Starting from Quirpini: The Travels and Places of a Bolivian People

The new one went along the edge of just the largest zona and did not cross the river. During the time I lived in the area, the bypassed zona, called Sakapampa, made vigorous but futile efforts to maintain the old road in order to stay accessible to truck traffic. Back on the other side of the river, several families had already moved their homes near the new road; some had opened stores to sell candy and soda; those who lived by the old road had closed their shops. As for the river, although even I could tell that it became a raging torrent in the rainy season, it took me months to appreciate that it was just one part of a valley-wide system for distributing the water that flowed from Antahawa and other sources.

In the semi-desert climate of Quirpini, the main factor limiting the extent of cultivated fields is not lack of land but lack of water. As a result, people of the valley manage and share the water with great care. One of the most important political institutions within each community is the larqha literally, canal , the group of landholders who share rights to water from a specific source, via a specific irrigation canal.

Starting from Quirpini

At numerous points water is drawn from the river into irrigation canals and then returned to the river at many other points, according to a schedule agreed on among the larqhas. At any point along the length of the valley there is usually far more water flowing through the irrigation canals than there is in the main channel of the river. Introduction 9Even the eucalyptus trees reflected a complex and malleable spatial re-ality. Eucalyptus is native to Australia; the trees were introduced in South America in the nineteenth century.

All the eucalyptus trees in Quirpini were planted; they are valued for their straight timber, their ability to grow fast in poor, dry soil, and their medicinal leaves. Yet they must not be planted near fields, as they are notorious for sucking up all the available nutrients and water in the soil, leaving nothing for crops; as a result, they are usually found in the most marginal areas, unsuitable for planting.

The trees in the school-yard had been planted a couple of decades earlier, in hopes that they would eventually provide cash for the school. While I was in Quirpini, the school contracted with an itinerant woodsman to cut them down and sell the lum-ber. This provided a tidy sum that helped the school build a new classroom, and also dramatically changed the feel of the schools land.

Finally, on my early visit, I was convinced that I was walking around in Quirpini; strictly speaking this was not incorrect, but it wasnt very cor-rect, either. The people I lived with orient their actions in many ways, and a recurring theme of this book is sensitivity to the invoked contexts of peoples actions and travels. As we will see most clearly in chapter 4, Quirpini often presents itself as the context for peoples actions, but just as often it does not, and there are many occasions when people act not in Quirpini but with an orientation to their houses or their networks of kin and friends.

There were times when placing peoples activities in Quirpini inhibited my ability to understand them. In other words, I learned with time that Quirpini is not a place on a map, nor is it a territory that contains a culture or a people. It is, rather, a pattern of movements, a conjunction of forces, a set of spatial strategies and struggles, a situational context for peoples actions. My challenge during fieldwork was to move beyond the landscape, to recognize that the land that people inhabit, that they work, is never a static object for contemplation.

My challenge in this book is to show how the people of Quirpini inhabit places of their own con-stant making, and that a part of the way they make it is by their movement. Again I was alone and coming to a strange place, but the circum-stances of my arrival could hardly have been more different. I was on a long Inscriptionsdistance bus from the Bolivian border, nearing the end of my overland trip from Quirpini to La Salada, an immigrant neighborhood on the outskirts of the Argentine city, where a number of Quirpini families had settled; this was a route well traveled by Quirpinis.

I was alone because my traveling companion, a Quirpini named Nicanor Huarachi, had a ticket for an earlier bus, which I missed because of my difficulty getting through customs at the Argentine border Nicanor had no trouble with customs, having Argentine citizenship papers. The city loomed impenetrably in my mind as I antici-pated trying to find the house of Nicanors cousin in La Salada. Nicanor had given me sketchy directions about which city buses I should take to get there, but I had little confidence in my ability to execute his instructions well enough to find him in the urban maze.

That I had been robbed in a particularly humiliating fashion in the border town of Yacuiba did nothing to improve my outlook. By now I was relatively adept at navigating Quirpini spatially and so-cially. I had left behind the communitys comfortably familiar confines to visit migrants in the unknown metropolis, accompanied only by one of my Quirpini acquaintances, my only link to Quirpinis in Buenos Aires. Were Nicanor not waiting for me at the bus station, I feared I would be lost, as would the whole second part of my fieldwork project.

To my relief, he was there when I got off the bus; in fact, he seemed to have been even more anxious over our separation than I was, terrified lest I not be on the next bus. He bundled me onto a series of local buses that took us all the way across the city into the southern suburb of Lomas de Zamora.

