†Kristiyanu Timpu†

Tenderness

2010-09-03T20:35:00.008-04:00

Back home in the USA, poring over pictures of Bolivia, talking about it every time I am given the opportunity like a lovesick teenage girl talks incessantly about her boyfriend, writing up final reports and finishing up rudimentary organization of what seems like an endless river of data to analyze, I have no idea what to write here to tie together my experiences there. The idea of attempting a crude synthesis of my research findings is overwhelming, not to mention unwise. But nor do I feel prepared to synthesize how my past 5 ½ months in Bolivia has impacted my personal life. So I think the only thing I am left with is to choose just one aspect from amongst the complicated threads of my experience, which glitter, dangle and tangle like the foot-long fringe on my cholita paceña shawls. If I have to pick a color that captures something from all my shades of experience in these months, I will pick “tenderness.”

“Tender” (or “tierno”) is a word I heard a lot near the end of my time in Bolivia. People often used it to describe what they liked about me. For most purposes, I would translate it to “sweet” in English, in terms of the associations it conjures when used to describe a person. But in this case, I want to translate it literally, because the word “tender” doesn’t just connote someone who is kind, loving, and pleasant, as "sweet" does; it also connotes vulnerability, softness, and openness. When we are tender, we expose the true sweetness inside our hearts, sometimes at great risk of being hurt. With tenderness I think also of permeability, and I indeed felt like the membrane separating me from the outer world was thinner in Bolivia. I felt gushing pleasure to see friends enjoying the food I’d cooked; I would cry readily when I knew someone was hurting, even if I didn’t know them well; I would cry sometimes just watching the sunset reflecting off Mount Illimani and thinking about how I will leave here and loose all of this someday soon.

I am tempted to say that Bolivia has more tenderness than other places I’ve been, but I really don’t know if that’s true. I am not trying to make any sort of anthropologist’s cultural comparison here, nor even a travel writer’s questionable but entertaining generalization. I don’t even know if the unique, intense tenderness I felt in Bolivia has more to do with the attitude of the people receiving me or with my attitude arriving to Bolivia. Maybe it was just for the refreshing levity of high altitudes or for the peaceful lifestyle of a culture averse to punctuality, but for whatever reason, I felt more tenderness in Bolivia than I have at perhaps any other point in my life.

Even if this tenderness was my very own fabrication and transposition onto my experience in Bolivia, I don’t want to lose what it’s taught me. So I am attempting to immortalize it here, and hopefully to share it with a few of you whose hearts will feel more opened by it, too.

Yet in some ways I feel that all my words have been used up, from fervent, constant field note-taking and epic blog entries and, of course, my dialogues, discourses, and debates with Bolivian friends. To truly explain to you what tenderness in Bolivia means to me, I’d like to just sit down with you on stools and start cutting pumpkins and carrots into a big bowl on the floor, or grab your hand as we struggle up a steep sidewalk-stairway in La Paz, or sit silently and wait on a stoop for the sun go down, for the kids to come back from school, for the uka roots to dry out, for the seasons to change, maybe just for something we can’t even explain.

The next best thing, of course, is a picture or two. In this blog so far I haven’t done much of just letting the pictures talk, and I’ve been rather heavy-handed with the 1,000 words, so I will try, in this closing, to let the ineffable quality of the images speak as much as my words do, and hopefully leave you with a definition of some of the variegated meanings of tenderness that I have discovered in Bolivia.

To begin where proper homage is due, I can tell you of the tenderness of my research assistants as they learned, alongside me, to play anthropologist. In some moments they stumbled nervously through painfully stilted rehearsals of our interview questions, seeming to be pretending one of their closest friends was a talk show guest, but then in other moments they improvised follow-up questions with a sensitivity to analysis that rivals my own.

There is the tenderness of excitement over getting one's picture taken, as some of the participants in my Gender Equality and Leadership workshop during the National Methodist Youth Encounter demonstrate here. These pictures also reflect their excitement to learn, which I noted in the sincerely receptive, if disoriented, looks on the faces of certain young male participants most of all. But of course, mostly it's just about the excitement of getting one's picture taken.

Then there's this indefatigable joker of a young man who insisted that we appear together in a photo to document our collaborative whiteboard work during my workshop in Sucre. (Pictured here are lists of stereotypical traits of women and men in Bolivian culture that we generated.) He was undoubtedly one of those eager to participate in my workshop more for the photo ops with the gringa than for the wisdom to be acquired, but he was so comically straightforward about this fact that I had to love him.

There is the tenderness of building something together, even if it is just made out of tubes of paper and even if it is only the product of a cute object lesson about teamwork that will only stay standing until the end of the workshop.

There is the tenderness of being able to express some new and secret invented self with each other, which happened spontaneously when they gave away presents at a women's retreat of FEFEME coordinators and pastors' wives, and every time one of us went up to receive our gift-wrapped aguayo, we all chanted "She must model, she must model!" The idea wasn't to model any clothing, but rather to act like a model, to act like someone famous or glamorous for a delicious moment of abandon via caricature.

There is also the tenderness of wanting to indeed model what we wear, even if it is a devil costume and possibly contrary to all things Christian—a question Rober is still trying to settle for himself—because "it's an expression of our culture." One learns to just nod enthusiastically to this phrase, despite the diabolically critical post-modernist anthropologist on one's left shoulder muttering about how "culture" doesn't actually exist, and other vague and indecipherable sentences with words like "essentialism" and "reification" in them.

Then there is the tenderness one can find in the more acceptably Christian forms of cultural expression, but the tenderest part, of course, does not emerge when it is done as a show of Bolivianness or Christianness, but rather when the far-away look in her eyes or the perfect arcing trajectory of her hand as she sings convinces you that a deep love for something bigger than all of us truly is moving through her.

There is a certain kind of tenderness that comes out of sheer exhaustion, when that separating membrane you are encased in is worn thin by sleeplessness, fasting, and hard, hard climbing. You almost don't feel the weight digging into your shoulder when you take your turn carrying the cross, and you find at the top of the world that you have no choice but to open your heart to everyone around you, and when you start to pray you have to just let the tears sting your face and clog up your nose until you are dizzy from crying.

There is the tenderness of a certain friend I felt comfortable crying beside even in the absence of mountains to climb and even in the midst of the normalizing effects of regular nourishment. Sometimes I cried for her, or for her daughter that she struggles so much to take care of on her own, and sometimes I cried for me, and the roots of my own day-to-day pain. But more often than not we just giggled conspiratorially together behind her reception desk, because life is so funny.

I think I read something once evidencing to the idea that being around the same people all the time for five and a half months is bound to set off some sort of psychological coping mechanism that brings out their endearing traits for you, even if you have a love-hate relationship with some of them. Thus, I admit all bias on my part, but I must say, there was something about the tenderness of those kids in the hospedaje that just killed me sometimes. Even when they drove me crazy with their irresponsibility I forgave them immediately, because they all seemed to be trying so hard, and my heart softens around each memory I have of them.

The last night I spent with my research assistants, I felt like there was nothing to do or say that could put a satisfying, climactic cap on our time together, because so much of what it meant to be with them was just living out our daily lives together in the hospedaje, bumping into one another, joking with one another when we were feeling lively, sharing with one another when we had enough food, commiserating with and worrying about and complaining to and rejoicing with one another other. Going out for a paseo to a mirador (lookout point) and eating cake and api con buñuelo just wasn't the same as living together day after day, and it never will be. So in essence I was leaving behind those relationships forever, at least in the form they took while I was there. As we took photos up at the mirador that night with them, I remember distinctly this moment when I tilted my head and wanted to just stay frozen there forever, breathing in the smell of Rosmery's hair.

Finally, there is the tenderness of saying goodbye to an entire community you have come to love, who are even willing to make fools of themselves dancing with you, because it's your last night there.

In the end, of course, I simply have to face the limits of my verbal capacities: There are certain people I found in Bolivia that I will miss beyond what words can say. There is a tenderness they opened up in my heart that perhaps has always been there, but it took traveling thousands of miles to a place I'd never been and, up until about a year ago, never imagined going to bring this out in me.

God Bless Bolivia, this Motherland of My Love

2010-07-17T16:40:00.006-04:00

When I first got to Bolivia, I was tired by all the endless worship services with five or six hymns stuck between each prayer, each Bible reading, each sermon—in effect, what seemed to me like five or six hymns for each time someone coughed—but instead of growing more tired of it as my time here passes, I've started to like it. Now I'm the one who requests just one more hymn before we get to the sermon—the one where we "jump like lambs," please, because what is praising God without cheesy hand motions to accompany it? I also find myself walking down the street or washing my clothes and singing Bolivian hymns to myself, surprised to realize I can recite many from memory, because we've sung them so many damn times.

This is something that the Bolivian church does way better than the Methodist Church in my country. Back home, we have all these complicated hymns with perfect poetic meter and surprise half-step melodic changes, and we sing different ones every week, but I think the only thing I can sing from memory out of our Methodist Hymnal is "Amazing Grace." On the other hand, in the Bolivian church, sometimes it seems like we sing the same ten hymns every worship service, but I'll be darned if we don't sing them well. Plus, this repetition facilitates my ability to wander around my daily life in La Paz singing such inspirational motifs as: "Aunque un ejército acampe contra mi, no temerá mi corazón" ("Even if an army rises up against me, my heart won't be afraid"), and "Cristo te necesita para amar, para amar / Al amigo de siempre dale amor / Al que no te saluda dale amor / Al que vive a tu lado dale amor / Al que viene de lejos dale amor" ("Christ needs you to love, to love / Give love to the bosom buddy and to the one who doesn't greet you / Give love to the one who lives beside you and the one who comes from far away"), and of course, the anthemic: "Bendice Dios a Bolivia, esta patria de mi amor / pues ella sigue esperando un futuro promisor / En la montaña y el valle, la llanura tropical / El pueblo sufre y anhela justicia y libtertad" ("God bless Bolivia, this motherland of my love / because she is still awaiting a promising future / In the mountains and the valleys, in the tropical plains / the people suffer and long for justice and liberty").

