Feminism and Decolonizing Decoloniality: Decolonizing the Coloniality of Power in Aymara Cosmology

Abstract

This article demonstrates the import of feminist reflexivity for the decolonial project. At its best, the decolonial project reveals the form and extent to which contemporary ideas and power structures are imbued with generations of power structures whose foundations were laid during colonialism. However, some power dynamics can be lost in reified forms of decolonial critique. Feminist methodologies, especially reflexivity, remind us to revisit the particulars of the constructions of power within dominant power structures and, as importantly, within resistant power structures. We revisit the decolonial stance within an Indigenous cosmology, Aymaridad, ‘the’ Aymara worldview as constructed for the second largest Indigenous population in Bolivia. Aymaridad is an important site for feminists to revisit the relationship between feminism and decoloniality because over a decade ago, María Lugones charted a course for decolonial feminism that drew on an Aymaran approach to decolonizing gender. By revisiting the coloniality embedded in the construction of Aymara (in academe and in politics), we reveal that feminism’s persistent reflexive methodology, even more than its attention to gender specifically, makes it an essential part of the decolonial theory.

Introduction

Colonization and slavery have arguably left the most indelible marks on international politics and how these are lived and resisted today everywhere. Coloniality permeates the field of International Relations (IR) by placing Enlightenment modernity at its center. Consequently, to recover non-Eurocentric histories and transform global politics, the IR field needs to include subaltern narratives, knowledge, and perspectives of the international. Decolonial theories have the potential to reveal the legacy of colonization and point toward transformative politics, thereby becoming possible antidotes to epistemological colonialism in IR. ¹ They identify the power imbalances within diverse hierarchical structures. Yet, decolonial theories risk being schematic. We argue that feminist methodologies, particularly recursivity, are as important a contribution to decolonial IR as gender analysis.

In the vein of Quijano ² this article focuses on the exercise of power in the social relationships that result from fighting for control of social existence. Complementing a decolonial geneology with feminist recursivity, we reveal, on the multiplicities of colonial power and relationships concealed within and by colonial and decolonial identity constructions. ³

Utilizing María Lugones’s influential work on decolonizing gender, we demonstrate that without feminist recursive interrogation of colonial constructions, the decolonial deconstruction of the coloniality of power risks reifying other colonial hierarchies or embedding only superficially modified ones in ‘new decolonial’ politics. Feminism’s methodological recursivity, which demands careful reflection on the power exercised through knowledge claims and constant critical scrutiny of one’s own methods, ⁴ is essential to the decolonizing decoloniality.

After an initial clarification of terms, the article revisits two leading analyses of the field that are particularly important in Latin American decolonial and feminist scholarship. Quijano argues that ‘the coloniality of power’ can be found in how power is structured in relations of domination, exploitation, and conflict, as social actors fight over the control of resources, collective authority, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity. ⁵ Building on this notion, Lugones ⁶ analyzes the coloniality of gender and argues that colonial authorities organized life into heteronormative binaries, thus reifying gender as dichotomous and hierarchical. She argues that a movement to decolonize gender calls for an analysis of the cosmologies of the oppressed that resist this binary configuration of the world. As an example of such resistance, she explores chachawarmi, a non-binary Aymara gender concept.

In the feminist pursuit of decolonized language and its powers, we can agree with Lugones’s question but worry about her methodology and answer. While centering Indigenous knowledge is an essential part of a decolonial methodology, without recursive attention to hierarchies and knowledge construction, and the risk of their morphing without transforming, Lugones’s proposed feminist decolonial methodology is insufficiently feminist and decolonial, or so we will argue.

Deploying the feminist method of recursivity, the heart of the paper is revisiting Lugones’s genealogy of the construction of decolonial power. Genealogy is a methodology used to uncover the history hidden ‘in the construction of a logical narrative of how the past occurred through an examination of the descent, emergence, and trajectory of events’. ⁷ Because Lugones’s decoloniality of gender relies on a genealogy of Aymaridad (a modern Aymara cosmology), we revisit the genealogy of the construction of Aymaridad with a decolonial lens. By questioning the power dynamics of power dynamics, in this case of the politics of indigeneity in Bolivia and specifically the privilege of elite Aymara people within that politics, we reveal the insidiousness of coloniality and identify key features of a methodology for a decoloniality of gender. This revisiting of coloniality of power within the construction of Aymaridad, we find its own coloniality. Western social scientists and Aymara intellectual and political elites, essentializing the experiences of marginalized Bolivian Aymara communities, contributed to a (re)construction of Aymaridad that reifies intergroup hierarchies within Bolivia. We further contextualize these hierarchies in national Bolivian political history of decolonization and in contemporary society. By decolonizing Bolivian decoloniality, we show the (re)colonial impact of the Aymaridad and its related political uses. For many in Bolivia, Aymara decoloniality was a morphing of hierarchies under an Indigenous guise, not a transformation of them.

In the penultimate section, we argue that using Indigenous words like chachawarmi may fabricate the feeling of a newly decolonized worldview. However, without revisiting decolonial analysis of the politics of language construction and use, use of these merely obfuscates the (re)colonial dynamic. Our goal is less to criticize Lugones, the feminist scholar who proposed the acknowledgment of chachawarmi as a tool for decolonizing gender, than to recognize that gender coloniality can be reproduced even under the guides of decolonial politics.

Lugones has two parts to her project, one deconstructing the coloniality of gender and the other recognizing the generative potential of the Aymara language. We argue that her second project risks undermining the first if her decolonial methodology is not likewise used to analyze the political roots and use of chachawarmi as part of the political construction of Aymaridad. Doing so, we show, reveals the role of Aymaridad in (re)colonial Bolivia. We are re-orienting a reading of Lugones and decolonial theory generally toward an ever-attentive and deepening genealogical project that recognizes that power can morph without transforming hierarchies.

We argue that a feminist decoloniality of power must set its sights not only on gender and coloniality but also on the ways that colonial resistance can ignore or even conceal other hierarchies under the guise of united resistance. Both gender and decoloniality are part of an always ongoing political project. Acknowledging the genealogies of power within decolonial politics contributes to a robust critique of coloniality and coloniality of gender. Decolonial thought needs to do more than resist colonialism in order to excavate the pernicious patterns of power relations within political, economic, and epistemological normalization. Decolonial thought needs a methodology to attend to the possibility that power hierarchies merely morph into a new guise rather than transform into a new politics. By reexamining the decolonial narrative of Aymaridad, this article initiates a recursive engagement with two iconic constructions of decoloniality: the political project of decolonial Bolivia and in the decoloniality of gender. By illustrating the importance of recursivity for revealing the pernicious power of epistemology, we strengthen the case for feminist methodologies in decolonial theory.