A few kilometers outside the city, we descended from our final bus into a marginal-looking commercial district, and walked to the residential neigh-borhood where some Quirpinis could be found. Nicanor led me a few blocks until we arrived at a fenced lot with two houses, one of cinderblock, one of tar paper.

We went to the cinderblock house and knocked on the door. This, Nicanor told me, was the home of Santiago Gmez, his cousin, who would surely put us up for the night. Santiago appeared to be nervous at the unex-pected appearance of a strange gringo; he told Nicanor that he already had guests for the night and directed us to his cousins house across the street. We knocked there, only to discover that the cousin had recently moved out, abandoning her husband and children. The husband, Paulino Flores, was not from San Lucas, did not know Nicanor, and had only one bed in his truly decrepit shack, but nevertheless he put us up for the night.

Introduction 11The next morning La Salada was very quiet. But the stillness was differ-ent than that of Quirpini. This was the quiet of the workday and of domestic space; every adult I met in the neighborhood was from elsewhere and had come to Buenos Aires for work or to accompany someone who was working. By mid-morning on a weekday at least half the population of the area had departed and would not return until the evening. There were no fields to be worked and few public spaces; people entertained visitors and celebrated minor fiestas in their houses.

Over the next few weeks I set about putting together a somewhat coherent idea of the space of La Salada and Buenos Aires, with the help of the Quir-pinis I got to know in the area. This process was very different from the one I conducted in Quirpini, not only because La Salada is so different a place but also because the Bolivians I knew in Buenos Aires were sojourners in someone elses space, and they knew it. As a result, getting a deeper grasp of the way they lived in space did not necessarily bring me to a full understand-ing of Buenos Aires or even of La Salada.

Instead, I learned to navigate the bus routes along the citys outer edge that took them to the construction sites where most of them worked. I quickly mastered a space that was made up of the names of bus routes and streets but was markedly spare in other geographical features. This thin quality of my interlocutors knowledge of the urban terrain differed strikingly from their rich and detailed knowledge of the land in and around Quirpini.

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On walks, even well into the mountains above the village, people were perfectly familiar with the names of each place we passed, knew where each alternate path led. Much of the geographical and historical information that I eventually learned about the city and the place of immigrants in it was of no relevance at all to the people I was spending time with; in learning about urban development policies or the history of migrant housing in Buenos Aires, I was learning a spatial depth that was relevant to them only in its consequences.

I suspect that this is true of cities in general. They are made up of spaces so complex and so dependent on the interconnection of people with dramatically different histories, prospects, values, and habits that no one version of lived space can be taken to be the space of the city. In learning something of the lived space of Quirpinis and other people from the San Lucas area in Buenos Aires, I was learning only one distinctive and marginal aspect of the urban space, largely populated by people who straddled the two spatial realities.

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There was no place that Quirpinis could fill with their spatial orientations, nor any that they wished to. Although the space that Quirpini migrants were helping to create was undoubtedly transnational, their aspirations were notthe Quirpinis I knew wanted either to settle in Argentina or return to Bolivia. Construction of a ChapelI finally did meet someone on that early visit to Quirpini, and in the course of our conversation he introduced me to what would become one of the themes of my field experience. He wanted to build a chapel. This was a project that would transform the space of Quirpini and that exemplifies the malleability and created nature of the communitys terrain.

Following the politics and the work of constructing this chapel was one of the ways in which I came to understand Quirpini as a terrain as well as the communitys insertion into regional and super-regional relations of power. The chapel was a key part of my introduction to spatial politics, and following its progress was an impor-tant aspect of my coming to understand Quirpini as a place.

I met Hilarin Condori as he was constructing a new field on the edge of his property. He was a short, quick man in his forties, who showed none of the reserve I had come to expect from campesinos. In time I would come to know him as an ambitious and intelligent person with a rather obsessive personality. To my pleasant surprise, after briefly asking me what I was up to, he launched into a long, rambling monologue, mostly taken up with com-plaints about the lack of rain.

He also told me that he was a catechist, one of a few people in the community specially trained by the Church to teach their fellows Catholic doctrine. His greatest ambition as a catechist was to realize the construction of a chapel in Quirpini. He told me that we were soon going to build the chapel with the support of the priest, whose church was in the nearby town of San Lucas. This was a good thing, because currently, when the priest visited Quir-pini, he had to hold services in the school, which was not fitting.