My memory has become so friendly with these hymns, in fact, that it can even throw around a joke or two in their revered presence. Once, while we were cooking in the hospedaje kitchen, I was singing a hymn that goes, "Search for Christ, search for Christ, while you still have time, search for Christ" ("Busca a Cristo, busca a Cristo, mientras tengas tiempo, busca a Cristo"). Without thinking about it, however, I replaced one word and effectively made the line: "Search for Christ, search for Christ, when you have some extra time, search for Christ" ("Busca a Cristo, busca Cristo, cuando tengas tiempo, busca a Cristo"). I realized what I had done immediately after the words came out of my mouth, and after I straightened myself out from doubling over with laughter, I recovered my cool by explaining, "I've decided to invent a new form of evangelization: the Laid-Back Method."

That's another thing that Bolivia does better than my country. Laughter. I don't know what it is about me and Bolivia, but we crack each other up. A possible explanation that comes to mind, however, was articulated by the janitor at an advertising firm in Detroit where my brother once did in internship. Apparently this guy was always laughing heartily about everything, sometimes even for no apparent reason, and when my brother asked him once why this was, the jolly janitor offered simply, "Sometimes you just gotta laugh to keep from crying." Perhaps amidst the struggles, uncertainties and sorrows experienced in the poverty, political unrest and freezing altiplano nights of Bolivia, people have to become remarkably proficient in making life funny, or else they would drown in tears.

As they say, when in Bolivia, do as the Bolivians do, and I have taken the example of my hermanos and hermanas in the church to construct something of a comedy routine out of my daily life here, or at least learn to laugh at the ridiculous jams, pickles and other sorts of canned quandaries in which I find myself.

For example, a complicated string of misunderstandings started a joke going around that I was dating the national coordinator of the Federación de Juventud Metodista (FEJUME, Methodist Youth Federation), who we’ll call Hermano J. Consequently, because Hermano J. shares the name of the Bishop, it turned out I was dating the Bishop too, and had multiple boyfriends named J., until pretty much anyone who shares the magic name was a possible spare boyfriend on hand. Many have become keen on the idea of the Hermano J. and I, as they see that I need to find a Bolivian husband in order to definitively secure my eventual return to Bolivia. Others have doubts about Hermano J.’s ability to fill this job, however. On a long drive back from a youth encounter, in which I was squished between Hermano J. and Eddy in the backseat of a pick-up truck cab, the director of a church-owned high school counseled me: “You need a Bolivian husband, but you’d do best not to marry one of these two”—he gestured back to Hermano J. and Eddy—“they’re bien flojos (too lazy).”

“I know,” I said. “They haven’t even once taken me to the discoteca (dance club).”

At this, an indignant Hermano J. shot up from his sleepy stupor and proclaimed, “I’M NOT LAZY. I’M GOING TO TAKE YOU TO THE DISCOTECA.”

A few days later, the same director of the high school was seated across from me at a gigantic, elegant party thrown in honor of the birthdays of the Bishop, the National Director of Services, the National President of Laymen, and yours truly. Because of this, I was seated beside the Bishop in a row with the other birthday celebrants. The director of the school decided it would be a good time to ask me what the name of my boyfriend is. Hermano J. was seated too far away from me to make a good show of our farcical couple-hood, so for convenience’s sake, I turned to Bishop J., patted him lovingly on his stiffly padded suit coat shoulder, and said, “My boyfriend’s name is J., of course!” Inevitably, the dedication of a love song I sang to the Bishop followed. Then, after “biting the cake” (morder la torta) in that wonderful collision with copious amounts of frosting that Bolivians offer their birthday celebrants, everyone demanded a kiss in the glass-clanging style of wedding parties. Who am I to deny the people what they want? And aside from that, Bishop J.’s left cheek was lacking full frosting coverage.

One doesn’t always have to take the initiative in making a fool of oneself, however. Sometimes it happens by pure grace. Once, when standing in the church's accounting office, a young man I had met a couple times came in to talk to the accountant, Hermano E. The young man and I exchanged formalities, asking each other how we were doing. “I’m good,” I said, “but my legs are a little sore.”

“Oooh, have you been sinning?” he joked.

“No!" I said. "It's because I went to the church fast yesterday and hiked up a mountain for three hours. Besides, it’s not a sin, it’s a natural pleasure that we share as men and women.”

Hermano E. agreed. “It’s a gift from God, right?”

I laughed and said, “Exactly.” Then, having completed my business with an hermana who works in the office, I said I best be going, gathered up my things and moved to say goodbye to the young man who had come in. I bent over him where he was seated to give him the customary kiss on the cheek, and I had somehow forgotten that I had just unscrewed the top of my water bottle. And I promptly poured my water ALL OVER HIS CROTCH.

“Whoooaaaa!” said the young man.

“Funny, we were just talking about that!” said Hermano E.

“Ahm, can I just crawl under this desk here for a little bit until I am brave enough to face the world again?” said Sari.

However, I don’t always have to be the center of attention (i.e., the laughingstock of the Bolivian Methodist Evangelical Church) to find the humor in life, however. For me, seeing cholitas in their polleras kicking butt in a soccer game, even with those tiny, pointy-toed plastic shoes that they seem to have the inexhaustible endurance to walk around in everywhere, is enough novelty to make me giggle like a baby. Meanwhile, the sassy, bold tomboy gringa went to sleep in the bus, complaining meekly that I was exhausted from waking up at 3:00 in the morning. On the other hand, my dear FEFEME hermanas, who had gone to sleep even later and woken up even earlier, played a soccer match like real women.

But in my defense, now that I have bought my own pollera outfit, and worn it while leading gender workshops and participating in worship services all weekend long during the 17th National Methodist Youth Encounter in Bolivia, I know a thing or two about getting down to business de pollera. I don’t even have to be fully dressed to kick out some bad dance moves as a cholita paceña. In nothing but my petticoats and blouse, which kept riding up and exposing my faja (a, thick woven strip of cloth that cholitas wrap around their waist to diminish the strain of the heavy skirts on their hips), I demonstrated for Hermano J. and Hermana G. the dance I would perform during the youth encounter, to the “indigenous music” of my beloved Motown (namely, Diana Ross and the Supremes singing "You Can't Hurry Love").

And this is only with the four layers of petticoats that go under the pollera, not to mention the heavy, pleated pollera itself, the ornately beaded and fringed shawl, and the bowler hat that would top off my official performance as the first ever cholita-gringa-soul-music-dancer.

But I wouldn’t want to leave you with the impression that the National Youth Encounter, or any of my work here in Bolivia, is all just fun and games for me. I worked hard alongside Hermano J. and other FEJUME coordinators and helpers in an effort to pull this encounter off. And not simply to pull it off, or to boost our own egos and goals, but to make something bigger than us, something that might allow for God to enter and move amongst the youth gathered there in ways that our own, limited agendas couldn’t necessarily encompass. Thus, in the weeks leading up to the encounter, I would go down most days to the office of the hopelessly disorganized but very hard-working and devoted Hermano J. to lend a hand in the planning in various ways.

In particular, I took it upon myself to use my connections with Methodist Churches and friends and family back home to help fundraise for the encounter, as well helping with Hermano J.’s fundraising process in general. The inevitable worries that accompany fundraising were made much worse by a surprising (for me, anyway) lack of support from other national church authorities. Thus, while working towards the encounter, I was also going about trying to understand the politics of the situation, and in this process, heard and observed various things that left me painfully disillusioned with the church’s administrative structure, and with churches as institutions in general, being that I knew corrupt and callous tendencies amongst powerful authorities are not special defects only pertinent to the Bolivian Methodist Evangelical Church. One day, after some particularly disheartening conversations, I almost wanted to just throw in the towel. I knew I believed in and wanted to support the grassroots of the church, but the power-down structure just felt too overwhelming to handle. Honestly, I wanted to catch a plane back to Detroit and go visit my mommy in Ann Arbor, then go to church on Sunday and sing the impossibly complicated classical compositions from our hymnal, and afterwards go downstairs to eat carrot sticks and cantaloupe cubes with the delightful older ladies I always sit next to in the front pew.

But as they say here, ni modo, hay que seguir adelante (It doesn’t matter, you just have to keep moving forward). Even when I doubted internally, I remained unflagging in my reassurances to Hermano J. that we would bring this all together somehow, that God would take this encounter out of our hands and make it into what it needed to be. As my deeply spiritual godfather told me at one point during the preparations for the encounter: “The Lord will take a willing heart and use it in ways which cannot even be imagined. All that’s required is our ‘Yes’ answer—in advance.” And he was right. The help I received from my church, family and friends was overwhelming, and far more than I had even optimistically estimated we might receive. Combined with funds from the Methodist Church in Switzerland and the funds from the national church, we were able to pull of everything we’d planned, and it felt like a true miracle.

Yet the question for me throughout this whole process—even as I went out jogging in the mornings and dedicated prayers to the National Youth Encounter with each breath I took—was what, exactly, I thought this encounter "needed to be." I felt a deep commitment to it without even fully understanding why, and the same goes for the commitment I feel to the Bolivian church in general. The thing is, before coming to Bolivia, I was never even a big fan of the idea of “evangelization.” I am highly critical of the universal truth claims of Christianity, and the ways in which Christian evangelization has almost never been a politically neutral process. I’ve always said that the only thing I would want to evangelize is the idea that we all would be better off with spiritual practices and some sort of connection to the transcendent, but that I’m just as happy if you join a Buddhist order or become a whirling dervish in Turkey as if you start going to my church.