Making Meaning

The decolonial project requires an important distinction between resisting colonial power and genealogically deconstructing its embeddedness in epistemologies of power and resistance. To make this distinction useful, we emphasize the difference in praxis anticipated and evoked by the terms we deploy: anti-colonial, decolonial, power, feminist, race, ethnicity, and ethnonationalism. Our argument is normatively and methodologically decolonial and feminist. We use the other terms throughout the analysis and exposition of the argument.

‘Anti-colonial’ is a paradigm, a discursive framework used to understand the colonial relations of domination. ⁸ It is built from the opposition between the colonized and the colonizer. The anti-colonial discursive framework is an epistemology of the colonized, anchored in the Indigenous sense of collective and shared colonial consciousness. ⁹ However, as Coulthard ¹⁰ argues, the politics it evokes risks reproducing the configurations of power Indigenous people have been fighting to transcend.

Decoloniality is not just a theory; it is a praxis. ¹¹ Decoloniality denotes ways of thinking, knowing, being, and doing, not limited to the period of colonization and resistance, but also including all subsequent politics of resistance, transformation, and transcendence. The decolonial project implies recognizing and undoing the hierarchical structures of race, gender, heteropatriarchy, and class that continue to control life, knowledge, the economy, and politics. In this sense, decoloniality is not only a discursive framework, but it is also a diverse set of perspectives and positionalities of the decolonial attitude and a political project of ongoing decolonization, deconstruction, and building a new politics from existing strengths. ¹²

Done well, decoloniality takes on more anti-colonial resistance to coloniality; the decolonial project acknowledges the presence of diverse hierarchical structures and encourages the deconstruction and transcendence of multiple power imbalances and their embedded epistemologies. Across the landscape, these vary widely, including anti-colonial epistemologies of resistance, ¹³ sovereignties, ¹⁴ and survivance, ¹⁵ but they can also include calls for self-determination ¹⁶ and rights ¹⁷ that work within an international system that consistently sustains state power. ¹⁸

Several contemporary decolonial scholars identify knowledge as the root of domination, making decolonizing knowledge across disciplines one of the most critical tasks in the decolonial project, understanding and affirming subjectivities that have been devalued by narratives of modernity that are constitutive of the coloniality of power. ‘Its main goal is the transformation of colonial subjects and subjectivities into decolonial subjects and subjectivities’. ¹⁹

Decolonizing knowledge is challenging because multiple intersecting power hierarchies over time and across the colonial, anti-colonial, and recolonial processes generate different colonial subjects and subjectivities. Resisting these means taking on the complexity of power inequalities and dynamics that have been normalized through values, practices, and norms. Those power dynamics can function epistemologically to conceal their existence (as in when gender hierarchies are not even viewed as hierarchies but natural differences) or to conceal that their presence is unjust (as in non-structural justifications for gender differences in compensation).

Given the scale of the challenge, significant oversimplification of both colonial and gender dynamics leaves out a lot of important history and politics. As we show in the next section, although working with a local informant, Lugones’s oversimplification of the decolonizing project replaces Western-centric colonial epistemological hierarchies with a constructed Indigenous knowledge system (Aymaridad) and replaces the Western gender binary with chachawarmi. We argue that, while Lugones’s gender analysis is useful in revealing the coloniality of gender as a complexifying dimension to the coloniality of power, ²⁰ her approach makes insufficient use of feminist social criticism as a methodology born itself of the critical struggles of women against the legacies of racism, coloniality, and neoimperialism. ²¹ While no specific standpoint is necessary for each feminist to inhabit, feminist social criticism’s recursivity is propelled by some feminists circulating between multiple conceptual worlds – for example between private struggles in the kitchen and academic reflection. ²² Political struggles vary around the globe, but they always demand recursive and robust commitments to reveal what lies beneath and sustains the layers of oppressive colonial hierarchies and also attend to how these might morph to be seemingly less oppressive, but only seemingly.

Without these methodological practices, a decolonial project does not sufficiently interrogate the foundations of its own argument. As we show, turning to ‘Indigenous’ language, concepts, and cosmologies without questioning the hierarchical powers that led to the preservation or construction of certain Indigenous knowledge as the authentic Indigenous knowledge reifies a (re)colonial power even as it portends to deconstruct coloniality. Consequently, the recentered decolonial subject may be silencing other subjects and subjectivities, thus producing a (re)coloniality of power.

In these politics, the recolonial actors reconstruct and deploy race, ethnicity, and ethnonationalism to political ends. In our exposition that follows, we show that the choice to deploy ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’, and ‘ethnonationalism’ is a political choice. This political choice is part of the construction and political use of the idea itself, and thus deconstructing these is an essential part of decoloniality.

Coloniality of Power

Lugones’s introduction of the ‘coloniality of gender’ into the discussion of the ‘coloniality of power’ offered a necessary corrective to the deconstructive analysis of colonial power offered by Aníbal Quijano. Quijano introduced the concept of ‘coloniality of power’ to provide an intersectional class and race analysis of coloniality, one on which most Latin American decolonial scholars build. ²³

Quijano ²⁴ defines power as the social relationship that articulates three main elements: domination, exploitation, and conflict. Power results from the struggles over the control of every area of social existence: work and access to resources, sex, collective authority, and subjectivity/intersubjectivity. However, power does not interact separately with each of the social existence areas. It affects every component simultaneously. Power runs through and connects all aspects of social life, forming a complex system of hierarchical powers. ²⁵

According to Quijano, the system of hierarchical powers is specific to a historical context. Quijano was influenced by the political landscape of his time, 1992, the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the neoliberal economy, neoimperialism, and globalization. Thus, class and ethnicity became the main focus of his analysis. In particular, ‘race’ was the category that defined an individual’s place within the social hierarchy. ²⁶

For Quijano, ²⁷ Spanish and Portuguese colonization of Latin America was a political, economic, and epistemological process imposing the cosmology of modernity and the power structure of colonization. From a Marxist perspective, the colonization of Latin America consolidated the relations between race, division of labor, and capital concentration. Racial identities were associated with the corresponding hierarchies, places, and social roles, as constitutive of them, in a pattern of colonial domination that was imposed. In Latin America, the idea of race was a way of granting legitimacy to the relations of domination imposed by the conquest. The racial difference was a new way of legitimizing the already old ideas and practices of superiority/inferiority relations between the dominant and the dominated. The reproduction of the racial superiority/inferiority relations is the basis on which the current structures of power – imperialism, globalization, and capitalism – are sustained. ²⁸ The consolidation of this process became what Quijano called ‘the coloniality of power’, a system of domination based on a network of intersubjective social relations. The colonization of the oppressed imaginary, changing ‘their traditional knowledge of the world, to adopt the cognitive horizon of the dominator as their own (coloniality)’, ²⁹ is the pillar of domination.