If there were a chapel, the priest would visit more often. I was later to learn that weekly re-ligious celebrations were conducted by the catechists and held in the school, Introduction 13but hardly anyone came unless they were approaching some major sacrament and were required to attend services. With his use of the term we, Hilarin clearly meant that the people of Quirpini would build the chapel, I soon came to think that he was the only Quirpini with much interest in the project.

Over the succeeding months I periodically mentioned the plan, but for the most part people just blandly agreed that the community needed a chapel; there was never any suggestion that we were going to do anything about it. A few argued that it was not worth the trouble and expense.

For over a year nothing happened. I came to assume that the chapel would never be built. Even the other two catechists in Quirpini showed little enthusiasm for it.

Then, in the latter part of , all this changed. Whereas the priest for the initiative was indeed his at first had offered to collaborate in some un-specified way on building the chapel, he now announced that the Church would buy all the necessary materials, and pay for the services of an engineer to design and supervise the project. Quirpini would provide only the work and adobe bricks. Once the priest had committed himself to this support, results came quickly.

For the last few years the Catholic Church in the area had been encourag-ing communities to build their own chapels. This was part of a broad politics aimed to help free the Quechua peasant communities of the San Lucas region from the control of the towns Spanish-speaking elite. One of the expressions of the towns dominance over the villages was the centrality of the Church to the regions ritual life. One could not baptize a child or have a religious wed-ding or properly celebrate a number of important annual fiestas without going to the Church.

In this role the Church was part of a system that concentrated transformative social powers in the town. Other parts of this system included the notary, who recorded births, marriages, and theoretically deaths, as well as the judge and the mayor, who could adjudicate certain disputes, and the shopkeepers and traders, who could transform goods into money and vice versa.

The Quechua-speaking residents of the rural areas were obliged to travel to town in order to realize these transformations. The two priests who had served successively in San Lucas since the mids, Juan Miranda and Vicmar Miranda,3 were of progressive sym-pathies and tried to loosen the power of the towns elite. In this spirit they helped many small rural communities, including Quirpini, obtain authori-zation to build their own cemeteries so they would not have to carry their 14 Inscriptionsdead to San Lucas to bury them; they also made efforts to advocate for the campesinos in regional politics, as well as encourage various campesino organizations independent of the town, such as Mothers Clubs.

They tried to undermine the ritual cycle whereby campesinos were frequently obliged to celebrate major religious fiestas by going into town and visiting notables or the Church. People in Quirpini used to celebrate Easter in town but had recently stopped doing so, with the priests encouragement. They still went into town on Carnival and visited the towns notables, but Vicmar Miranda, who was the priest during most of my time in the area, was openly ambiva-lent about this custom and sometimes made a point of not being present to receive the visits.

Encouraging communities to build their own chapels was a part of this de-centering of the town in relationship to the region; by doing this, and visiting these chapels regularly to conduct masses, Miranda was able to move some of the focus of campesino Catholic ritual life into the communities. A corollary of this effort was trying to strengthen the organization of the regions communities.

He was concerned that because of labor migration, the growth of evangelical Christianity, and increased contact with the rest of the world, the regions campesinos were abandoning their traditional culture and political structures without adopting anything to replace them. He felt that the Church could act to strengthen communal culture and society. Apart from anything the priests were doing, San Lucas had been los-ing its dominant position over the communities of the region for several decades.

The highland communities outside the San Lucas River valley had, to a considerable extent, thrown off the political influence of the town, and the dominant class of relatively white Spanish-speakers in the town no lon-ger enjoyed the privileged position it once did.

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In this situation, with power in the region moving out of the town, it made sense for the local Church to change with the times and not tie its own position too closely with that of the town elite. In addition, the regional Church was sensitive about the growing number of people converting to evangelical non-Catholic Christian sects. Evangeli-cal churches led by campesinos were popping up not only in San Lucas but in private houses throughout the region, including in Quirpini.

As the ability of San Lucas to command ritual submission declined, the Catholic Church was finding that it had no presence in most of the region, while its main rivals had a beachhead in every population center. Although Juan Miranda never con-Introduction 15nected the issues of evangelical Christians and the chapel, it seemed unlikely that the convenience of having an institutionally sanctioned Catholic center in every village escaped him. It is telling, then, that the only obstacle to the plan to build the chapel was the objection of the relatively small number of evangelical Christian families in Quirpini fewer than ten out of a hundred households.