With that said, I do believe that authentic, sincere religious commitment as a community effort can have remarkable power on our lives and on the rest of the world. I also think that when the precepts and cultural context of a given religious community demand a more intentional and devout approach to spiritual cultivation, it has all the more transformative power. Because of the marginality of evangelical faiths (i.e., Protestantism) in the predominantly Catholic Bolivia, the members of such congregations, by default, enter through the “narrow gate” of religious commitment (“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” Matthew 7:13-14). In more New Age-friendly terms, we could put it something like this: spiritual cultivation ain’t no walk in the park. It requires a very intentional, disciplined dedication, which the majority of people don’t have the guts to take up. In this spirit, Bolivian evangelicals challenge themselves, as "Christians," to stand apart from your average partying, binge-drinking, promiscuous, nominally religious “Catholics” (which in this case really refers generally to anyone who’s not an evangelical Christian). And indeed, some of the practical and spiritual benefits of a more disciplined lifestyle and a more demanding commitment to God are evident in my Methodist brothers and sisters here. Yet I’ve also heard many times some variation of the lament, “I would expect that kind of treatment from some person in the street, but he/she is Christian; a brother/sister of the Church!” This evidences to the contrary: the rhetoric of a demanding, refining spiritual path doesn’t necessarily mean the average “Christian” is really any more spiritually developed than the average “Catholic.” Moreover, what will probably always discomfort me about the worldview of the Evangelicals here is that setting oneself “apart,” religiously speaking, can ultimately entail setting oneself and one’s religion above others, which a far too arrogant leap for me to make as a Christian.

Despite my liberal North American Protestant’s critical eye towards religious plurality, however, I’ve found myself investing a surprising amount of trust in the evangelical project here in Bolivia. I’ve found myself writing in a fundraising request letter things such as the following:

I have found amongst the youth [here] a passionate spirit directed toward the work of God, but…without a sense of support and fortification for the youth, and without effective, sensitive and passionate evangelization, the youth will disappear from the church. [This] means that in the end, the church itself will disappear, or if not, it will become a 'dead sect,' as our church's founder, John Wesley, wrote was his only true fear in terms of the destiny of the Methodist Church. From my perspective, [the National Youth Encounter] will be crucial in encouraging the unity and spiritual dedication of the youth of the church, and I have faith that in spite of the diminished support from the national authorities, in some way we will manage to carry out this encounter in a manner truly inspired by the Holy Spirit, and that the youth who come will be able to feel this and will return to their districts, their churches and their homes with this spiritual fortification.

Likewise, I kept praying on my morning jogs leading up to the encounter, “Lord, that you may truly transform the hearts of all the youth that come for the encounter, and that you may send them out into the world to manifest more of your love, your justice, and your hope all around them.” But what does this really mean? It sounds very pretty, but love, justice and hope aren’t anything without concrete actions to go with them. For example, love could be truly loving and learning from people who don’t share your religious orientation. Justice could be working for the equal dignity and equal rights of the gay community, even though many Christians would claim that God “abhors” their lifestyles. Hope could be serving as a beacon of acceptance and support for single mothers who are condemned for their sexual promiscuity. These are some of my conceptions of love, justice and hope that might not mesh with the conceptions of numerous brothers and sister in the faith here. So I have to ask myself, is the church really working towards what I believe in? On the other hand, how do I know what I believe in is right? Who or what forces will get the final say in the effect the Methodist Evangelical Church has on individual lives, on society, and on what we ambiguously refer to as “the work of God”? In the end, who wins?

For some leaders and members of the church, this is all blessedly clear. On the last day of the encounter, the national Pastor of Life and Mission preached a sermon designed to end with an invitation to all those who had not yet accepted Christ into their hearts to come down from the bleachers, come forward and kneel before a long line of pastors ready to pray with them and bless them as they go forth into the world born anew as Christians. This, for many present, was the ultimate goal of the whole encounter. But of course, as I watched the youth gather in droves before me, I had to wonder: Is this what I had in mind as the purpose of the encounter? Is this the radical transformation of their hearts that I had prayed for? Will they truly go home to their respective communities after this and dedicate themselves to creating more of God’s love, justice and hope in the world? Or is this just another conversion based on fear of not "running the race and reaching the goal," as the pastor preached, in order to enjoy eternal pie in the sky? Is this just another response to a shallow, feel-good God rather than the God that turns our lives upside down and shows us what being human and loving others truly means?

But then as I watched those kids kneeling down before their God, I remembered the one thing I do know: if we’re all running a race to try to figure out what God is, and to figure what we’re ultimately supposed to be reaching at the end, then the only one that can really win in this moment is God. Because God is the only one who knows. That's the beautifully equalizing force of Absolute Mystery. So what else could I do but stand up, bow my head, hold out my hands above the mass of kneeling figures, like the pastors and the charismatic woman who had been sitting beside was doing, and pray for those kids. I prayed that God truly had transformed their hearts, whatever that means. Which is to say, it’s not up to me what it means. It’s up to God.

I have learned a lot here in Bolivia about the eminent wisdom of offering all the mysteries of the universe up to a higher power. That’s another thing Bolivian Christians do better than us North Americans. They pray together like crazy. And it’s rarely the typical North American scenario of some pastorly figure reciting eloquent-sounding petitions aloud while everyone else bows their heads and silently agrees with the prayer, their only direct communication with God being something like, “Yeah, good idea. I second that.” No, when Bolivians really want to get down and do some praying, they let loose their tongues. They find their own words, their own worries, their own joys and passions, their own deep longings to voice. They sometimes drown out the voice of the supposed leader of the prayer, but even when they’re not loud, you can still hear and see many of them whispering to God, as if creating a little chamber out of their folded hands or their hunched shoulders, a little space in which God can slip in and listen just to them. It seems when this space is truly created, when there is a sense of entering some altered realm in which communication with God is fluid and personal, tears often flow from their eyes, streaking like rainwater down their faces and barely leaving any trace when they stop praying and stop crying in the same instant. In this space, one can desahogar (unleash) every bit of pain one carries, with the trust that God will collect it all in God's own cupped hands and make living water out of it.

When I first got here, I wondered about the different reasons that some people pray out loud (and loudly), while others pray softly but still speaking, and still others silently, and if perhaps the approach changes in different moments for different people. After having asked various people in interviews about their prayer lives, it seems that the common consensus is that even if one doesn’t pray aloud, for self-consciousness or laziness or whatever the case may be, it is still ideal to pray aloud. Why? My favorite answer came from a man I admire as a authentically spiritual, charismatic lay leader, who told me: “Why would you listen to the guy who’s leading the prayer when you’re supposed to be praying, too? It’s time for you to talk to God, not listen to someone else talking to God!” Well, gosh, that makes so much sense. Why didn't it occur to me before? Now, like the bad anthropologist I’m becoming, I don’t even try to listen and observe those around me when we pray. I just start talking away with God like the rest of them, and sometimes, I even cry those free flowing, freely given tears. There are some things that just make more sense to me here than they ever did “allá” (way off there) in my country. Now, when I sing, “God bless Bolivia, this Motherland of my love!” I am starting to really mean it.

The Vicissitudes of Gender Dialogues

2010-06-18T11:56:00.008-04:00

A question I have asked myself many times in these past three years full of photocopied hand-outs, take-home exams, research papers and ridiculous amounts of pages of all varieties: "Where does all this theory finally end, and practice begin?" I have certainly done things that feel like "practice" during this time, such as visiting a local mosque for an anthropology class, or giving the children's message for the Sunday service at my church, or hosting Bible studies and dream workshops at our "secular monastery" of Marlboro College. But instead of feeling like a real researcher, a real church leader, or a real workshop facilitator, I have felt like I am "practicing" in the clumsiest and most endearing sense of the word, and that those participing are kindly humoring me, like my parents and my friends' parents clapping wildly during a dress rehearsal.

I have hoped, of course, that at a certain point my practice will start to feel like the "real world"; perhaps a bit more like praxis, in the sense of gaining knowledge to transform my reality by way of my experience within and through that reality. Now, the moment in which I realized that this is exactly what I'm doing has arrived: at the end of May, I facilitated a gender workshop as part of the Mother's Day celebration of the district church of El Alto, in which approximately 75 women participated, about half of whom spoke little Spanish, and many of whom have struggled with such fundamental obstacles as illiteracy, monolingualism in a non-dominant language, lack of ability to exercise control over family planning, lack of adecuate health care, complete destitution after becoming widows, and physically abusive husbands. I'll admit I came home from this workshop feeling a little demoralized.
I was thinking especially of one of my closest female friend here, Hermana G., and her three-year-old daughter, who was been neglected and underfed by Hermana G.'s married sister while Hermana G. herself, as a single mother, has been making the long and expensive commute from El Alto to La Paz every day to work as the receptionist of the national church's office, and even then she hasn't really been making ends meet. A letter I wrote to a friend the evening I got home from the workshop in El Alto captures what was, for me, a less than triumphant arrival at the reality of "practice":

After I got back to my room, I took out my ukulele and sang that Tom Petty song, "Wildflowers," thinking about my friend G. and all the things I wanted for her: the love on her arm, the wildflowers, the boat sailing far away to somewhere she feels free, somewhere close to me. And I just started crying, because I was thinking about all the difficulties that the women I know here suffer with, and it's not something theoretical anymore, it's not like an anthropological study about "gender inequality," nor can I contemplate "injustice" and "oppression" and blah blah blah as interesting elements in an ethnography... Now it's something I see and I live every day with the women here, and I feel so powerless, and now I don't want to analyze anything, I just want to help. Which is to say, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed!

I guess the old adage "be careful what you wish for" applies here. Moving from theory to practice is famously bloody and messy for a reason: deepening our understanding also deepens our suffering, because when we start digging down to the tender, fragile heart of things, we have to recognize that suffering is an existential fact for all of us who breathe. At the same time, suffering is not the only thing we do when we breathe, and nor is the long-suffering indigenous Bolivian woman, isolated from the "enlightened" gender politics of "Western civilization" (whatever that means), the only image I could paint for you of the women I know here. Some of the women in the workshop, for example, gave fiery presentations after working in small groups to analyze women's suffering and how to transform it, in which they insisted in both Spanish and Aymara upon their ability—and even imperative—to do things that seemingly only men have the right to do.

