nationalist politics. The authors base their argument on field observations since the 1980s, recent interviews with key religious players, and more than two hundred pages of written materials that offer a rare entry point to the study of Hindu nationalism ex situ.     

Identity creation and the culture of contrition: Recasting ‘normality’ in the Berlin Republic

This paper considers transformations in the concept of national identity post‐unification. In particular, it is interested in examining the changed status of the NS past in contemporary formulations of national identity. Whilst during the Historikerstreit conservative thinkers predicated the plea for conventional patriotism upon a ‘normalisation’ or ‘reladvisation’ of the NS past, left‐liberal discourse based the case for a post‐national Verfassungspatriotismus upon the critical engagement with the NS period. The collapse of the Cold War political framework has profoundly altered the polarised discourse over the German past and during the 1990s the critical consciousness of National Socialism became a central tenet of contemporary formulations of national identity. The paper attempts to place the contemporary discourse on national identity within a broader historical context and to consider reasons for recent transformations in perceptions of the German national past.     

The Initiation of the Sino-Indian rivalry

ABSTRACT

Sino-Indian interactions after the mid-19th century had a causal influence on Chinese and Indian elite perceptions. Modern China encountered modern India as an agent of British imperialism. China perceived India as an “imperial” power in the late 1940s by resorting to the availability heuristic while doubting India’s intentions in Tibet/Southeast Asia. By contrast, India viewed China as a fellow victim of colonialism that had sought India’s help during World War II. Consequently, India perceived China as a “partner” in postwar/postcolonial Asia. This interpretation was based on confirmation bias after 1947, despite contradictory Chinese signals. India’s image of China changed only after the 1950–51 invasion/annexation of Tibet. India then ascribed the image of an “expansionist/hegemonic” power to China based on historical analogy. Nevertheless, they carefully calibrated their strategies towards each other in consonance with these images until the 1959 Lhasa Uprising, thereby preventing their relationship from descending into militarized hostilities.     

Review essay: Agrarian transformation,agrarian struggles,and Marxist analyses of the peasantry

Abstract

After some years of living in an Indian village, on family land that by the standards of most Marxist scholars puts us in the category of “capitalist farmers” or “kulaks,” I find myself taking scholarly discussion of “agrarian transformation” and “agrarian class structure” quite personally. There is something that jars against the reality of a daily life that includes hauling water for household use in the morning, enduring frequent blackouts or “load sheddings,” trying to decide whether to purchase first a TV or a refrigerator or a washing machine and not really being able to afford any of them, to be told that in moving from a salaried position in a U.S. university to an Indian village one has made a class jump upwards, from a section of the “expanded working class” or at worst “petty bourgeoisie” to membership among the capitalists and even (according to some scholars) participation in India's “ruling bloc.”     

State,Society and Markets in Argentina: The Political Economy of Neodesarrollismo under Néstor Kirchner, 2003–2007

The national Peronist social contract in Argentina has a long history rooted in syndicalism and populism. However, Menemismo in the 1990s, El Argentinazo in December 2001, and Kirchnerismo post crisis have all served to change the fundamental framework of the Argentine economy, the social underpinnings of that economy and how it intersects with global capital. This article is an attempt to identify the nature of Kirchner's administration through analysis of political economy, therefore seeking to facilitate a deeper understanding of the developmental nature and impact of the Kirchner administration of 2003–2007.     

Loss and Longing: Emotional Responses to West Indian Soldiers during the First World War

Abstract

This article traces the place of black soldiers within British military history from the 18th century to the eve of the First World War. It shows how during the war, attitudes to and representations of West Indian volunteers reflected anxieties surrounding white male efficiency.     