They felt it was wrong that a Catholic building should be constructed as a communal project. As in much of Bolivia, the evangelical population of the San Lucas area was small but growing, and clearly constituted a threat to the hegemony of the Catholic Church. This dispute made it clear that the Churchs concern was partly to defend its own turf by means of the chapel. Father Miranda argued that the chapel was crucial to any effort to strengthen Quirpini as a community; by implication, he was arguing that the Churchs centrality to the rural communities of the area was a fact that outweighed any consider-ations of religious favoritism.

The issue was resolved in a series of town meet-ings reuniones generales with the agreement that evangelical households would contribute the same amount of work as Catholics but would work on the school the only other communally held building in Quirpini rather than on the chapel. With this issue out of the way, the reunin quickly decided how to pro-ceed.

Under the guidance of the school director, who usually ran the meet-ing, it was agreed that everyone would contribute a certain number of adobe bricks for the walls and several hours of work on construction. The chapel was to be situated near the geographical middle of the community, on some un-irrigated land across a ravine from the school and above the cemetery. The owner of this unproductive land donated it to the community, and it became part of what could be a nascent center of Quirpini. Not far from the chapel was Quirpinis new cemetery. Finally, a three-member committee was elected to supervise the work.

Theirs would be the heaviest responsibility, as one of them would have to be present whenever work was going ahead, and they were expected to keep records of everyones contribution and make sure no one came up short. This arrangement was not uncommon for group labor projects. Each household was responsible for making bricks out of the soil of their own land, in their own time, with water from their own allotment for irrigation, and each was responsible for bringing it to the building site.

Each household also had to provide a set number of man hours, building the chapel walls out of 16 Inscriptionsthese adobes. Every adult male in Quirpini knows how to make adobes and build walls, so this was labor that fell equally on each household. Work proceeded apace, and as far as I knew everyone fulfilled their obli-gations. The Church provided windows, doors, tiles, and other architectural items that were not available in Quirpini, and hired an architect who turned up periodically to direct the work.

The priest also visited from time to time. The chapel was finished not long before I was to leave, and was inau-gurated with a Mass and a short fiesta. The central event of the fiesta was a folkloric performance for the new priest, who had recently replaced Vic-mar Miranda. He was asked to sit at a small table, and a crowd of Quirpinis watched him closely as members of the community performed a succession of traditional songs and dances.

By this time most Catholic Quirpinis had come to support the chapel enthusiastically, and plans had been made that would radically revise the spatial order of the community around it. Most significant, it was decided that all the saints held in the community would be moved to the new chapel. There were three, each owned by a different family: Until this time these saints had each resided in one of the three zonas of Quirpini, and their celebrations usually drew people from their respective zonas.

My encounter with the building of Quirpinis chapel exposed me to many of the themes that would become central to my understanding of how Quirpinis live in space. First of all, around the chapel people were working out aspects of the relationship between Quirpini and the regional capital San Lucas, home to nearly all the Spanish-speaking elite of the area.

A key struggle between these groups involves the elites constant demands that campesinos come to San Lucas to effect most of the transformations that are realized through the Church, the state, or the market. The relations of the local Catholic Church to both these factions was also played out in the construction of the cha-pel. In light of the way I explicate spatial politics throughout the book, it is worth noting that although advocating for chapels throughout the region was partly a power move by the priest, he exercised and augmented his power not through commands but through inducements to get people to transform the space of their community in a way that would affect both their future pat-terns of movement and, it was implied, the priests.

I argue that a key means Introduction 17of exercising power is to respond to peoples movement so as to try to influ-ence or control it. But the chapel was not just negotiatedit had to be built. Creating the chapel as a place, then, depended on peoples repeated attendance at reuniones generales, on Father Mirandas involvement with the community, on his bringing win-dow and roofing materials, on the periodic visits of an engineer to plan the structure, and on the Catholics making and delivering adobe bricks and com-ing to the chapel site to put together the bricks, windows, and roof.

Finally, the chapel would never succeed as a place if Quirpinis and the priest did not go there regularly, make it part of their spatial practice. It finally looked as if it would succeed as a place because it was being incorporated into Quirpinis ritual ways of making their social space. Thus the building of the chapel not only provided temporal bookends for my field experience in Quirpini but exemplifies some of the key themes of this book. About the TitleThe reader may have noticed that the books title references Walt Whitmans sweeping poem Starting from Paumanok Whitman [].