In the rowdy competitions that followed lunch, other women proved their ability to peel a potato with a kitchen knife in 10 seconds flat, while maintaining the entire skin in tact as a superfluous bonus ability. Equally impressive and equally brief was a hair-braiding match, in which they not only had to braid one side of their long, thick black hair, but they also managed to incorporate the tullma that holds the braids together. Still others got up and rattled off a list of Bible verses, with reference numbers, that I would have been hard pressed to name just one of. One woman, a very young-looking cholita that fascinated me from a distance with a wry smile, a fire in her eyes and a baby boy at her breast, got up and sang the verse of a hymn in the most haunting warble I have ever heard, easily surpassing the eerie, ancient child-likeness of Joanna Newsom's voice.

What lifted my spirits most of all, however, was the gender dialogue we had the next day in the hospedaje, where my fellow female youth affirmed their refusal to live with domestic violence, or even partners who didn't respect them as equals. They insisted on not giving a damn about "el qué dirán" (fear of "the what-will-they-say" that seems to keep women here trapped in all kinds of ridiculously compromising positions), and on doing what makes them happy in life, above all. Near the outset of the dialogue, Hermana B., who is an odd bird of a Bolivian woman, raised by American missionaries after her parents gave up on her because of eye problems, and now the spunky and content single mother of the most delightful 8-month-old girl I've ever met, announced: "I don't want to focus on women's suffering and problems. I want to talk about what's good about women! I want to talk about solutions to these problems!" We finished with a plan to have informal dialogues to share our strength, along with the delicious coconut cookies of my panadero casero (my preferred baker up the street) every Saturday night. Hermana B. and others were enthusiastic about dragging along their women friends who were stuck on unworthy men, so that they would be inspired to value themselves more highly.

What gender rules would you like to break?

- Let's not be timid --> Let's be brave

- Let's not be submissive --> Let's have confidence in ourselves

- Let's not be dependent --> 50/50 with men

- Let's break the total authority of men --> Our opinion MATTERS!

- There shouldn't be any inequality in the labor of survival/reproduction

[Solutions]

- Bringing workshops to rural areas

- Talks, support groups and dialogues

- Campaigns for legal and psychological support

- Radio in rural areas

- Literacy [training] ([but] first workshops in self-esteem, [to encourage value of participating in literacy workshops])

- Talks for men [top priority]

- Integrated trainings [on gender equality] for teachers

We also finished with a satisfying whiteboard-list of gender norms we wish to transform or break, and concrete actions we could take to make these things happen. I found myself thinking: Why am I even leaving Bolivia? Why don't I just stay here and start working on radio campaigns to be disseminated through rural Aymara radio stations, and workshops for school teachers and church leaders on how to put gender equality into daily practice rather than just rhetoric and written policy? As you might suspect, I was soon reminded of why I am not ready to stay in Bolivia and Change the World: This is some complicated shit. I am 23 years old, with 3 years of undergraduate education under my belt, and I still have a heck of a lot more theory to learn and go along weaving into my practice. For example, what do I do with the fact that at every workshop I've facilitated, in almost every interview I've carried out, and even in many casual conversations I've had about gender inequality here, women cite the primary cause of gender inequality as women themselves? In the dialogue in the hospedaje, my assistant Rossío, along with Hermana B., insisted that the valiantly tolerant battered wife and sacrificed mother stays in such a situation and suffers not because it's actually better for her children, but because she wants to suffer. Other women have pointed out that mothers are often the most consistent and insistent inculcators of machismo in their sons, by the way they divide up household labor and discourage care-taking or sentimentality in boys. Still others have blamed women for men's dominance in public discourse, as women themselves willingly hand the reins over to the men, preferring not to risk saying something stupid in public, nor to push themselves to become better-educated or to develop leadership skills when men already seem to fill those roles just fine, thank you.

When I hear these things, I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place in terms of how to approach gender inequality. On the one hand, I know these assessments of women's own fault (and own choice) in perpetuating gender inequality are in many ways true, and I feel at a loss as to how to approach women who are fully complicit with the mechanisms of their oppression, or whether I should even be so presumptuous as to assume such women need liberating from their oppression in the first place. On the other hand, like the good post-modernist ivory-tower-dweller that I am, I know that oppressive structures maintain themselves through hegemony, which is to say, through convincing the masses of the naturalness and even goodness of their own dehumanization. In this sense, I wonder how to approach those women who blame their mothers, sisters and best friends for tolerating deplorable inequalities and mistreatment, when it is not so much a personal choice that these women have made as it is the result of a complex structure of power plays, psychological molding and unequal footing in struggles for basic survival needs. How do I convince these harsh critics of their own gender to walk the delicate line between challenging other women's complicity with gender inequality, and fruitlessly blaming the victim for all her problems? Moreover, how do I learn to walk that line?

But the biggest challenge, perhaps, is not with convincing women of whether, or how, to change their gender's position in society, but rather with involving men in this project. Blaming women for their own suffering is a temptingly clear and manageable analysis of their situation, but it takes (at least) two to dance the dance of inequality, and men's reinforcement of gender inequality, whether overt or subtle, conscious or unconscious, is just as important a factor to address. Furthermore, we can educate, empower, boost and support women all the live long day, but if nothing is done to shift men's perspectives and practices, women will keep running up against the same problems, as if we were building a house of sand too close to the sea during low tide and kept having to build it all over again every time the tide rises.

This is why I, as the good transplant into Andean culture that I am, have elaborated my research plans around doing everything in complementary gender pairs. After carrying out dialogues with the women in the hospedaje with the help of my two female research assistants, I turned with equal energy and attention to carrying out dialogues with the men, with the help of my two male research assistants. I wanted to carry this out in such a way that the men involved were challenged to think about their own participation in the mechanisms of gender inequality, and furthermore to think about how rigid gender roles limit their full self-expression as human beings. At the same time, I wanted them to feel they could speak honestly and freely about their perspectives, rather than feeling like they had to heap praise on women or on the project of gender equality. Thus, I decided to entrust Eddy and Rober with carrying out the dialogue without my presence, being that I imagined the fact of my having a vagina could produce an automatically hampering effect on the confianza between the men in the room. However, Eddy, Rober and I prepared the dialogue together, editing my explanations of concepts and theories, choosing Biblical readings to serve as parting points for discussion, and drawing up discussion questions and activities. I also gave the two a brief lesson in how to facilitate a dialogue according to my methodology. One morning on a national holiday, we managed to awake and drag down to the sala some eight or so of the hospedaje boys, and I set them to work dialoging while I washed my clothes in the sinks outside. As had happened with the women's dialogue, they couldn't finish all of it in the time allotted, and a night after their classes the next week, we dragged another similar-sized group to my room to complete the last reading and activity (though this time, dragging wasn't so much the imperative verb as sheepherding, which is the only way to describe the way I got them to move from the parking lot up the stairs to my room, with the help of a large woolen blanket I had wrapped around me to keep warm).

As might be expected from their reluctance to physically move their bodies to the space of the dialogue, the men weren't quite as enthusiastic or thoughtful in their responses as I would've liked. This past Saturday, I listened to the recordings of the dialogues just before a meeting with my research assistants to plan the final, co-ed dialogue the next day, and I felt more discouraged about my research than in any other moment here. Part of the problem, I realized, was my assistants' lack of understanding and ability to clarify the theoretical concepts they presented, which made me realize think it was perhaps a mistake that I decided not to be present. On the other hand, a factor that neither I nor my research assistants could control was that all of the men participating maintained an uncritical denial of the existence of any significant problems with gender inequality "hoy en día" (in this day and age).

As far as the conceptual misunderstandings went, at one point an activity asked the participants to reflect in examples of men they knew who had abused their position of privilege and advantage to discriminate against women. This seemed to be too big a concept for the boys to bite off and chew, so Eddy and Rober, bless their hearts, essentially simplified it to asking how men abuse their physical force against women, which needless to say did not return a very nuanced and critical representation of the mechanisms of gendered injustice, and it certainly did not offer any examples of gender inequality in which these basically good-kid evangelical Christian boys could recognize their own participation. At another point, the questions we had written were trying to get the participants to think about how they are, in fact, also limited and dehumanized by their gender roles. We had selected the Bible Reading in which Jesus washes his disciples' feet and another in which he professes the primary importance of servitude and humility in the spiritual path. The ensuing questions were designed to get the men thinking about what would change if they actually modeled themselves off of such behavior and teachings, which are rather quite feminine according to Bolivian cultural norms, as well as many cultures all over the world. However, instead of considering the fact that women are already the humble servants of church and society, most of the men in the dialogue came to the conclusion that if they all acted more like Jesus, they would set examples for the women to also take up such a noble task.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the dialogue was that when Eddy and Rober asked for examples of the differences between men and women according to this cultural context, most of the men failed even to elaborate such givens as women's place in the house and men's place at work, or women's sentimentality and men's stoicism. Most of them simply said, "Really, hoy en día, there is no difference between men and women. Women have all the same rights and can do all the same things men do." Being that I had just finished reading a laborious, 175-page sociological report on the gender breach in all aspects of Bolivian society, with indicators that women politicians are customarily sexually harassed so that they will be intimidated into stepping down from their position, that in the majority of couples it is the man who has control over family planning, and that seven of every ten women experience or have experienced violence in the home, this response on the part of my hermanos in the hospedaje made me want to bang my head against the wall. Nonetheless, I realize that the problem is a structural one; just as women who seem to choose to remain in a position of subordination and suffering can't be personally blamed for this choice, men can't be personally blamed for not examining critically and withdrawing from a system of inequality that composes the air they've simply always breathed. As I have become accustomed to pointing out, you'd be hard-pressed to find a man who wakes up in the morning and says, "You know what? I think I'm going to go out and oppress some women today!" (If you do happen to know such a man, please send him my way, because he would make a fascinating interview subject.) Nonetheless, even if it is no man's intention as such, the fact that even basically decent men engage in concrete actions and behaviors that serve to oppress women is undeniable, and must be addressed if we're going to move forward with this whole Changing the World and Bringing the Kingdom of God to Reign in the Here and Now project. Thus, my discouragement after listening to the men's gender dialogues wasn't so much that I had wanted to come out with certain responses or even a certain level of participation for the sake of my research, because my job as a researcher is just to watch everything happen however it happens and say, "How interesting. Men don't give a damn about gender inequality. How very interesting." The thing is, I really care about this place, this church, these women and these men. As idealistic as it may be, I want to see significant positive change unfold here in terms of gender roles, and I want to be a part of making it happen. As I have suggested previously in this blog, if I am involved in this context only to pick apart and analyze these people and write a good thesis about them, I've done little more than waste their time. I am here, above all, to live with these people, to grow with these people, and to help and learn mutually from each other.