Quijano offers a decolonial methodology that reveals the multiple interconnected dimensions of power and the importance of controlling subjectivity/intersubjectivity. For Quijano, decolonizing knowledge entails challenging the ownership of the subjectivity/intersubjectivity and calls attention both to class dynamics and the control over political power. In this sense, Quijano’s analysis follows one crucial dimension of feminism – subjecting all hierarchies to skeptical scrutiny ³⁰ – but it makes insufficient use of the complementary feminist methods of learning across differences.^31,32

Coloniality of Gender

Quijano’s emphasis on capitalism and imperialism drew a transversal line where race crossed every aspect of social life. However, in his focus on race and class, Quijano overlooked the effect of gender on the power structure. Quijano’s notion of the coloniality of power veils the ways in which nonwhite colonized women have been subjected and disempowered.

To address this gap in Quijano’s decolonial analysis, María Lugones introduces the concept of ‘coloniality of gender’ in an effort to bring gender into the concept of ‘coloniality of power’. ³³ She argues that race is not the only central dimension in the hierarchical power structure of coloniality. Colonialism

imposed a new gender system that created very different arrangements for colonized males and females than for white bourgeois colonizers. Thus, it introduced many genders and gender itself as a colonial concept and mode of organization of relations of production, property relations, of cosmologies and ways of knowing. ³⁴

According to Lugones, this colonial gender system shapes current global powers. Though a development of Quijano, her purpose is less to offer a decolonial analysis of Latin American hierarchies and more to offer a decolonial analysis of ‘white’ feminism, pushing the family of feminisms to take on the role of colonialism in constructing the ways in which gender, race, and class have been co-constructed through colonialism. In her analysis, the colonial disruption of the pre-colonial gender structures undermined pre-colonial communal relations, egalitarian relations, ritual thinking, collective decision-making and authority, and economics.

The coloniality of gender is what lies at the intersection of gender/class/race as central constructs of the capitalist world system of power, that is, ‘racialized, capitalist gender oppression’. ³⁵ . Lugones proposes ‘decolonial feminism’ as a methodology for learning

about each other as resisters to the coloniality of gender at the colonial difference, without necessarily being an insider to the worlds of meaning from which resistance to the coloniality arises. That is, the decolonial feminist’s task begins by her seeing the colonial difference, emphatically resisting her epistemological habit of erasing it. ³⁶

Coloniality organizes social life in a system of binary categories that have dehumanizing effects on certain subjectivities by ignoring their realities and their views. Because the binary notion of gender (man/woman) is a colonial imposition, Lugones applies decolonial feminism to the concept of gender by looking at everyday resistance to the colonial binary. She gives the example of Aymara women in Bolivia. The Aymara concept of chachawarmi understands gender not as the colonial binary concept but as a continuum of complementary opposites. Chachawarmi can be understood only through the Aymara cosmology, through the relationship between uqtaña and qhamaña. For Lugones, the translation of chachawarmi as man/woman in everyday life in Bolivian communities is a sign of the coloniality of gender. The possibility of decolonial feminism depends, in part, on lives lived in the tension of ‘languaging – of moving between ways of living in a language’. ³⁷

In thinking of the methodology of decoloniality, I move to read the social from the cosmologies informing and constituting perception, motility, embodiment, and relation. Thus the move I am recommending is very different from one that reads gender into social. The shift can enable us to understand the organization of the society in terms that unveil the deep disruption of the gender imposition in the self in relation. ³⁸

In sum, Lugones explores Aymara cosmology, Aymaridad, in order to understand chachawarmi. However, her approach lacks the epistemological deconstruction of the power of knowledge and its normalization that her decolonial project anticipates. Instead, Lugones assumes that Aymaridad is decolonial. This assumption is a misapplication of her own methodology and a misinterpretation of the ‘coloniality of power’. In our reading, after applying feminist reflexivity, the Aymara cosmology as the modern construction of Aymaridad is part of a colonial (or (re)colonial) project within Bolivia.

As we saw above, coloniality of power is a system of domination based on a network of intersubjective social relations. Power is the result of the interconnection of work and access to resources, sex, collective authority, and subjectivity/intersubjectivity. Therefore, a meaningful feminist decolonial methodology must account for the intersection of the different sources of power. As we show in the remainder of the paper, the control over subjectivity/intersubjectivity is not apart from gender, race, political, and economic relations, but rather it is as deeply connected to the hierarchies of the ‘recolonial’ project of the contemporary era as they were to the colonial project.

As we show in what follows, an anti-colonial resistance politics which centers on the Western/non-Western dichotomy will be complicit in concealing the power dynamics within decolonizing societies. As Quijano argued, those who control political and economic power have the power to define subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Just as his coloniality of power illustrates the pernicious imposition of Western and modern cosmology on colonized communities, our analysis demonstrates that the construction of the Aymara cosmology, which was part of Bolivian colonial resistance and nation-building, perniciously recolonized other Bolivian Indigenous groups. Control over subjectivity and intersubjectivity, ostensibly as a part of recovering the resistant cosmologies of Indigenous communities, might instead be a political, economic, and academic exercise of benevolent racism.

To reveal this possibility, we conduct a feminist decolonial analysis of the political, economic, and academic construction of Aymaridad. Our ostensible purpose is to understand by contextualizing chachawarmi and its decolonial feminist potential. Yet, the analysis reveals much more about the recolonizing project concealed within what portends to be a decolonial project.

Applying a Feminist Decolonial Analysis to Aymaridad

Further from suggesting a monolithic Aymara cosmology, we argue that whether through class, race, ethnicity, or ethnonationalism, a version of Aymaridad has been constructed by academics and politicians. We show that the tools of that construction include the census, academic disciplines, politics and ethnonationalism, and economics. In the remainder of the paper, we bring feminist reflexivity and decolonial analysis to revisit the genealogy of the construction of Aymara identity as pre-colonial. We reveal the epistemology, political purpose, and economic consequences of Aymaridad. We find that the ostensibly decolonial project of reclaiming Aymaridad as an anti-colonial stance about which so many were enthusiastic was in practice a (re)colonial project, one that replaced the colonial hierarchies with Indigenous hierarchies while also undermining the ability of rural Aymara and other Indigenous groups to claim a voice in decolonial Bolivian politics.

Below, first, we explore the role of the census in creating racial and ethnic categories. Second, we investigate the role of Western scholars and Aymara intellectuals in the modern ethnonationalist construction of Aymaridad, idealized in anthropological, linguistic, and historical scholarly work. Then, we reveal the co-construction of the Aymaridad and Aymara political and economic control over resources, enabling the exploitation of non-elite Aymaras and other Indigenous communities in Bolivia by Aymara political and economic elites. The Aymaridad consolidates hierarchies, places, and social roles, in a pattern of (re)colonial domination by Aymara intellectual, political, and economic elites, one that makes it a dubious foundation for a decolonial, let alone a feminist decolonial political project.