Whit-mans poem is a paean to North American mobilityto the wild dyna-mism of nineteenth-century America in its rude variety, which Whitman both observes and identifies himself with. Paumanok is an Algonquian name for Long Island, where Whitman was born. At the simplest level I found his title useful to underline an important insight: I wanted to claim for Quirpinis the restless, embracing mobility that Whitman claims for Americans.

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At the same time this book can be seen as a counter-poem to Start-ing from Paumanok. For Whitman, Americans are a people of ceaseless movement; the nations dynamism is identified with their mobility, and it is that dynamism that contrasts America to much of the rest of the world, as future to past. One of the clearest lessons of globalization is that America 18 Inscriptionshas no monopoly on such people; migrants, tourists, and business travelers alike not to mention anthropologists restlessly crisscross the world, and their travel is a central part of the global integration and transformation that some anthropologists celebrate in an almost Whitmanian fashion see, for instance, Appadurai a, c.

Although Whitman does casually include South America in his celebration of the American future, people such as the Quirpinis I worked with would not have fit into his vision of a restless, forward-looking people. He makes this clear in his dismissive reference to Native Americans: And for the past I pronounce what the air holds of the red aborigines. The red aborigines,Leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and winds, calls as of birds and animals in the woods, syllabled to us for names,Okonee, Koosa, Ottowa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez, Chattahoochee, Kaqueta, Oronoco,Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla-Walla,Leaving such to the States they melt, they depart, charging the water and the land with names.

It is a kind of homage to the red aborigines but one that is based on their identification with a disappearing wild nature and their utter separation from the future, which Whitmans Americans embody. Quirpini would have fit comfortably in Whitmans list of aborigine place-names, as would Potos, Cuzco, Lima, Bogot or Mexico, but the situation is quite different for Quirpinis than for Long Islanders.

Quirpinis share in an indigenous heritage with the people who named the place from which they are starting, and are most likely in large part descended from them. They find themselves on the same side of the indigenous versus Eurocentric divide as the name of their community, and on the opposite side from Whitman, as well as Bolivian literary society. In borrowing Whitmans title, I am refuting his relegation of Native peoples to the past.

In fact, one aim of the book is to show that Quirpinis are Introduction 19very much agents in their own present and that their actions are molding the future. Far from departing and leaving their names, they and their fellows are building and feeding cities, transforming international borders, re-forming the national identities of Argentina and Bolivia. Theorizing Lived Spaces, Big and SmallWhen Whitman has the aborigines leave behind place-names, then disap-pear, he is not only erasing Native Americans from history.

The same de-vice draws a temporal dividing line between his forward-looking, dynamic Americans and the places in which and through which they move and act; the places are already there, a support for action, but not a result of it. Here, too, my book stands opposed to Whitmans poem in that I refuse to separate action and the places in which it happens. Why must we suppose that the transformative mobility that Whitman celebrates is something new? How were the places his Americans were reinventing created in the first place if not through the movement, work, and struggles of precisely the red aborigines who Whitman sees as static?

Heightened sensitivity to the problem of talking about place, and par-ticularly the refusal to treat locality as a matter that can be dispensed with before taking in more weighty cultural matters, is not new to anthropology. Mueggler invokes what is by now a well-known dichotomy in philosophical and social scientific debates about spatiality: In a similar vein Munn rejects the commonplace assumptions that space is static and to be contrasted with the dynamism of time, and that spatial boundaries are. Pandya criticizes the com-mon anthropological approach that treats space as a prefabricated stagelike structure, arguing that our subjects live it as something created by the ongo-ing practice of movement The people of Quirpini constantly enact and reenact the space they live inthe arena in which movement takes 20 Inscriptionsplace is not immune to the effects of that movement.

In other words, social space is always lived space, and it is always embodied. As Low and Lawrence-Ziga a show in the introduction to their collection, The Anthropology of Space and Place, there has long been a tradi-tion of thought in anthropology that focuses on embodied space, with the implicitly phenomenological assumptions accompanying that approach. In effect, the problem anthropology encounters today is that there is a disjunc-ture between the approaches represented in part 1 of their book Embod-ied Spaces and part 5 Transnational Spaces.

There is still a disjuncture between the anthropology of lived space and that of large-scale space. My central theoretical goal in this book is to show a way that this disjuncture might be overcome. My chief methodological assertion is that this can best be achieved by scaling up from the space of bodies and experience to the large-scale spaces of nations population movements and other large-scale phenomena, and by maintaining an unwavering awareness that space, con-sidered as a social phenomenon, is the product of action and movement.