Thus, I was honest with my research assistants about my deflation before the apathetic male contingent of our Methodist Hospedaje Center, but I wasn't mad. Eddy and Rosmery were my only two research assistants who were able to make it to the meeting on Saturday. They sat side by side on my bed, sleepy-eyed, serious and sweet, across from my weary, crestfallen form slumped in my desk chair. They suggested that the best thing to do at this point was postpone the final dialogue and do another one with the men, with better planning and the presence of a facilitator who could speak with more authority on the subject and was more used to leading things like this. Fortunately, later that same day, I convinced Hermano J., the national coordinator of the Federación de Juventud Metodista (FEJUME, the Methodist Youth Federation) to collaborate with us on preparing another dialogue for the men and to help Eddy and Rober facilitate it, which will hopefully solve the problem of needing a more experienced and leader-like presence without having to introduce the presence of any vaginas.

Now that I have recovered from my initial discouragement, I have realized it's also important to bear in mind that in the end, things like gender dialogues are just more rhetoric. The things that people say there, whether they are the kinds of things a gender studies student like myself likes to hear or loathes to hear, are not necessarily direct transmissions of the complex realities people live. Granted, dialogues can certainly help elaborate and clarify cultural ideals, and they can also help concientizar the participants and thus eventually change practices and entire realities. Nevertheless, the most significant factor is how we, as men and women, actually relate to each other on a day-to-day basis, and how we might implement change into habits that seem as old as time. As Eddy is always saying, "Gender inequality comes from antes (before), from our ancestors, from the way it's always been." Whether or not it's true that this is the way it's "always been," it's certainly true that it feels like it's always been this way. But stereotypes, social structures and cultural norms aren't people. People are much more mercurial, quirky, adaptable and ultimately joyful in their daily lives. Maybe gender theorists would have much to say about how the woman in El Alto who won the potato-peeling contest is seriously, tragically limited to only being able to find her worth in menial domestic tasks, but that devilish grin on her face as she stripped that potato naked and let a perfect, continuous spiral of skin drop to the ground was enough to convince me that she genuinely does find joy in her everyday potato-peeling life.

Thus, setting up columns, charts and theses in the style of the sociological study I read, to compare the differences between men's and women's opinions as voiced in a gender dialogue is only a tiny part of the story of how they relate to each other, love each other and infuriate each other "in this day and age." This is why I am so interested in courtship, romantic relationships, and marriage among the church youth (apart from the topic being obviously befitting of such an unmarried, overdramatic and helplessly flirtatious young lady as myself). Of course, these concrete interactions are much harder to analyze articulately than are the opinions expressed in a dialogue or the solidified experiences, already lived and transformed into cohesive little stories like lucky charms on a chain, that people are willing to share with me in interviews. From my observations of romance and courtship here, which I am always somehow emotionally invested in, since I am only privy to those experiences of the people closest to me, I seem to come away only with more hardened, silvery little charms for my own chain. For example:

Providing the lyrics of "Sea of Love" to Eddy so that he can send the girl he is in love with a cryptic text message in English, then teaching his sharp, linguistically-apt tongue to sing the song itself as we wait wrapped in wool blankets against the bitter cold night at the corner of a desolate highway and a dirt road, hoping for a truck to appear to take us to the pueblo of said girl for a youth encounter.
The mock fights, flirtatious jokes and reciprocal food-sharing that transpires between boys and girls in the kitchen, and the boys shaking their heads and saying, "It's more the men who cook these days," while the girls come down once in awhile with their bags of potatoes from their pueblos and giggle secrets amongst themselves.

The now-predictable custom of stealing a girl's cell phone to rile her up, snoop around in her text messages, and provoke an entirely welcome wrestling match in order for her to retrieve it.

The all-to-obvious clothes-washing strategy, in which you pass by the object of your affection washing his or her clothes at the sinks outside, and you suddenly remember that you really ought to get to washing your own clothes too, and when you reappear with your bundle, the object of your affection obligingly pushes his or her clothes out of the way so that you can share between you the two sinks, the cold water and the questions about what you like and who you are.

Meanwhile, the older women in their little makeshift church kitchens keep peeling away at their potatoes, dishing out heaping plates of potatoes, ch'uño, rice and meat, and trying to marry me off to their sons, then laughing and laughing when I finally tell them that I'm 23 years old and I really don't think a 15-year-old boy is a suitable marriage choice for me.

Birthdays, Deathdays, and the Stuff of Life

2010-05-15T20:04:00.032-04:00

If you know me even just a little bit, you probably know that I love Getting Things Done. This certainly helps to explain how I found a volunteer position through a crapshoot email contact with a stranger that has enabled me to live in Bolivia for five months with the foolhardy aim of doing Master’s-level research work as an undergraduate student, after having become fluent in written academic Spanish and colloquial Andean Spanish in a crash-course period of three years. I make this all sound very exciting, but on the flip side, my obsession with accomplishing said “things” can lead me to a life that is as tediously abstract as the word “things” itself. I have been known to pass up vibrant parties to finish a writing project a day early (thus, theoretically, freeing me up to do even more Things than I would’ve done otherwise). I also spent at least two of the past three years refusing to watch any movie that wasn’t in Spanish, because I reasoned that I simply didn’t have time if my language skills weren’t also to benefit in the process. At home on breaks from school, I sometimes barely see dearly missed friends because I am too busy studying in between other “side projects,” like recording my second album.

But life is not made up of abstract Things to Get Done. As much as I might try to convince myself otherwise, the important things in life are vibrantly, viscerally concrete. For example, sharing peanut-butter-and-apple-slice sandwiches with my friends on an overcrowded bus from La Paz to Ancoraimes. Or watching the college classrooms across from my window light up in the evening and waiting for one of my research assistants to come to the window and jump up and down as he tries to get my attention. Or offering my eternally chilly hands to get warmed up between Hermana M.’s eternally warm, soft and motherly ones. Or arguing with a refresco vendor about whether or not I’ve paid her yet and realizing I’ve become one of those uppity Americans who doesn’t want to be cheated out of what translates to a few dimes for me. Or finding a sad love note dirtied under feet on the sidewalk. Or missing my mother on the US Mother’s Day. Or feeling complete as I run up to Mirador Montículo where the tall buildings fall away to reveal jaggedly carved stone mountain ranges that look so close I imagine I can stroke their contours. And finally, knowing that all of this could be taken away, indeed all of it will be taken away, in the blink of an eye, by that one task that every person on earth accomplishes completely, if not voluntarily: death.

If I was at risk of forgetting these important concretes of life, last week has provided a heartbreakingly sweet and, at times, just plain heartbreaking reminder. I was flying at the beginning of last week, veritably shining in my specialty of Getting Things Done. On Monday evening I wrote a brief paper on doing anthropological participant-observation, outlining several tools and approaches I saw as particularly useful for doing anthropology as a native of a cultural context. Over a lunch meeting on Tuesday, I presented these ideas to my five native-anthropologists-in-the-making, and tried to get them to generate their own ideas about things they will find noteworthy and challenges they will encounter in doing participant observation. I gave them each a copy of my paper on methodology and a thick notebook with hardcover binding carrying their name and the words “Cuaderno de Investigación (Research Notebook)” markered on to the cover of each. With these tools in hand, I sent them off to try their hand at participant observation in an event or situation in which they found themselves amongst other Methodists during the week.

Three of my research assistants already had the perfect opportunity to carry out this initial assignment and dive headlong into playing anthropologist, as we were planning to travel together to a weekend-long workshop on evangelization and church leadership for youth leaders from around the country. In an impressive group effort, my research assistants and I gathered at 10:30 the night before our departure to generate ideas for the design of a brief interview on gender and youth to administer to young men and women at the weekend training. We managed to generate more than enough questions and decide on a basic organizational approach without me dropping to sleep right there on the couch, and the next morning I woke up early and immediately got to work typing up, prioritizing and categorizing the questions into a user-friendly interview instrument. I dashed around getting some promised road food together for the trip and going to a printing and copying shop to get copies of the interview instrument made. In the midst of our whirlwind to get ready and leave, which included packing up a copious amount of wool blankets to make our beds on straw mats during the chilly nights of the rural altiplano, we heard there had been some sort of auto accident in which some people from the church were involved. We saw the daughter of the national secretary of finances crying with worry and being comforted by another hospedaje student, because the secretary of finances and his wife were, apparently, involved. Clear details were not forthcoming. Just before we headed out the gate of the hospedaje, an hermana arrived and was talking with the guard hermana of the hospedaje, and we heard the woman vaguely mention something about death, but then she waved us on encouragingly, and we set out for the pueblo of Ancoraimes. En route, we practiced giving each other the interview and recording it both with notes and with the digital recorder. Afterwards, as we settled back in our seats and Eddy excitedly pointed out landmarks as we neared and passed his own pueblo, I felt like we had just pulled off the most effective last-minute research designing and training on record. I expected to return home with the fruits of our labor, inspired and stimulated to dive deeper into our research.

