April 29, 2025
Based on nearly two years of immersive fieldwork, Visions of Transformation: Hegemony, Plurinationality, and Revolution in Bolivia, explores the relation between theoretical production and political practice. Through the contrasting perspectives of hegemony and plurinationality, Aaron Augsburger analyzes three specific conjunctural moments—a proposed highway through the TIPNIS, a conflict over representation of the highland Indigenous movement organization CONAMAQ, and the struggle for Indigenous autonomy—to shed light on the primary economic, social, political, and theoretical tensions at the heart of Bolivia’s proceso de cambio. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.
The sky is still black when we leave the house in the early morning hours of June 21, the winter solstice in the southern hemisphere. It is cold, below freezing, as a friend and I hail a taxi to El Alto. We are not sure exactly where we need to go, but, with a quick phone call, our cab driver helps us find the corner where we can catch a minibus at this early hour to Jesús de Machaca for the ritual celebration of Willkakuti, the Aymara New Year. Officially named a national holiday in 2009, the celebration is a ritual inviting Tata Inti, the sun god, to provide a bountiful harvest in the coming year through offerings of coca, alcohol, and a sacrificial llama. Critics have charged the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS, Movement Toward Socialism) government with mobilizing indigenous symbols and practices such as Willkakuti for political gain, which is certainly true, but it is also possible to read these ritual celebrations as expressions of the power, vitality, and continuing relevance of indigeneity in Bolivian society.
We arrive to the area just outside Jesús de Machaca, near the ruins of Qunqhu Wankani, about an hour before sunrise, to a crowd of people surrounding a large fire in celebration of Willkakuti 5523. Not nearly as popular as the celebration at the pre-Incan ruins of Tiwanaku, where thousands gather for Willkakuti, this gathering is one of the less prominent across the highlands and attendees number in the hundreds. As bottles of the local Bolivian spirit Singani and bags of coca are shared, we shiver and wait for the first rays of sunlight to creep over the horizon, bringing both a reprieve from the cold and a new year. Hands raise to the sky as the sun begins to appear, and cheers ring out while offerings are made to Tata Inti, to Pachamama (Mother Earth), to health, to land, to Qullasuyu, to Bolivia, even to hermano Evo. More than just a celestial ritual of rejuvenation, the celebration and its accompanying symbols are thoroughly embedded in and representative of the ongoing processes of political, social, and economic transformation. With these thoughts in mind, I ask those around me how Willkakuti relates to the ongoing changes under the government of Evo Morales and his MAS party. A few people express to me their ongoing hope that the attention Morales has brought to the country can bring more tourists to the half-buried ruins, whose weatherworn structures might both provide economic benefits and foster appreciation of precolonial indigenous history. “While these cultural ruins are buried, they are still present,” one man tells me. “We are different now, nowadays we live in different ways, but what you see in the dirt here gives us life. It is a history with knowledge, one that offers guidance.”
Additionally, as part of the day’s celebration, community members choose their leaders for the upcoming subnational elections. Demonstrating a particular vision of democratic responsibility and accountability, community members line up behind their chosen candidates in an open grass field for all to see. After the electoral proceedings, the party really gets underway, with music, dancing, drinking, and general merriment to usher in the Aymara machaq mara (new year), at the midpoint of the Gregorian calendar year.
Willkakuti is organized through indigenous symbols and ritual practice that point to a continuous indigenous history in what is today called Bolivia. Yet, despite this traditional underpinning, Willkakuti is interlaced and overlaid with any number of other, so-called modern symbols and practices. In its current form, the solstice celebration emerged in the late 1970s as part of a larger indigenous cultural revival, and its official recognition in 2009 symbolizes the continuation of that movement in a new phase. The ritual, at least at the local level, expresses the salience of a plurinational project that emerged around the same time as the current version of Willkakuti. At a larger national or international level, the ritual celebration also provides legitimacy for the MAS project of nation-state hegemony as one composed of indigenous worldviews and indigenous bodies. This ritual offers a contrasting set of social symbols and practices and, therefore, serves as a good representation for much of what I analyze and argue in this book. The juxtaposition of “tradition” and “modernity” in the particular ritual of Willkakuti, I believe, offers insight into Bolivia as a social and political formation, while also helping us interpret contemporary processes of change that have been underway since the beginning of the twenty-first century. With both the national tricolor Bolivian flag and the indigenous multicolored wiphala flying over the festivities, local modes of democratic practice and official electoral contests operating alongside one another, and temporalities based on indigenous and Western calendars occurring concurrently—this scene offers a vision of Bolivian society as a mosaic of contrasting yet overlapping political, social, and cultural forms that exist side by side yet express distinct historical trajectories and alternative visions of a future Bolivia. Yet, more than just symbolizing Bolivian society, the solstice celebration offers a theoretical and empirical point of entry for making sense of the ambiguous and contradictory process of social change in Bolivia during the era of Evo Morales.
Aaron Augsburger is an assistant professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies at the University of South Florida.