Embodied Transnational SpacesLocating culture in Low and Lawrence-Zigas phrase and locating so-cial relations has become a complex and urgent problem, as people, images, goods, and values move more rapidly and routinely between ever more dis-tant places. It is becoming increasingly clear that culture and society happen at multiple scales.

The collection of articles edited by Gupta and Ferguson b includes valuable insights into how to understand large-scale cultural phenomena, particularly identity in the context of the nation-state. One in-spiration for my approach to locality is their observations that anthropolo-gists have too often taken the local as given, without asking how perceptions of locality and community are. Rouses , , work on Mexican immigrants in the United States was also very helpful; he engages many of the issues raised by the experience of transnational migration with a nuance and attention to details of practice that take him beyond simple generalizations.

His notion of transnational migrant circuits, the intensive and enduring movement of people, goods, and information between distant localities to the point that Introduction 21the localities can be lived as a single social space Rouse , has been a particularly useful tool for understanding the articulation of places, and I have adapted and employed it throughout this volume.

Starting from Quirpini : the travels and places of a Bolivian people

A number of anthropological works have been written during the last fifteen or so years that endeavored to take account of the challenges posed by globalization and transnationalism, while taking seriously the reality and dynamism of places. A few notable examples are Tsings ethnographic and theoretical work , ; Bestors research on the global fish trade , ; Ongs wide-ranging ethnographic work e. In my own view, all this work offers the hope of realizing the implications of LeFebvres dictum that no space disap-pears in the course of growth and development: The worldwide does not abol-ish the local Not all these authors may choose to align themselves with Lefebvre and his approach to space, or indeed with one another, but they share a commitment to recognizing the multi-scalar nature of social reality, and the way that any understanding of peoples situ-ations today must be capable of non-reductively relating different scales of activity and organization.

In this book I am proposing another way to grasp the importance of lived places in relation to much larger-scaled realities. These authors implicitly write in distinction to an earlier approach to globalization, which constituted the first concerted effort by anthropologists and other social scientists to come to grips with the new realities of global integration.

This work, faced with the manifest but theretofore widely ne-glected entanglement of the spaces of peoples experiences with an array of vast institutions producing public order, economic value, information, entertainment, and more, and the no longer deniable reality of global mo-bility, tended to argue for a radical disjuncture between scales. They saw the global and the mobile eroding the ontological status of places. The work of Arjun Appadurai stands out here, with his argument that social and cultural life happens in a variety of scapes, and that cultural life is becoming deterritorialized.

Another notable example of this approach is Kearneys work , ; Nagengast and Kearney on transnational Mixtec identity. An important early strain of thought about globalization starts by attrib-uting most agency and dynamism to large-scale entitiesto global markets 22 Inscriptionsor corporations or regional economies. Authors such as Castells , a, b and Sassen , , as well as Appadurai , , argue that individual agency and locality are increasingly subordinated to, or effaced by, large-scale global forces, often called flows.

But rather than taking the eth-nographic approach of studying up see Nader , these authors choose to study aggregates, looking not at bureaucratic practices or the way bankers act in the world but at marketing trends, policy changes, and demographic data. They do not look at people with the power to act on a large scale but rather at what those people themselves look at. In seeking to embrace a dynamic and interconnected model of large-scale structures of action, these writers end up draining place of all dyna-mism.

This downgrading of place starts with a refusal to move beyond the traditional idea of locality as a container or stage for action. Placing Bolivia in Quirpini: Civic Ritual and the Power of Context-- 7. They visit each other's houses, work in their fields, go to nearby towns for school, market, or official transactions, and travel to Buenos Aires for wage labour.

In this rich ethnography, Stuart Alexander Rockefeller describes how these places become intertwined via circuits constituted by the movement of people, goods, and information. This compelling study makes important contributions to contemporary debates about spatiality, temporality, power, and culture. Nielsen Book Data Publication date ISBN hbk. Placing Bolivia in Quirpini: Civic Ritual and the Power of Context 7. Privacy Notice Accessibility Help. Skip to services menu. Search by title, author, keyword or ISBN. Available through various retailers. Customer Reviews Comments There are currently no reviews Write a review on this title.

Table of Contents Acknowledgments Part 1. Places and History in and about Quirpini Part 2.