God, however, had other plans than for us to Get Things Done last weekend. We arrived in Ancoraimes past dark, and a bitter wind was whipping through my thin hoodie as we stood in the deserted town plaza, unsure of the exact location of the district church’s headquarters. After a bit of wandering and worry, we stumbled upon a big garage-type gate with “Iglesia Evangélica Metodista” stenciled on to it, and I peeked in through the hole to see a large yard covered in grass like windblown hair, and in the distance, a big farmhouse glowing with warmth. We banged on the gate and called out for a few minutes before someone came to show us the way in. Rather than a whole crew of young church leaders, pastors and coordinators, however, a lone, middle-aged hermana dressed de pollera greeted us at the door. We stepped into a mostly barren living room with wide, clean old floorboards, an empty fireplace and a set of loveseats and a couch in the center. Seeing the blank confusion on our faces as we looked around the room, the hermana told us that everyone else had returned to La Paz already. When we informed her that’s where we had just come from, she asked us why we hadn’t heard about the accident. We had, of course, but we hadn’t heard what she was about to tell us: that two beloved members of the church had died in it. One, Pastor G., was the national coordinator of Liturgy and Communications, and pastor of four churches (on a rotating basis) in El Alto. Another, who I hadn’t met, was a young man from Oruro who led a Christian praise band and, as I found out that evening, had left behind a wife and a three-year-old son. Aside from that, the national secretary of finances’ wife and the younger sister of the deceased orureño were seriously injured, and the national secretary of finances himself, who was driving, sustained minor injuries. A sixth passenger, another young man from Oruro, came out with only a few scrapes and scratches.

My three research assistants and I were all a little paralyzed as we stood on those clean-scrubbed wooden floorboards with our backpacks and the suitcase full of blankets that now seemed somehow useless to me. I was automatically placed in the position of leader, decision-maker and spokesperson for the four of us. All I could offer in response to their queries about our decision to depart for Ancoraimes was, “We had heard about it when we left, but we hadn’t understood well the details. It was very confusing. We though the best thing to do was just to leave.” Rosmery offered, “No sabíamos que era tan grave” (“We didn’t know it was so bad”), which henceforth became something of a mantra for her as the night wore on.

A local pastor and another church hermano came in to greet us as well, and they and the hermana helpfully directed us, in our state of mild shock, to sit down on the couch and loveseats. We mulled briefly over whether we should just run back to the town square and try to catch the last movilidad (vehicle) back to La Paz, which they said usually left at 8:00. We determined that it was too dangerous to be traveling at night, however, and after consulting with me, the pastor and hermano decided we could stay in a guestroom with several bunk beds in the local hospital, rather than the traditional straw-mats-on-the-floor arrangement of big church encounters. We planned to wake up before dawn and take the 6:00 movilidad back home.

We sat mostly in silence as we waited for our cedar mate to be boiled and brought to us sweetened and accompanied with a piece of bread each. Eddy was the quietest of all. He pulled his baseball cap over his eyes as if he might be trying to hide tears. Amalia, seated at his side, grew uncomfortable with this gesture after awhile and jiggled his knee, saying, “Come on, don’t be sad, Eddy!” Rosmery, along with repeating her “No sabíamos que era tan grave” line, as if it were some kind of repentance for our heedlessness, asked questions about the accident, trying to get details that they mostly didn’t have. She also commented on the tragedy of the young orureño’s death, as she is from the department of Oruro and knows him, and his wife and child. I sat looking down at the worn, well-swept wood floor and thinking about how ridiculously fragile our human lives are, with tears welling up in my eyes every few minutes.

The pastor, for his part, kept trying to call his wife on her cell phone, because, as he explained, she was supposed to be home by now, and “when these sorts of things happen, you get to worrying.” But she arrived safe and sound, with their two-year-old daughter in tow. Shortly after arriving, the little girl walked over to her father, clasped his knees, and looked up into his face if she did know that it was “tan grave.” He picked her up and kissed her forehead and stroked her hair for quite awhile, because he, too, knew the graveness of this situation called life, which is so quickly and so easily followed by one called death.

This pastor was joined by another, somewhat older local pastor, and the two sat with us in the living room and tried to lighten the mood. They talked about other things, and attempted jokes. These efforts only started succeeding when they asked me about where I was from and what I was doing here. My foreignness, juxtaposed with my comfort with the language and sense of humor of Bolivian culture, is a constant source of amusement and fascination for my Bolivian brothers and sisters. By the time we finished our tea and bread and I announced that it was time for us to be getting to bed, we had more or less absorbed the fact of the accident, and we conversed light-heartedly with the pastors, who lead us through town to our appointed sleeping quarters, trying to learn how to pronounce and spell my name most of the way there. Meanwhile, Eddy bravely continued to drag the gigantic and half-broken roller suitcase full of blankets behind him across the bumpy streets, in the freezing cold, without gloves, despite various offers to relieve him of the duty he had designated for himself that day.

We awoke the next morning to more bitter cold and rode home with barely anything to eat or drink until we got back to La Paz, but we somehow managed to enjoy each other’s company anyway. We evenly distributed a meager leftover supply of drinking water, bananas and havas tostadas (fava beans I had fried in oil and salt the day before). We also held a surprisingly eventful tic-tac-toe match, and we enjoyed Eddy’s less than scientific—or psychic, for that matter—palm reading. As is commonly the case, experiencing a tragedy together seemed to have bound us to each other in a unique way.

I spent almost the entirety of the next two days processing Pastor G.’s death, too distracted or sad to even keep up with my field notes. I have been pondering how to describe Pastor G. here, because I don’t want to fall into the temptation of painting a grandiose picture of a man of monumentally loving, brave, and wise proportions, just because he’s gone and everybody misses him. I honestly didn’t know Pastor G. all that well, and he may have disappointed me had I known him better. As everyone does. Perhaps he thoughtlessly threw litter out the car window, or only gave money to beggars to boost his public image, or had a double sexual standard for his teenage daughters as opposed to his teenage son. I don’t know. But the man I did know was humble, soft-spoken, and always seemed genuinely concerned for the welfare of those around him. He would accompany the FEFEME hermanas at the last minute when they were delegated to attend church encounters, if they wanted him along for the extra support and perspective. He came across as timid and somewhat serious, but he was actually pretty keen on playful banter, and even forgave me—after he finished blushing—for once jokingly suggesting that he had multiple wives in different houses. Pastor G. was also one of the first people whose hands I shook in Bolivia. He was waiting at the airport with the FEFEME hermanas when I arrived, and on our winding drive down to the Methodist Hospedaje Center that morning, he offered me little insights on the church, La Paz, and Bolivia’s current government. The last time I saw Pastor G., I had stopped into his office to ask him about getting a copy of the book on the history of the Bolivian Methodist church that his colleague, Pastor D., wrote and to which Pastor G. contributed as a researcher. “That is the official story,” Pastor G. told me. “The documents, the records, the decisions that were made. But what it doesn’t say is how those decisions affected the people. It doesn’t have testimonies of peoples’ faith. That is what we need more of,” he affirmed. I thought, “This guy knows his stuff. I should come back and talk to him more about the church.” But now, of course, that’s a conversation I’ll never have.

Fragmented and mildly fond memories are all I am left with from my brief acquaintance with Pastor G. But in this sense, I am lucky. For many others, the memories are complete, continuous, and painfully dear to them. I snapped this photo of him as we were getting ready for the Easter march of the Methodist Churches of El Alto, and I had sent it to Hermana J., one of the FEFEME leaders, along with several others after the march. When I went to visit the FEFEME hermanas in their office earlier this week, Hermana J. was sitting glued to the computer screen as other business went on around her, meticulously examining this same photo. She zoomed in on Pastor G.’s face, his scarf, his notebook, his pant leg, as if by getting close enough to each part of his person, she could move through the pixels on the screen and move through time and space itself to touch him, to feel his real presence there. It was one of the most heartbreaking expressions of longing that I have ever witnessed.

Outside the FEFEME office, the receptionist of the building, who I have become somewhat close friends with, told me that things were sad around there, because they are all so used to having Pastor G. around. She explained how he would always come through smiling and asking how she was, and sometimes he would have so much on his mind that he would run into the door she was in charge of buzzing open, then he would have to turn back sheepishly and ask her to open it. Hermana G. was not only familiar with him at the office, but he was also the pastor of her church in El Alto. As her eyes welled up with tears remembering her daily interactions with Pastor G., I remembered seeing her at his burial service last Sunday. After they finally lowered the coffin into the grave, after many speeches, many songs, and much chewing of coca leaves and consumption of puffed corn and lemon sodas, we all began ripping flowers from the abundant wreaths and bouquets to fill his grave with them. I watched Hermana G. and several other women from his churches sobbing with belly-aching intensity as they threw fistfuls of red, pink and yellow petals into Pastor G.’s grave, and I couldn’t help but start weeping, too. The same was true when I had been standing outside the cemetery walls earlier, and saw Pastor G.’s wife and three daughters ushered outside as they wailed with sorrow and held black shawls around their heads. They were lead to a wall to lean against as they sobbed, and then they sat down outside the cemetery amongst other women and remained there for the rest of the ceremony, as if it were too much for them to be so near his ceremonial parting.

How on earth do we humans move on after losing someone as important to us as a husband, a father, a brother? I suppose most of us are able to and do perform such a feat, since most of us lose someone dear—or many dear ones—in the course of our lives. Still, I’ve yet to experience such a devastating loss, and it’s hard for me to wrap my mind around it. Perhaps this is why I came home from the burial on Sunday night with a splitting headache and stomachache to match my heartache. I went down to the kitchen to heat myself up my first decent meal of the day (which I suppose probably also had something to do with my physical state), and every time I dropped something or the match went out before I could light the burner, I swore profusely in English, and then told the two boys that were also cooking down there never to repeat what I was saying. I lamented aloud that no one was going to remember my birthday tomorrow; I was even having a hard time remembering it was my birthday tomorrow. I didn’t feel up to celebrating my 23^rdyear of life with the sort of joy and zest that it probably deserved.

But somehow, joy found its way to me, to remind me that the reason I’m still alive is precisely to enjoy the fact that I, and countless of my beloveds, are still alive. I was awoken at 7:00 in the morning with a hearty, enthusiastic and out-of-tune serenade outside my door. I opened it to find perhaps half the students from the hospedaje, and the hospedaje caretaker, clapping and singing away in the hall, accompanied by the one boy who plays decent guitar. In the pants I’d put on backwards and my groggy morning breath, I danced a cueca with one of my male friends, replacing the customary white handkerchiefs with white napkins (napkins and toilet paper, in my experience, are in fact the de facto custom for this dance, since white handkerchiefs don’t seem to be on hand as often). Then we danced a huayño, adding into the dance the sassy and sweet single mother who lives in the hospedaje under the auspices of her American missionary godfather. I didn’t even care that they had woken me up early, because it felt good to be awake, and alive.

