This four-session seminar uses Bolivian history as a lens to illuminate and explore the intellectual and political trajectories that have shaped contemporary debates on indigeneity, statehood, and colonialism in the Andes. After a brief introduction to Bolivian history and indigenous thought, the seminar traces a genealogy of Andean critical theory linking Latin American Marxist thought, indigenous modernity, and the evolving forms of postcolonial governance.
The first session investigates René Zavaleta Mercado’s theorization of the sociedad abigarrada – a motley society where multiple temporalities and modes of production coexist – and his notion of the Estado aparente (apparent State), as a critique of the absent hegemony that characterizes postcolonial States. In particular, the lecture uses the example of the Bolivian National Revolution of 1952 as the political and intellectual crucible in which Zavaleta explored how the coexistence of multiple historical layers shaped Bolivia’s modernity.
The second session turns to Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and her engagement with Katarismo, the indigenous political movement that reshaped class and ethnic politics in the 1970s and 1980s. This context led her to develop, in dialogue with Zavaleta, the notions of ch’ixi and memoria larga, which redefine indigeneity as a contemporary condition. In particular, the lecture explores how Rivera’s feminist and Aymara perspective challenges the ideology of mestizaje in Bolivia and pushes forward a politicization of motley subjectivities.
Building on the theoretical framework outlined in the first two sessions, the third lecture examines the passage from mestizaje to neoliberal multiculturalism and finally to the plurinational re-foundation of the Bolivian state. It analyzes how the uprisings of Cochabamba (2000) and El Alto (2003) led to a constituent process that opened unexpected spaces for indigenous participation in politics. Yet the lecture also explores the ambiguities of the Estado Plurinacional, and, more broadly, of the new constitutionalism in Latin America, prompting a reflection on if and how the state can institutionalize difference without reproducing hierarchy.
The final session addresses the contradictions of neoliberalism and the rise of Andean capitalism: the coexistence of redistributive politics and extractive dependence. Under the discourse of vivir bien and plurinationalism, the Morales government pursued a model that sought to fund social inclusion through intensified resource extraction. The lecture examines how neo-extractivism exposes the limits of decolonization and considers which subjects are excluded from dominant narratives of progress, drawing on ethnographic examples collected in the lecturer’s research.
Ultimately, the seminar proposes to read Bolivia as a vantage point from which to examine Latin America’s indigenous political history and critical thought. It invites participants to reflect on how colonial and capitalist domination has been reproduced, at times even within emancipatory projects, and to explore what forms of class and territorial politicization might still emerge as indigenous identities become entangled in the circuits of global accumulation.