Constructing Aymaridad Through the Census

Ethnic division in Bolivia was and is, first and foremost, a class division. ³⁹ According to Tristan Marof nearly a century ago, ‘Whites are all those who have a fortune in Bolivia, those who enjoy influences and occupy high positions. The enriched Mestizo or Indio, although of shallow skin, are considered White’. ⁴⁰ During the colonial period, to be Indigenous was a fiscal category. During the Republic’s early years, it denoted a trade or profession.

The national censuses have played a fundamental role in constructing Indigenous identity. After the National Revolution of 1952 through 1992, the census question used the primary language spoken at home to define the Indigenous Bolivian population. The focus changed to self-identification in the last two decades. ⁴¹ These measures count different subsets of the population. For example, multilingual people are hard to classify when language is the measure. When using self-identification, the wording matters. A change in the wording of the census question between 2001 ⁴² and 2012 ⁴³ led to a decrease in the ‘Indigenous population’ from 62% to 41%.

The AmericasBarometer, in 2019, asked the 2012 census question: ‘As a Bolivian, do you feel you belong to any of the Bolivian Indigenous communities?’ and the following question asked about which Indigenous group. 15.6% of Bolivians self-identify as Aymara. The AmericasBarometer also asked: ‘Do you consider yourself white, mestizo, Indigenous, black, mulatto, or of another race?’ In 2019, from the 15.6% of self-identified Aymaras, 54.6% identified as Indigenous, 23.7% identified as mestizo, and 14.8% identified as white. If, in the Bolivian context, it is difficult to identify the Aymara people, who then are the preservers of the Aymara cosmology?

In ‘La construcción de la Aymaridad. Una historia de la etnicidad en Bolivia (1952–2006)’ (The construction of the Aymaridad. A history of ethnicity in Bolivia (1952–2006)), Verushka Alvizuri offers a thorough historical account of the modern development of what is now defined as Aymaridad, ‘the Aymara cosmology’. Alvizuri shows how over half a century, the Aymara intelligentsia built a national identity: a shared language, history, values, and symbols (pp. 23–24). The account of Aymaridad that academics of the 1970s and recent political and economic elites have deployed diverges from Alvizuri’s constructed account and instead is characterized as a reclamation of a historical identity. In this and the following two sections, we find more evidence for the constructed account than for the reclamation account, and we reveal the political hierarchies sustained by the latter.

The modern construction of Aymaridad began with linguistic and anthropological work in the 1970s. Exploring the academic studies that support this account, we show that the historical identity is a linguistic, anthropological, and historical reconstruction led by foreign academics and supported by local scholars.

Like its population, the Aymara language has undergone several changes throughout history and exhibits significant regional variation. Alvizuri walks us through the study of the Aymara language and its impact on contemporary Aymara. The language suffered substantial alteration through colonization, beginning as early as the early 17th century. The first attempts to normalize the language came with the catholic priest, Ludovico Bertonio. Inspired by and following the precepts of the normalization of Castellano, he created the first grammar and Aymara dictionary. Those who had access to the catholic schools learned to write and read in Aymara under Bertonio’s Aymara. ‘The fact that this first Aymara vocabulary had crystallized based on patterns of a Latin language, puts us on the track of an irreparable “colonization of the imaginary”’. ⁴⁴ Thus, to ground Aymara exceptionalism, identity, and cosmology in the language is partly a recolonial project.

Since then, there have been more than two dozen alphabets, a reflection of the power struggles between the catholic church, the protestant church, and the State. However, in 1972, Martha Hardman, an American scholar, published ‘Postulados lingüísticos del idioma aymara’ (Aymara language linguistic postulates). Though based on her study in Peru, the work opened up the field of Aymara ethnolinguistics; she then published what became a seminal work on Bolivian Aymara. In a series of publications, she stated four Aymara postulates: (1) in Aymara, the speaker distinguishes between the testimonial and the non-testimonial experience, (2) the human is distinguished from the non-human, (3) Aymara has many suffixes, combination possibilities, and versatility, (4) in Aymara the past is up ahead and visible, while the future is behind and invisible. With these features, Hardman ⁴⁵ sets clear distinctions between Spanish and Aymara because the Aymara reflects the Aymara culture. She celebrates the Aymara exceptionalism on which Lugones’s recollection of qamaña and uqtaña (discussed below) relies.

Hardman refutes the dominant view in the 70s that Aymara was an inferior language. She presents a set of idealized characteristics of Aymara. She demonstrated that with its complexity of meanings and grammar Aymara enables people to contribute and debate complex ideas as they can in Spanish. Her work influenced subsequent linguists of Aymara descent. The most relevant was Juan de Dios Yapita, considered the first Aymara linguist. Hardman trained Yapita in the United States. What we know today as the Yapita alphabet, Aymara’s most popular modern normalization, shows a clear influence of Hardman’s postulates.

This dynamic of well-intentioned idealization and overgeneralization of the Aymara by a Western scholar that influenced the work of Aymara intellectuals occurred not only in linguistics but also in anthropology. John Murra was considered the ‘father of Andean ethnohistory’. ⁴⁶ Murra, like Hardman, was a professor at an American university (Cornell) who started his fieldwork in Peru. In 1972, Murra published ‘The vertical control of a maximum of ecological floors in the economy of Andean societies’. In this work, Murra explains that Andean societies had control over different ecological floors, separated by great distances. According to this author, the guiding principles of the Andean economy were reciprocity, redistribution, and the vertical control.

His work was disseminated in Bolivia by Xavier Albó, a Spanish priest who is one of Bolivia’s most influential anthropologists and linguists. Murra’s work was hardly criticized for its idealization of Andean cultures and the generalization of one study case to all Andean economic systems. The Bolivian historian, Ramiro Condarco, wrote an article defending Murra, saying that he found similar results in his study of Bolivia. Since then, Murra’s and Condarco’s ecological complementarity has been widespread among Bolivian intellectuals. Its influence, however, also reached the work of Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who used Murra’s theories to explain food security to Aymara communities. ⁴⁷ A well-balanced Aymara diet resulted from the historical control over different ecosystems that secured the supply of fruits and vegetables.

The construction of Aymara history reinforces Aymaran exceptionalism within Linguistics and Anthropology. The contemporary retelling of the shared Aymara history has its roots in Bouysse-Cassagne’s doctoral thesis: ‘The men of the altitudes: social relations and spatial-temporal structures of the Aymara, XV-XVI centuries’. ⁴⁸ She postulates the existence of an Aymara identity before the Incas. Despite the fact that the work was criticized in France for its flawed historiography, it was well-received by Bolivian intellectuals. Its embrace was so widespread that Bouysse-Cassagne’s maps were used to define what we know now as the Aymara nation and its territory. Her work has also influenced the theories and methodologies of Aymara intellectuals, such as the members of the Andean Oral History Workshop (THOA). The work of the THOA postulates a long and a short Aymara memory. The long memory allows them to argue that the Aymara cosmology has been preserved – and for Lugones to think of it as the resistant cosmology.