Resource Sovereignties in Bolivia: Re‐Conceptualising the Relationship between Indigenous Identities and the Environment during the TIPNIS Conflict

This paper examines the active re‐construction of indigenous identities within the Plurinational State of Bolivia through the case study of a resource conflict that arose with the government's announcement of its intention to build a road through a national park and indigenous territory, the Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure (TIPNIS; Indigenous Territory and Isiboro Sécure National Park). Ethnographic fieldwork shows that both the state and the lowland indigenous movement have fashioned essentialised understandings of an indigenous identity linked to the environment in order to legitimise competing resource sovereignty claims.     

Chiquitano and the Multiple Meanings of Being Indigenous in Bolivia

To be ‘indigenous’ in Bolivia is not only a rights‐ and resource‐bearing identity, but the national MAS party has recently actively promoted the ‘indigenous’ as an inclusive national political project. This article seeks to shed further light on the different meanings Bolivians attach to ‘indigeneity’ by focusing on the Chiquitano people of the Bolivian lowlands. This reveals that while Chiquitano employ the term to advance their political project, some nevertheless simultaneously reject its power to categorise and subordinate Chiquitano. This highlights some of the paradoxes faced by those employing an indigenous political strategy, be it at the local or ‘more inclusive’ national level.     

Adaptation and Appropriation on the Colonial Frontier: Indigenous Leadership in the Colombian Chocó, 1670–1808

This article explores the consequences for the native population of the Colombian Chocó of the emergence, over the course of the eighteenth century, of an elite of caciques and indios mandones or principales whose functions of powers far exceeded those of the warrior chiefs that had traditionally acted as leaders of their people. Appointed for the purpose of facilitating the collection of tribute and the supply of labour to European settlers, caciques and mandones were almost universally rejected by native communities during the early phases of Spanish colonisation (c. 1630–1690), and they disappear from the historical record after Independence. Eighteenth‐century sources, however, not only record the existence of a clearly defined elite of mandones or principales in villages across the region, but show these individuals engaging actively with the colonial authorities, on behalf of their communities, at local and audiencia levels. This article argues that, at a time of a much strengthened European presence in the region, caciques and mandones came to understand their roles in ways that were entirely different from those intended by the Spanish, and in so doing acquired the legitimacy that had eluded their seventeenth‐century predecessors. Far from serving merely as intermediaries between settlers and indigenous populations, indios mandones acted as negotiators on behalf of the indigenous population, whose task was to defend and/or advance the interests of the communities they had been appointed to control.     

Culturing identities,the state,and national consciousness in late nineteenth‐century western Guatemala1⋆

This paper examines the procedural culture that shaped ethnic and national identities in late nineteenth‐century western Guatemala. Rooted in face‐to‐face encounters between departmental jefes políticos (departmental governors) and local Maya communities, this procedural culture emerged from routines of governance such as annual municipal inspections, ethnic struggles for municipal control, and local efforts to title community lands that led Maya and state officials to develop contrasting understandings of each other and their relations. Far from precipitating a national identity of mutual belonging, state formation here intensified the racism and political violence that would rend Guatemala during the century to come.     

‘This is not a Favela’: Rio de Janeiro's Urban Quilombo Sacopã and the Limits of Multiculturalism