The hospedaje caretaker warned me at the end of the serenade that this was only the beginning of the fun, and even then I underestimated what exactly they had in store for me for later. I was, typically, nervous that if I didn’t do things to make my birthday special, nobody else would either. Furthermore, the FEFEME hermanas had called me to wish me a happy birthday but also to apologize that the promised cake they had planned to push my face into (a charmingly messy Bolivian custom) would have to be delayed since they were so busy with taking care of the practical follow-up from Pastor G.’s death. But my friends at the hospedaje, less directly impacted by the tragedies of the weekend, did not fail to deliver. After all the students had gotten back from their classes at 10:15 that night, I heard all kinds of commotion in the downstairs sala, and eventually wandered in to find balloons, ribbons, a table full of cake, candy, popcorn and other delights, and a poster they were still fervently finishing up that included the rather impressive artistic attempts and personal messages of almost all the students in the hospedaje.

An inordinate amount (for me) of sugar consumption ensued, and this was followed by an attempt to “teach” my Bolivian contemporaries to dance to soul music. Despite what I take to be the universal infectiousness of the Jackson 5 and the Temptations, and despite my continued attempts to convince them that there was really nothing to teach them—no specific steps or moves, that they just had to “feel it” and dance “a su manera” (in their own way)—they were understandably trepidatious about joining me in my wild arm-flailing and hip-gyrating. Later, we put on Bolivian folkloric music and they had their chance to embarrass me as they tried to teach me the morenada and the tinku. Finally, as if drawing up a sort of compromise, the DJs motioned me over to the stereo and said, “Why don’t we play cumbia? Everyone loves cumbia!” It’s true. Cumbia, even more so, I would argue, than salsa and merengue, is a sort of universal dance language, at least for anyone at all familiar with Latin American cultures.

My favorite part of the evening, however, was when I was dead tired (at the inappropriately early hour of 12:00, my friends all complained) and went into the kitchen to wipe some cake frosting off my sweater before, hopefully, escaping up to my room. There I found Eddy and M., who was the one playing the guitar this morning, and they were singing huayños. Eddy grabbed me and spun me around to the slow foot-stomping huayño rhythm, singing along to the perfectly appropriate words: “¿Qué la voy a hacer a esa mujer? La voy a matar, ¡la voy a matar!” (“What am I going to do with that woman? I’m going to kill her, I’m going to kill her!”) This somehow created enough energy in me to dance to a couple more of our private huayños intoning death on my birthday.

Afterwards, I went up to my room with my hands full of poster, a couple odd gifts and cards, and cake and other leftover snacks. I felt very happy to be alive, and very accomplished for having been in this world for 23 years now. Just Being Here, I thought, is more important than Getting Things Done. And despite my usually morbid sense of humor and my habit of casually reminding everyone that I could, possibly, die any day now (I even updated my will, which I originally wrote when I was 16, before leaving for Bolivia), I do have to agree with the wish constantly repeated to me throughout the day of my birthday here in Bolivia: that I complete many, many more years of life here on this earth.

Stones Speak Louder Than Words

2010-05-02T16:48:00.016-04:00

I found a petoskey stone in the pocket of my orange hoodie the other day. I had been rubbing it absentmindedly between my fingers for the past couple months, without remembering where it came from or taking it out to look at it. When I finally did, I felt my heart break a little bit for those perfect starburst lines radiating from dark centers and ending at the outlines of imperfectly round white flowers, and I remembered that the seamstress who lives across the backyard of my mother's house had given me a petoskey stone the day before I left for Bolivia. She had just gotten through shortening the strap on the shoulder bag that was to become my constant companion here in La Paz, and she pressed the stone into my palm and said: "So that you don't forget where you come from."

A wise move. Sometimes, I almost forget. I am surprisingly comfortable with many of the details of everyday life here: I skip down the long, smooth stone steps of Landaeta or Aspiazu and forget that sidewalks—and streets!—don't eventually become stairs everywhere. I duck into the cool underground market on Sanchez Lima and stop by each of my preferred vendors, getting their attention by calling out "¡Caserita!" ("My dear vendor!") and asking for havas (fava beans), camote (sweet potato, which hides a beautiful magenta color just beneath its skin), mangas (a hybrid mango, which is larger and has a meatier texture), plátanos de postre ("dessert bananas," which is to say, plantains), ají panka (a spicy red chili paste used in small amounts in entrees), and, if I am feeling extravegant, perhaps some lomo (literally, "back"—in this case, of a cow) or cold cut slices of jamón. I run out in front of oncoming traffic and avoid being plowed over by just a few moments, or else I would never be able to cross the street. I set aside entire afternoons to wash my clothes, donning a wide-brimmed hat and carrying my socks and underwear and sheets down to the sinks in the yard to soak them in powdered detergent and scrub the dirt out of them with a bristly brush, then rinse and ring everything three times. If I'm lucky, the scorching sun will still be out when I hang my sheets up, in which case they dry in ten or fifteen minutes. I braid my hair almost every day because it is more practical, and more modest, than wearing it loose. I have gotten used to coming over to someone when they blink their eyes at me from across a room, in a tasteful gesture that replaces our brutish American use of hands or entire arms to motion someone towards us. I have also gotten used to kissing almost all Aymara women over 40 on the lips when I encounter them. I wake up and fill my electric water heater to boil drinking water for the day. I never throw toilet paper in the toilet itself.

Yet in spite of how familiar the strange has become for me, I am still, essentially, a stranger here. There are so many little gestures, implied consequences beneath circuitous speech, motivations and logical connections that I know I don't understand. So just imagine all the things I don't know I don't understand! This is one of the reasons I have decided to involve "natives" in my research as much as possible at every step of the process, not only as well-respected informants, but as workshop designers, dialogue facilitators, interview question writers, interviewers, and participant-observers. Over the past week, I have gone through the process of soliciting and hiring five research assistants from amongst the students in the Methodist hospedaje I live in, and in my hiring interviews with each of them, I made it clear that in this project, I wanted their own ideas to shape the questions we ask, and for us to ultimately arrive at their own conclusions about the problems, solutions, and complexities of gender in the Methodist Evangelical Church, above all amongst young people like themselves. My job, I told them, is to facilitate this process and get out of the way as much as possible, then represent your perspectives as faithfully as possible in my thesis. Furthermore, I promised them that I would not simply take their ideas with me to the United States for the benefit of my own academic accolades, never to be heard from again. Rather, I promised them that I would return, sooner or later, with my thesis in hand, translated into Spanish, and I would present it to the church for its own use. And who knows, I might come back as missionary and stay awhile, continuing to collaborate in the facilitation of dialogue and auto-analysis in the church.

I'm a woman who keeps her word, so I guess there's no backing out now. Before I left for Bolivia, I was reading the autobiography of Domitila Barrios de Chungara, a Bolivian miner's wife who was a leader in the Syndical Federation of Bolivian Mine Workers (FSTMB) and the associated Housewives' Committee (Comité de Amas de Casa). In a conversation she had after the sociologist she dictated the book to, after it had been published—which formed an introduction to the edition I read—she was clear about what she thought should be done with academic representations of the people of her country; that is, what exactly such research is for in the first place. She explained:

I've been interviewed by hundreds of reporters, historians, lots of people... [and] anthropologists, sociologists and economists come to visit the rest of the country, to study. But of all those materials that they take away with them, very few have returned to the heart of my [economic] class, of my people... I think that the movies, documents and studies that they make about the reality of the Bolivian people should return to [us]...so that we can analyze them, criticize them. Otherwise, we'll stay the same, without any contribution that helps us to understand our reality better and solve our problems (p. 9, my translation from the Spanish).

The moment that I read these words, I knew that I had to make it a constant and central aim in my research in Bolivia to emerge with a study that would not only please my professors, my outside examiner and perhaps other members of the academic community, but rather one that could, indeed, be presented to my very research subjects themselves. I realized that it had to represent them in a way that they themselves would want to be represented, and that if this wasn't the case, I would be nothing more than the "literary wetback" that anthropologist Ruth Behar feared she was being by taking a Mexican woman's story across the border and turning it into a book that won her respect and popularity as an academic and writer in the US. In my opinion, the resulting book, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border With Esperanza's Story, proves Behar's fears to be well-founded: while it resulted in all kinds of benefits for Behar and the rest of the North American academic community, the originator of this rich material did not see such benefits in her own life from having shared it. However, the same could be said for probably the vast majority of anthropologists in the US, and I'm not so sure I'll manage to exclude myself from this group.

My ideal of remaining faithful to how my research subjects would represent themselves is also a product of several studies I read that insisted on coming up with all kinds of reasons Bolivians (or, in some cases, other Latin Americans) have converted to Protestant Christianity besides the simple fact of their belief in the goodness and truth of the religion. Not to say that analyses of socio-economic factors and emotional needs and so forth aren't useful in studies of religious commitment, but I couldn't help but wonder how the people who participated in these studies would feel if the works were translated to Spanish and handed over to them. They would read their religious lives shrunk down into a few sentences about how Catholic fiesta sponsorship became too expensive for them in a time of economic crisis, or about them being women trapped in a patriarchal system that makes paternalism attractive, even though they are ultimately repressed by male dominance and the precariousness of relying on male benevolence. I, for one, would be indignant.