Bouysse-Cassagne’s enthnohistoriography, in conjunction with Hardman’s and Bertonio’s linguistic research, paved the way for the study of the concepts of pacha (earth), pachamama (mother earth), and pachakuti (the return of time), three concepts that today exemplify the Aymara cosmology. ⁴⁹ In sum, the Aymara subjectivity/intersubjectivity is the result of Western academic work, that influenced and was expanded by Aymara intellectual elites. Its foundations, however, are tainted by a halo of benevolent racism. The efforts to elevate the Aymara culture to the status of Western culture led scholars to generalize study cases and idealize the Andes. In the following two sections, we will describe how the constructions of the Aymara cosmologies, the subjectivity/intersubjectivity, interact with politics, and the economic benefit of Aymara elites.

Aymara Ethnonationalism: Ethnicity, Heroes, and Symbols

In the previous section, we showed the construction of Aymaridad based on the academic work in linguistics, anthropology, and history. However, this contribution serves a political purpose. In this section we show how, based on the exceptionality of Aymaridad, Aymara political movements can retell a colonial history as a ‘decolonial’ history to consolidate an Aymara ethnonational and colonial political project.

The current Aymara Indigenous movements claim their roots in the rebellions of the Caciques apoderados (empowered chiefs) that occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century. ⁵⁰ These Caciques (chief) were Indigenous leaders that fought over the control of what they considered their ancestral territories. However, their strategy was to recover colonial territorial titles in order to have their ayllus (communities) and original land excluded from la Revisita (land allocation review) of 1881. ⁵¹ The titles certificated that their lands were bought from the Spanish Crown and belonged to them. This was their legal strategy vis-à-vis the State, similar to the strategy deployed by the hacendados (major landowners).

However, it is possible that the territorial documents do not correspond to the ‘ancestral’ territories of the Aymaras but with what the Western colonizers decided to grant to the Caciques. During the colonial period, the colonial authorities gave the Caciques political power and the responsibility to collect taxes and convey them to the Spanish Crown. ⁵²

The struggles of Caciques against the Republican State fit the anti-colonial narrative. However, a decolonial analysis challenges the role of the Caciques apoderados. Furthermore, the emphasis on the struggles of Caciques obscures the struggles of other Aymara communities who lacked colonial territorial titles and fell prey to the State and the hacienda (farmstates). ⁵³ The modern Indianist and Katarista political parties construct a memory of the Caciques.

After the death of the Cacique Santos Marka T’ula, the Chaco War, and the beginning of a leftist movement at the government level, the Indigenous movement organized itself in the form of peasant unions. ⁵⁴ The primary identity of this organization was class more than ethnicity. They participated in the 1952 revolution that led to an agrarian reform and the opening of the public university to the Indigenous population. Since the beginning of the century, the Aymara movement conceived education as essential to Indio liberation. Projects like the ayllu-school Warisata and protagonists such as Eduardo Leandro Nina Quispe stand out. It is the public university of La Paz that provides the soil for future indianista parties. ⁵⁵ Indianismo was born in and nurtured by the urban struggles against discrimination against and exclusion of Aymara students.

In 1968, one of the most relevant student political groups, the Movimiento Universitario Julian Apaza (MUJA), was born. They self-identify as a group of students who discussed the ideas of Fausto Reinaga, the ideologue of Indianism. In his work ‘La revolución india’ (The Indian revolution) and ‘Tesis india’, Reinaga questions Western legitimacy and its impact on the Bolivian national design. Then, he argues the existence of two Bolivias. Two irreconcilable Bolivias, the whitened mestizo and the Indian – of the oppressors and the oppressed. The two Bolivias were permanently at odds. ⁵⁶ According to this position, parasitism of the criollo (born in Latin America to European ancestors) elites prevents the development of the country and the construction of a sovereign State and nation. He proposes a new political project, the rebirth of the nation, the resurgence of the Indio. ⁵⁷

Reinaga, however, is a controversial character. He was not always the Indianist ideologue. He had been part of the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR), one of the most relevant political parties in the history of Bolivia, whose political project was the assimilation of Indigenous people and the creation of a mestizo national identity. Reinaga was elected a Congressman in 1944, running under the MNR ticket. However, in 1947 was accused of treason and expelled from the party. This experience led him to write. After spending time in Spain and Russia, Reinaga adopts an Indianist position. He claims to be influenced by Mahatma Gandhi, Franz Fanon, and Leopold Sedar Senghor. ⁵⁸

His self-identification also changed. Fausto Reinaga presented himself as a ‘true indio’, claiming an origin of poverty, exclusion, and analphabetism, appropriating the negative stereotypes associated with Indigenous people. However, Albó ⁵⁹ said that Reinaga was the main non-Indigenous intellectual to propose an Indigenous project. In fact, he did not belong to a poor and excluded family. His father was an hacendado and Reinaga grew up in an urban mestizo middle-class environment.

The emerging Indianist parties were inspired by the writings of a self-proclaimed Indio that constructed a political project that determined the subjectivity/intersubjectivity of a new Indianist nation, inspired by foreign thinkers. Around Reinaga, there were similar efforts to create a new narrative and the foundations of Aymara ethnonationalism. Using the work of anthropologists and archeologists, with the central participation of members of the MUJA, the discourse of the exceptional Aymara was created. The new Aymara political elites created a unifying symbol, the whipala (Indigenous flag); a mythical place of origin, Tiwanaku; and a hero, Tupak Katari. ⁶⁰

Few historical documents detail the life of Julian Apaza, Tupak Katari, the Aymara hero whose name appears in political parties and Indigenous Aymara movements appellations. Written from the perspective of the colonizers, they portray a negative image of the leader of the Indigenous revolts in La Paz during the XVIII century. However, they inspired two fictional biographies ⁶¹ that were read as historical biographies and were incorporated into school curricula in 1955. These fictional books changed the narrative of Julian Apaza from negative to positive. The consolidation of Katari as the Aymara Christ came after a contest of scripts for radio soap operas inspired by Julian Apaza, organized by Centro de Investigación y Promoción del Campesinado. Center for Research and Peasant Advocacy, a Catholic NGO, in 1975. ⁶²

The construction of these symbols and the consolidation of the Katari myth were effective. Two main Katarista parties formed during the 1978 presidential elections, the Movimiento Indígena Tupak Katari and the Movimiento Revolucionario Tupak Katari (MRTK). The latter was the most politically successful. The leaders of the MRTK were Genaro Flores (one of the founders of MUJA), Macabeo Chila, and Victor Hugo Cárdenas. All of them received a university education. Flores, who was well connected to peasant unions, was behind the cultural revindication of the Tiwanaku Manifesto. ⁶³ His connection with peasant unions and politics began while working as a research assistant for a team at the University of Wisconsin. ⁶⁴

The Kataristas and Indianist parties fought for their right to participate in decision-making spaces, but with a negative political cost by allying with traditional parties in order to participate in elections. ⁶⁵ The Katarista movement did not conceive itself as a leftist or right movement, and its electoral success actually came from alliances with right-wing parties. In 1993, Cárdenas, ⁶⁶ from the MRTK, became the first Indigenous Vice-president of Bolivia. The President was Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, a man infamous for his American accent. Their government instigated neoliberal reforms, including the privatization of the key national industries and natural resources.