Under Brazil's 1988 Constitution, quilombo communities have the right to the titles of the lands they occupy. This paper assesses quilombo titles' transformative potential through the experiences of Rio de Janeiro's urban quilombo Sacopã, an ethnic Afro‐descendant community once perceived as a favela. Unlike its neighbours, the community managed to resist the widespread favela removals of the 1970s. Based on an ethnographic approach during fieldwork conducted between December 2013 and January 2014, the article asks: how did Sacopã manage to remain, whilst its surrounding favelas were forcefully removed? Who counts as ethnic? What does this imply for Brazil's afro‐descendant majority?     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this issue. Gretchen Helmke and Julio Ríos‐Figueroa, eds., Courts in Latin America. Ksenija Bilbija and Leigh A. Payne, eds., Accounting for Violence: Marketing Memory in Latin America. J. Tyler Dickovick, Decentralization and Recentralization in the Developing World: Comparative Studies from Africa and Latin America. Andreas Tsolakis, The Reform of the Bolivian State: Domestic Politics in the Context of Globalization. Luis Roniger, Transnational Politics in Central America. María Clemencia Ramírez, Between the Guerrillas and the State: The Cocalero Movement, Citizenship, and Identity in the Colombian Amazon. Kenneth J. Mijeski and Scott H. Beck, Pachakutik and the Rise and Decline of the Ecuadorian Indigenous Movement. Todd A. Eisenstadt, Politics, Identity, and Mexico's Indigenous Rights Movements. David Close, Salvador Martí i Puig, and Shelley A. McConnell, eds., The Sandinistas and Nicaragua Since 1979. Olga M. González, Unveiling Secrets of War in the Peruvian Andes. George Philip and Francisco Panizza, The Triumph of Politics: The Return of the Left in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador.     

India and Australia: Security Dynamics in the Asia Pacific

India and Australia are rediscovering the vast potentials of maximizing mutual benefits that are inherent in their complementary economies. There is also a great deal of convergence of interests in the strategic domain. As an emerging power, India's profile has attracted attention by countries in the Asia Pacific region, which tended to neglect it in the past. The rise of China and its assertive stances have created an element of uneasiness in the region. Its military modernization and beefing up of naval capability are suspected to be behind enhancing its power projection capability.

The strategic significance of the Indian Ocean for the region is huge. The region's growth is inextricably linked to the Indian Ocean. The littoral states in the region are home to 2.6 billion people, almost 40% of the world's population. The Indian Ocean is the world's third largest body of water, and the world's leading energy and trade seaway. The volume of global trade brings with it the re-emerging problems of terrorism and piracy, a shared policing challenge for all littoral states. The security of the Indian Ocean goes to the heart of both India's and Australia's national interests.     

Soviet boarding schools as a forge of national professionals and intellectuals in Soviet Tajikistan in the 1950s and 1960s

ABSTRACT

The study focuses on the institution of boarding schools (Russian: internat) in Soviet Tajikistan in the 1950s and 1960s and its role in the education and training of the new national generations of skilled professionals in the fields of industry, science, culture, art and healthcare, which in turn contributed to the development of their country. Along with the de-Stalinization of education and subsequent polytechnization, as well as flexibility in the use of Soviet institutions, the internats were transformed from a purely Soviet project into a more inclusive Soviet-Tajik project at the national level for the training of new young national-Sovietized professionals. These professionals combined the qualities of Sovietized and local (national), with their distinctive norms, traditions and values, into a totally new form. The boarding school system turned into a factory for bringing up national-Sovietized specialists and cadres.     

Not Child's Play: Tactics and Strategies in Viva Cuba and Habanastation

Recognition of the national and international contexts in which Viva Cuba (Juan Carlos Cremata, 2005) and Habanastation (Ian Padron, 2011) were made and marketed highlights the coexistence of a pragmatic, tactical approach to filmmaking with the expression of specific, national concerns. Indeed, the two elements are inextricable, since both directors exploit the association of children with universality and the apolitical in order to pursue both personal and national goals, so that these films for children, about children must be seen not as child's play but as contracandelas: strategic and affective responses to uncertainty and threat.     

Demographic engineering in the late Ottoman empire and the Armenians

An examination of the diverse Hebrew newspapers published in Palestine in the aftermath of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 teaches us a great deal about the complexity of the term Ottomanism, which was interpreted differently by the Empire and the minorities remaining within its shrinking borders. Whereas the Empire officially perceived Ottomanism as a new form of hybrid identity which would substitute existing national identities, the yishuv's various sectors envisioned a decentralized empire under the house of Osman. In this sense, the Revolution encouraged the emergence of a shared national vision among many circles in the yishuv, although each group still strove to shape the character of the Zionist community in Palestine according to its own agenda.