You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book offers the first interpretive synthesis of the history of Andean peasants and the challenges of nation-making in the four republics of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia during the turbulent nineteenth century. Nowhere in Latin America were postcolonial transitions more vexed or violent than in the Andes, where communal indigenous roots grew deep and where the 'Indian problem' seemed so daunting to liberalizing states. Brooke Larson paints vivid portraits of Creole ruling élites and native peasantries engaged in ongoing political and moral battles over the rightful place of the Indian majorities in these emerging nation-states. In this story, indigenous people emerge as crucial protagonists through their prosaic struggles for land, community, and 'ethnic' identity, as well as in the upheaval of war, rebellion, and repression in rural society. This book raises broader issues about the interplay of liberalism, racism, and ethnicity in the formation of exclusionary 'republics without citizens'.
A historical and theoretical analysis of the formation of colonial society in the Cochabamba Valleys of Bolivia. A new final chapter reexamines the findings of the original study and situates this regional history in the political/historiographical persp
Many women throughout the world face the challenge of confronting an unexpected or an unwanted pregnancy, yet these experiences are often shrouded in silence. An Open Secret draws on personal interviews and medical records to uncover the history of women’s experiences with unwanted pregnancy and abortion in the South American country of Bolivia. This Andean nation is home to a diverse population of indigenous and mixed-race individuals who practice a range of medical traditions. Centering on the cities of La Paz and El Alto, the book explores how women decided whether to continue or terminate their pregnancies and the medical practices to which women recurred in their search for reproductive health care between the early 1950s and 2010. It demonstrates that, far from constituting private events with little impact on the public sphere, women’s intimate experiences with pregnancy contributed to changing policies and services in reproductive health in Bolivia.
"Major compilation of historical and anthropological articles focuses on the nature of markets and exchange structures in the Andes. Prominent scholars explore Andean participation in the European market structure, the influence of migration in changing ethnic boundaries and spheres of exchange, and the politics of market exchange during the colonial period. Larson's introduction places articles within the context of Andean economic systems, while Harris concludes with an appreciation of the relationships between mestizo and indigenous ethnic identities in the context of market relations. Both introduction and conclusion lend a greater coherence to this carefully-crafted and monumental volume"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.
A Revolution for Our Rights is a critical reassessment of the causes and significance of the Bolivian Revolution of 1952. Historians have tended to view the revolution as the result of class-based movements that accompanied the rise of peasant leagues, mineworker unions, and reformist political projects in the 1930s. Laura Gotkowitz argues that the revolution had deeper roots in the indigenous struggles for land and justice that swept through Bolivia during the first half of the twentieth century. Challenging conventional wisdom, she demonstrates that rural indigenous activists fundamentally reshaped the military populist projects of the 1930s and 1940s. In so doing, she chronicles a hidden ...
For more than twenty years Linda J. Seligmann has walked the streets of Peru in city and countryside alike, talking to the women who work in the informal and open-air markets of the Andean highlands of Cuzco. In this readable ethnography, composed of vignettes and accompanied by a superb series of photographs, Seligmann offers a humane yet incisive portrayal of their lives. Peruvian Street Lives argues that the sometimes invisible and informal economic, social, and political networks market women establish, although they may appear disorderly and chaotic, in fact often keep dysfunctional economies and corrupt bureaucracies from utterly destroying the ability of citizens to survive from day t...
The notion of empire has in recent years taken on a renewed importance in world politics. US foreign policy has in particular been associated with this concept by both critics and supporters of American global power. But what exactly is an empire? What distinguishes different forms of empire? Is this category still useful in a post-colonial world? These and other related questions are addressed in this historically informed conceptual introduction to the idea of empire. Alejandro Colás draws on interdisciplinary debates surrounding this disputed notion and offers a survey of different imperial experiences across time and place. Successive chapters consider the imperial organization of polit...
Exploring how people from Andean communities seek progress and social mobility by moving to the cities, Cecilie Ødegaard demonstrates the changing significance of kinship, reciprocity and ritual in an urban context. Through a focus on people ́s involvement in land occupations and local associations, labour and trade, Ødegaard examines the dialectics between popular practices and neoliberal state policies in processes of urbanization. The making and un-making of notions of the Indigenous, communal work, and gender is central in this analysis, and is discussed against the historical backdrop of the land occupations in Peruvian cities since the 1930s. Through its close ethnographic descripti...
Examines the end of the colonial era in Bolivia.
Bringing together experts across Latin America, North America, and Spain, The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Independence innovatively revisits Latin American independence within a larger regional, temporal, and thematic framework to highlight its significance for the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. The volume offers a synthetic yet comprehensive tool for understanding and assessing the most current studies in the field and their analytical contributions to the broader historiography. Organized thematically and across different regions of the Iberian Peninsula and Spanish and Luso America, the essays deepen well-known conclusions and reveal new interpretations. They offer analytical interventions that produce new questions on periodization, the meaning of anti-colonialism, liberalism, and republicanism, as well as the militarization of societies, public opinion, the role of sciences, labor regimes, and gender dynamics. A much-needed addition to the existing scholarship, this volume brings a transnational perspective to a critical period of history in Latin America.