After the collapse of the Katarista parties, Indianist intellectuals found refuge in local and international NGOs until they rejoined the government under the Morales regime. In this paper, we will mention two relevant figures: David Choquehuanca and Felix Cárdenas. Choquehuanca was the National Coordinator for Programa Nina (‘fire’ in Aymara), an NGO consortium that provided training to rural movement leaders. He went on to serve as the Foreign Minister of Bolivia for the first 11 years of Evo Morales’ government, and he is currently Bolivia’s Vice-president. Felix Cárdenas is the Director of popular education of a local NGO, Centro de Estudios, Proyectos y Asesoramiento Ambiental. He went on to serve as Evo Morales’ Decolonization Vice-minister for nine years. In addition, he served as the President’s delegate to the Constitutional Assembly that was in charge of designing Bolivia’s new constitution from 2006 to 2009.

NGOs were essential to the diffusion of Aymaridad in Bolivia. They incorporated Aymara intellectuals and foreign Aymaristas in projects designed to improve the life of Indigenous communities. Their programs spread the ‘correct way’ of being Indigenous, the idealized version of the ayllu, and what it meant to be Aymara. The efforts of NGOs, such as Choquehuanca’s and Cárdenas’, were directed to form the future Indigenous leaders from local communities. Other examples are CINEP Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular. Center for Research and Popular Education, CIDRE, Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo Regional. Center for Research and Regional Develpment and Caritas, NGOs that worked in the Chapare region with coca-leaf producers. The General Secretary of the cocalero union federation was and still is Evo Morales Ayma, former President of Bolivia and the first Indigenous in the Presidency.

The Movimiento al Socialismo - Instrumento Político por la Soberanía de los Pueblos. Movement Toward Socialism–Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples, Evo Morales’ party, was conceived as the political instrument for Indigenous and peasant social movements. It brings together the same Indigenous and peasant organizations that had close contact with the Katarista parties and NGOs. Then, it was no surprise when NGO workers became public servants working closely with the president and advisors for the writing of the new constitution.

The Aymara project is consolidated in the new constitution. Bolivia became the Plurinational State of Bolivia, acknowledging the presence of many Indigenous nations. Yet one, the Aymara, was ready to claim a national identity and set the national agenda. Moreover, a new project of development is incorporated into the design of the new state: the sumaq qamaña (‘living well’ in Aymara). Even though the Constitutional text translates the term to Quechua (sumaj kawsay) and Guaraní (ñande reko), sumaq qamaña is the root of the political project. Qamaña is the concept recovered by Lugones as the root of the Aymara cosmovision.

The Aymaristas (intellectuals currently working on Aymara topics) explained the significance of sumaq qamaña, using a linguistic perspective that reiterates Hardman’s postulates of the exceptionality of the Aymara. In one theoretical approach, in his ethnolinguistic analysis of qamaña, Xavier Albó points out that this Aymara category etymologically denotes a collective implication, which can be translated as ‘knowing how to live and support each other’. ⁶⁷ In another theoretical approach, when explaining qamaña, Medina ⁶⁸ echoes Aymara Mario Torrez and emphasizes Aymara duality, the complementarity of opposites. For Medina, Qamaña is the expression of the duality of qama and jiwa (life and death). Qamaña is the ‘external space of existence’, the existence of everything that is alive, in a pleasant space and well-being. Notably, Albó’s translation of qamaña differs from Medina’s, reflecting the existing variation in the significance of qamaña among Aymara communities and Aymaristas. ⁶⁹ In fact, there is not a unique Aymara resistant cosmovision, and the attempt at a singular one is a political alteration, whether intentionally or inadvertently.

One particular political alteration of the term sumaq qamaña can be tracked to the work of NGOs and international cooperation. The first time that ‘living well’ was used was in the 90s in a forest preservation project financed by the German cooperation. In this context, sumaq qamaña meant living in equilibrium with nature, disregarding economic growth. This led to statements such as Mario Torrez’s: ‘although we are poor, the Aymara feels good and even enjoy some happiness’. ⁷⁰ Today, scholars such as Alison Spedding and Denise Arnold believe that the sumaq qamaña is an urban concept that is now being applied in rural communities. ⁷¹

In sum, in the new Bolivian Plurinational State, the ruling party is encompassed by Indigenous and peasant movements that were influenced by the Katarista and Indianist movements. These movements were built upon the generalization and idealization of Aymaras by Aymara and Aymaristas. As a result, currently, sumaq qamaña is an empty idealized generalization of the Aymara cosmovision that is a state policy. Aymara elites such as David Choquehuanca, in his position as Foreign Minister, decided on the version of ‘living well’ Bolivia exported to the world. Felix Cárdenas, author of a book on chachawarmi, through the Decolonization Ministry, secured that the interpretation of the new developing project was through the Aymara cosmology.

Below, we will address how the Aymara centrism privileged some economic elites obscuring relations of dominations.

A Recolonial Process: The Aymara Economic Power

Despite the plurality of cultural identities in Bolivia, progressives led by Evo Morales rallied to celebrate the Aymara national identity and, until recently, their political leader without attending to the political and economic inequalities that they perpetuate.

The Aymara population in Bolivia is far from being homogenous regarding class. According to the AmericasBarometer survey, in 2019, 15.6% of Bolivians self-identify as Aymaras (using the 2012 census question). Of these, 27.5% were in the lowest quintal of wealth, while 13% were in the highest quintal of wealth. In addition, 37% of Aymaras have post-secondary studies, while 12.6% have achieved less than six years of education. 51.9% of Aymaras live in Metropolitan areas and 32.1% live in rural areas (AmericasBarometer 2019).

In Bolivia, some Aymaras have become part of the economic and political elites, and their actions are constantly explained through the Aymara cosmology. For example, the economic values of Aymaras, according to Murra, ⁷² are reciprocity and redistribution. Then, the Aymara traders are considered to have different economic practices than Western traders. However, in reality, Aymara traders comply with the rules of capitalism and are often accused of exploiting their workers. A group of powerful traders managed to accumulate significant wealth, and they often demonstrate their opulence in festivities like ‘El Gran Poder’ (‘The Great Power’) in the city of La Paz. This religious festival is a platform to display the success of rich Aymaras and to consolidate economic relations among them. ⁷³

The Aymara traders, an economic elite, have been the subject of recent research in sociology, anthropology, and economics. In ‘The Native World-System. An Ethnography of Bolivian Aymara Traders in the Global Economy’. Tassi ⁷⁴ offers an exhaustive description of this group. However, his narrative is impregnated with postulates of Aymaridad. Despite the articulated belief in reciprocity and redistribution, Aymara elites are criticized for exploiting their workers, workers that are, for the most part, also Aymaras.

Another more relevant example of Aymaras exercising colonial power is the highlands’ Colonos (colonizers). Employing Murra’s ⁷⁵ postulates, the colonos activities are part of the vertical ecological control of territories. Because the Aymara ancestors had control over territories both in the highlands and in the lowlands, it is reasonable that the new generations will occupy different ecological floors. Andean Colonos are often accused of occupying the territories of Indigenous communities in the lowlands

The Colonos used to be organized in the Confederación Sindical de Colonizadores de Bolivia (Syndicalist Confederation of Colonizers of Bolivia). Today, they are called Confederación Sindical de Comunidades Interculturales de Bolivia (CSCIB) (Syndicalist Confederation of Intercultural Communities of Bolivia). The CSCIB agglutinates people of highland regions (mostly Aymaras and Quechuas) who occupy (colonize) territories in the lowlands of Bolivia. They are part of the Coordinadora Nacional por el Cambio. National Coordinator for Change, the National Coordination for Change, a group consisting of the social organizations affiliated with Evo Morales’ government.

The 1952’ National Revolution identified the ‘need’ to colonize the ‘uninhabited’ territories in Bolivian lowlands. As a result, the governmental Instituto Nacional de Colonización (National Institute of Colonization) led the Marcha al Oriente (March to the East). Between 1953 and 1993, the Institute distributed around 2 million hectares of land to more than 50,000 beneficiaries, The Colonos, predominantly Andean settlers and white farmers. ⁷⁶ Andean settlers were often privileged at the expense of Indigenous communities of the lowlands. ⁷⁷ The ‘uninhabited’ land was, in fact, inhabited by a great diversity of resistant Indigenous people that claimed their right over their territory. Aymara settlers, complicit with the state, were part of the colonization of other Indigenous populations, dispossessing them from their lands.

As a result, the tension between Andean Colonos and lowland Indigenous people is evident. In the following quote, a Tacana woman, forced to share the same territory with Aymara settlers, differentiates her people from the colonos.

The Colonos always try to get more, to make a profit (ganar) (. . .) (In contrast) we (Tacana) want to live peacefully and comfortably. We sell a chicken here or a tree-trunk there, but only in order to live in peace. But how can we do this, if the collas advance on us like termites taking our land and cutting down our trees to sell? ⁷⁸

Despite invading the territories of Indigenous communities, the action of Aymaras is justified by their political elites as the result of the control of their ancestral territory. Indianist–Katarist leaders and Aymara intellectuals disseminated the view that ‘recovery of pre-colonial land and territory could only be achieved by reconstructing the ethnic Aymara identity and, on this basis, rebuilding the Aymara nation within the borders of the Republic of Bolivia’. ⁷⁹ As a result, the CSCIB recovers Murra’s work to justify their occupancy of territories of the lowlands.

In many cases, we were returning to lands that were part of the ecological floors of the Aymara and Quechua before the colony. It is a sad irony that we are foreigners in our own lands. (http://www.apcbolivia.org/org/cscib.aspx ⁸⁰ )

The political power of the CSCIB does not come only from their affiliation to CONALCAM, an organization composed of social movements affiliated with Evo Morales’ government, which was part of the distribution of Ministries and nominations to the National Assembly. Several organizations affiliated with the CSCBI are also affiliated with the Confederación de Productores de Coca del Trópico de Cochabamba (Confederation of Coca Producers of the Tropics of Cochabamba), of which currently Evo Morales is President.

Evo Morales is also part of the colonizing movement that brought Indigenous communities from the highlands to the lowlands. Originally from Orinoca–Oruro, Morales moved to the locality of San Francisco in Cochabamba’s tropical region at the end of the 70s. San Francisco is one of the access ports to the Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Secure (TIPNIS, Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory), the land of Mojeño, Yuracaré, and Tsimane’ communities.

The TIPNIS has been a protected Indigenous territory since 1990. However, recently, it has been threatened by development projects led by Evo Morales’ government. The conflict over the TIPNIS embodies the contradictions between the rhetoric adopted by the Indigenous government and the colonization of Indigenous territories. It is the reification of the Aymara coloniality of power.

In 2007, the presence of 67 cocalero unions in the TIPNIS was registered. In 2009, a deadly clash between the Yuracarés and the colonos occurred over the territory. In 2010, despite the consensus among TIPNIS’ Indigenous authorities against the project, Evo Morales’ government promoted the construction of a highway that it would pass through their Indigenous territories. The Indigenous communities of the lowlands organized and marched to La Paz to be brutally repressed by the Indigenous president’s government. The official argument in favor of the highway was the colonial discourse of bringing progress to the Indigenous, to the savage, to bring the state to the Yuracarés, Mojeños, and Tsimanes. In favor of the road construction were the cocaleros and colonos settled in the TIPNIS territory.

Despite the clear signs of a government that legislated and ruled against Indigenous communities from the lowlands, Evo Morales was defended by the international left and progressive movements during the Bolivian post-electoral protests of 2019. The movements echoed the official discoursed of Morales’ ruling party. They felt compelled to defend the first Indigenous president of Bolivia from a racist movement that wanted to overthrow the democratically elected leader.

Chachawarmi Through a Feminist Decolonial Methodology

In the preceding discussion, we demonstrated that Aymaridad both been a modern post-colonial construction and political project that privileges Aymara political and economic elite. Academics both inside and outside of Bolivia have contributed to the idealized linguistic, anthropological, and historical account of Aymaridad. This empty constructed cosmology empowered a new political elite, which, in return, consolidated Aymaridad as a state project. This project benefitted new Indigenous economic elites while masking their exploitation and colonization of other Indigenous populations. Aymaridad reifies the coloniality of power.

Having deconstructed the conceptual, political, and economic project of Aymaridad, we now turn to revisit the decolonial and feminist potential of chachawarmi in Lugones and more generally. Lugones and Miranda’s draw on chachawarmi as a pre-colonial ancestral cosmology, one that offers an alternative to the colonizers’ cosmology. The genealogy above suggests, at a minimum, that decolonial feminism should reconsider this interpretation.

Just as post-Cold War Latin American politics was foundational for Quijano, so too 20th-century feminisms’ need to attend to its own diversity was foundational for Lugones. She published ‘Toward a Decolonial Feminism’ in 2010, after spending time in Bolivia during the period when Bolivians were re-writing their constitution. It was a time of hope, where the official discourse included decolonization and depatriarchalization as pillars of Evo Morales’ government. Lugones joined in the excitement for a new future:

The new Bolivian constitution, the Morales government, and the Indigenous movements of Abya Yala express a commitment to the philosophy of suma qamaña (often translated as ‘living well’). The relation between qamaña and utjaña indicates the importance of complementarity and its inseparability from communal flourishing in the constant production of cosmic balance. Chachawarmi is not separable in meaning and practice from utjaña; it is rather of a piece with it. Thus the destruction of chachawarmi is not compatible with suma qamaña. ⁸¹

Lugones was part of an intellectual and political community who were inspired and privileged by this political moment. Thus, we argue, ‘Toward a Decolonial Feminism’ should be read as not a model of decolonial feminism but rather a methodological cautionary tale.

Lugones makes explicit reference to the commitment to the specifically Aymara cosmology of sumaq qamaña. For a decolonizing project, this is curious because the Aymara are not the only or even the largest Indigenous group in Bolivia. In a move that is neither decolonial nor feminist, she does not question the power dynamics behind and within the Bolivian constitution, the government, and Indigenous movements and the consequences of these dynamics for the more than 30 recognized Bolivian Indigenous communities and their cosmologies.

Ironically, Lugones’s enthusiasm for the time and focus on the coloniality of gender distracts her from attending to other dynamics of the coloniality of power and the power of epistemology that they wield. Methodologically, she relies on an interlocutor whose privileged positionality in the political, economic, and epistemological landscape of the period is concealed by Lugones’s description. From the text, the reader can infer that the interlocutor, Filomena Miranda, is an Aymara woman living in an urban area but with strong ties to her rural community. Lugones leaves out other aspects of Miranda’s biography: she has a PhD in linguistics; she is a professor in the most prominent university in La Paz; Miranda is part of an Aymara research lab; she wrote a book about the meaning of chachawarmi. Miranda has the positionality to construct a new subjectivity. She is part of a movement of Aymara scholars that constructed and articulated Aymaridad and what it means to be Aymara. As intellectual elites, they are not subaltern but rather interpreters and authors of the cosmology that gets proposed as the Bolivian alternative to the colonial cosmology, one that is Indigenous and authentic.

Moreover, Miranda herself has a more nuanced understanding of chachawarmi than Lugones deploys. Written in Spanish, Miranda translates chachawarmi as hombre/mujer (man/woman) and specifies how chachawarmi varies by class. In Miranda’s understanding of the Aymara cosmology, the complementarity between men and women is for biological reproduction.^82,83 Thus, for Miranda (whom Lugones refers to as ‘Filomena’), the meaning of gender complementarity is not a radical reinterpretation of gender complementarity as Lugones suggests, ⁸⁴ but rather quite similar to the meaning it has in Lugones’s critical analysis of the European bourgeoisie:

The European bourgeois woman was not understood as his complement, but as someone who reproduced race and capital through her sexual purity, passivity, and being homebound in the service of the white, European, bourgeois man. ⁸⁵

Yet, even while Miranda has local intellectual authority, Lugones’s translation of Miranda’s interpretation of chachawarmi seems disconnected in politically and feminist ways from Miranda’s positionality and scholarship. In Miranda’s view, the woman in Aymaridad is weak and complementary in the sense that above and below are complementary. ⁸⁶

Counter to its feminist reclamation by Lugones, as Aymaridad has been used to reify as Indigenous what was, in fact, a (re)colonial hierarchy, in practice, chachawarmi has been used to silence women. When Indigenous women mobilize, many of their demands are framed in terms of nostalgia on the part of urban intellectuals for the idealized rural models of chachawarmi, Andean reciprocity, or ‘communal system’. ⁸⁷ This idealization of chachawarmi is also inspired by anthropological work from the 70s and 80s without reconsidering its application today.

In fact, the idea of complementarity relegates women to the private world while normalizing the presence of men in the public sphere. This reduction was achieved by praising the feminine attributes of women as healers and guardians of the culture. This problematic impact of chachawarmi on women and gender politics was captured by a participant in an Aymaran oral history project:

Women’s anonymity complements men’s visibility in the white world (Western, criollo, mestizo) through the legal and public things they do. Men are in a vulnerable position because they are active in the white world. The feminine silence is a practice of cultural self-defense to protect men from the dangers of being linked to the white world and by reproducing the cultural and moral values of the Aymaras. (THOA 1986) ⁸⁸

Seen in this light, chachawarmi is not particularly decolonial or feminist.

Moreover, as we discussed above, Filomena Miranda argued that chachawarmi is multiply gendered by class. ⁸⁹ Further, as Mamani Bernabé ⁹⁰ explains, the chachawarmi version of complementarity in which being a wife is the only legitimate role for adult women in the community is heteronormative. In Aymaridad, husband and wife become a single person, jaq’i and, in the community, the person is the husband. With this, the husband acquires absolute control over his personal property and that of his wife. ⁹¹

In Aymara communities, there is no exercise of authority between chachawarmi; only one person assumes the position of leadership and becomes responsible for managing public affairs. This person is usually the husband or a single man. Women can have this authority only when they are widowed. ⁹² Lugones, through Miranda’s recollection, description of a woman in power is one of a widowed.

In sum, Lugones’s reading of chachawarmi’s decolonial feminist is insufficiently decolonial in that it does not attend to the colonial and recolonial legacy of Aymaridad. It is insufficiently feminist in that it does not attend to the complexity of gender and gendered, classed, and raced power dynamics of chachawarmi.

To Conclude

In global decolonial politics generally, Indigenous communities have been excluded from power even within newly independent states. Bolivian Aymara elites are an exception: they had some power during the colonial period and through land redistribution and the reconstruction of Aymara identity, they have had significant political power in the post-colonial period. This power depends on hierarchies more than it overturns them. Feminist methodology recursively reveals those hierarchies, grounded in history, hidden through normalization, and insidiously reincarnated in contemporary local and international politics.

While critical of the recolonizing power of Aymaran epistemological reach, our findings do not negate the role of Indigenous values in Indigenous communities and in the broader decolonial project. Rather, they offer a cautionary tale with methodological implications for decolonial feminists, particularly those who, like Lugones and the co-authors of this article, cross many boundaries. They caution against the dangers of adopting constructed cosmologies without robust excavation of the power politics they reinstate. Discourses can be appropriated by political or economic elites to the detriment of resistant communities. Elites can claim control over the subjectivity/intersubjectivity reifying a (re)coloniality of power. This article is a call to stay vigilant to the multiple dimensions of power constructed and reconstructed even in the decolonizing landscape.