Perhaps this means I'm not cut-throat enough to be a truly critical, analytical anthropologist, but in this case, at least, I just don't feel capable of doing on to others as I would not want them to do on to me. Hence, my plans to become a minister, rather than a professional anthropologist. However, there is certainly a place for the kind of anthropology I am trying to do, and I don't plan to turn in my critical academic tools the day I get ordained in the church. (I did, after all, announce to my mother when I was four years old: "I am very good at academics!", and have ever since set out to prove myself right.) I have been particularly inspired recently by Julia Paley's ethnography on a Chilean shantytown and their political organizing in the rhetorically democratic, but effectively disempowering, atmosphere of post-dictatorship Chile (Marketing Democracy: Power and Social Movements in Post-Dictatorship Chile). At one point, in a transcript of Paley's conversation with a Chilean sociologist friend, her friend asserts that the difference between anthropology and sociology is that in sociology they "don't believe what people say," and Paley concurs, adding that in anthropology, on the other hand, "it doesn't matter if they're right or wrong. What's important is what it means to them" (p. 182). Indeed, Paley's analysis is not hers alone, nor is it a collaboration simply with other academics; rather, she worked with health promoters, teenagers and other locals to jointly construct analyses of their history and their present situation. To underline this point, her book-length ethnography is followed by an article-length one written by health promoters from the neighborhood in which she carried out her research. Likewise, all the people she worked with in the health organization wanted her to use their full, real names in her book, as contributors to an intellectual work. Similarly, Rober Galo Condori Machicado dictated his full name to me during our hiring interview the other day, to make sure it would appear correctly in my thesis about his religious community.

Although the vow I originally made when I read Domitila Barrios' exhortation to social scientists was simply to write something that could be read by my research subjects, now I am committed to writing something that will be read by my research subjects. Thus, Barrios' insistence that studies serve the people rather than simply represent them or debate them has become all the more relevant. The good news is that I am not going to take on such a monumental task alone. Indeed, I couldn't. I will need lots, and lots of help from all my hermanos and hermanas in the faith here. Fortunately, my new research assistants are as excited as I am about delving into the craft of field work, even though none of them could exactly pinpoint what "anthropology" is when I asked them, although a couple offered alliteration-inspired guesses that it had to do with "bones and ancient civilizations." Beginning with a lunch meeting I am planning for my assistants this coming week—for which I will cook them a soup out of the chicharrón (pork), choclo (boiled corn) and chuño (freeze-dried potatoes) I bought from a group of students who were selling it this weekend to raise money for the hospedaje—I will teach them a little bit about participant-observation and making the extremely familiar a little bit stranger to their own eyes. I will assign them to record and analyze an event or even a personal encounter in the context of the church, with all their five senses plastered against the world like a kid's nose against a fish tank. As we move forward, I will try to give them the sort of tasks they feel they were made for. Rosmery, who loves to "listen to people's problems" and try to understand them and help them, will be my primary interviewer of young women. Rober, who wants to be a politician of the common people, "like Evo," but does not want to seek a high-ranking position in the politics of the church—as he sees it, pastors shouldn't be serving God for their own benefit—will investigate the church political structure and the dynamics that prevent women from being represented in almost all areas of its decision-making processes. Amalia, who seems to have a special attraction to formulaic academic work, will be in charge of carrying out the surveys she has envisioned herself administering, even though I hadn't originally planned to include surveys in my research design. Eddy, who wants to "understand other cultures," and how people think in "the pueblos"—despite the fact that he himself is from one such rural pueblo—will be my representative and investigator amongst the young men at a national multicultural assembly of Methodist youth. Rossío is a firecracker: she is at once incisively critical of the divide between egalitarian rhetoric and actual discrimination in the gender politics of the church, yet at the same time fulfills traditional overworked and underappreciated womanly roles in her living situation with her brothers, and takes it all on like a dimpled, smiley and sugary-sweet warrior princess. I'm not sure yet what her specialty will be in my research, but I have a feeling she will have much more say in the matter than I will.

My own research plan includes the facilitation of three dialogues that will take place in the hospedaje on gender, romantic relationships, and religiosity and spirituality in the Methodist church—one with women, one with men, and, finally, one with both genders—which we will draw on in order to write our interview instruments. Then, with our lists of interview questions in hand, we will each carry out a couple of interviews with young men or young women in the church, to explore these themes more deeply, in individual lives and experiences. I think that what my researchers don't understand yet—but which I am hoping to help them grasp clearly through the methodology we use—is that they themselves are the primary subjects of their own research, and that rather than looking for "the other" in the people we interact with throughout our research—the "people with problems" or "the people from different pueblos"—we will be looking for ourselves, and trying to understand ourselves better, even as sometimes the radical difference of our fellow Christians will be exactly what pushes us to these new understandings.

But then, these are simply my plans, and as I've learned from the three national Federación Femenina Metodista leaders I work with—none of whom I have ever seen make a decision without first deliberating the matter with the other two—my work in the church is not just up to me. If I tried to make it that way, I would soon be alone and discounted as a leader. Perhaps this is why the people in peak positions of the church hierarchy at various levels and in various areas are called "coordinators." For example, in a meeting with the 14 district coordinators of FEFEME the other day, Hermana M., the national coordinator of FEFEME, explained that there was a lack of female scholarship recipients to use up the funds provided for this purpose—conditional on their complete use—by the Methodist Church in Sweden, and after she finished she said: "What do you all think we should do? What suggestions do you have?" In turn, I am asking my hermanos and hermanas in the hospedaje, "What do you think we should research? What does this mean to you?" If I can successfully coordinate their efforts to seek out their own meaning, maybe I'm worth my salt as a leader in the church. And maybe my thesis won't meet its end gathering dust in the Literary Wetback Archives, or worst yet, accolades in the Literary Wetback Showroom.

Meanwhile, my petoskey stone's flowery eyes are blinking up at me from my desk as I write, and I am remembering how my friend M., who has been known for a strikingly accurate psychic reading or two of my life, once told me: "You know what you need to do, Sari? This is all you need to do. Take a couple of stones and carry them around with you in your pocket. Then, when someone asks you, 'How did you get this way?' or, 'Why are you so happy?', just take one of the stones out of your pocket and give it to them. Without saying anything." Serendipitously enough, this friend happens to live in the town of Petoskey, Michigan. I am remembering his words right now and agreeing that probably the best thing I can do is not to explain, analyze and shape the reality I am living here, but simply to take the stones out of my pocket and, inexplicably, give them away. Maybe they will inspire someone else to do the same.

The Fuzzy Line Between Gringa and Cholita Paceña

2010-04-04T10:15:00.011-04:00

Last night, I arrived home wearing a new wide-brimmed felt hat I bought to shield my gringa skin from the sun. Even for non-gringas, hats are an essential acessory here in the altiplano, where we live so close to the sun that sometimes it seems like it is reaching down and trying to touch us, the way you might try to touch fish swimming close to the surface of the river as you row along in a canoe. I climbed up the stairs to my bedroom in my smart coffee-colored hat with its wide ribbon tied in a bow trailing off behind it, and I found two hermanas sitting on the steps talking. They gasped with delight to see me in my new hat, and the hermana who guards the hospedaje grounds exclaimed, "I don't even recognize you! You've become Bolivian! Now you're my real hermana!" The hermana who is the caretaker of the hospedaje concurred and told me I looked right pretty. I laughed and said, "We're blood hermanas now," and they seemed pleased by this. Their assessment of my new Bolivianhood was similar to some of the comments I recieved after participating in the Easter parade last weekend put on by all the Methodist churches in El Alto, in which I wore the traditional pollera dress of city-dwelling Aymara women, which I had asked someone to lend me for the ocassion. Church men who passed shouted "cholita paceña!" approvingly (a chola, in the local vernacular, is a woman identified with indigenous Aymara culture but is not a country-dwelling campesina, in the sense indigenous groups are often identified, but rather a fully urbanized individual). I thought it ironic that they should shout this at me, considering that there were several hundred cholitas paceñas of greater authenticity all around me. The women, for their part, would beam at me with a bubbling, giddy confusion and say "Hola, hermana!"; some would add, "You look so pretty!", while others would just keep staring at me, as if unable to think of anything else to say but unable to leave the situation at that. I think many of them didn't understand why on earth I would want to look like a cholita paceña, but they were flattered that I did. For my part, I just think cholas have damn good fashion sense, and I fully intend to buy my own pollera get-up, if I can scrape together the money for the entire outfit, which is quite costly even by US standards.

Whether or not I'm actually becoming more Bolivian in a physical, behavioral or ideological sense isn't so much important to me as is my hermanas' sense of me coming to belong with them in some way. My exchange with the guard hermana about us being "real" sisters now reminded me of some articles I read on informal adoption and "child circulation" in the Andes, wherein children will be dispatched by their birth parents, or requested by the recieving family, to go to live with aunts and uncles, granparents, ritual kin (i.e., godparents), or, particularly in the case of informal adoption, simply acquaintances. This might be due to the family's poverty or rural location, when living with someone else might provide the child financial resources his or her birth family cannot, or a better education in the city. On the other hand, children might go to live with a widowed female relative, for example, who needs the extra help and company. Children can in this way become quite detached from their birth family, but by being nourished and cared for by their adoptive kin, they often indeed come to be seen as a member of the family even in a physical sense, through a sort of logic of shared substance.

I have, from the beginning, been sharing a lot of the practical substances of life, and particularly food, with my spiritual hermanas and hermanos (brothers and sisters) here in Bolivia. At least once a day, I knock on the door of the dorm caretaker and have her 14-year-old son or 10-year-old daughter come down and open the kitchen for me. Then I set up shop cooking my experimental meals combining Bolivian ingredients, a very high altitude, and my pseudo-cosmopolitan, Mexi-Italia-Japanese hippy-health-nut cooking expertise. I banter with the three or four 18-20 year old boys that are usually also present, and I often find myself explaining what my ideal man would be like, or why formulaically romantic Latin American courting strategies don't work on me. Once, much to my delight, I even had a receptive audience of one for a lecture on the importance of using protection when having sex. In larger groups, however, we often exhaustivally discuss the differences between Bolivia and the United States, including such hot button issues as socialism, machismo, drinking alcohol (a mostly forbidden act in the Bolivian Methodist Evangelical Church), and the comparative blandness of potatoes and fruit in my country. They might share their fried potatoes with me, and in turn I give them samples of my lentil soup or my meat/vegetable/chili-paste concoction. When the boys are tired and quiet, or absent, I busy myself reading daily newspapers or The National Geographic in Spanish as my food cooks.

The kitchen is, obviously, a great way to get to know other students in the dorm. However, I have been confused and frustrated by the almost total absence of women in the kitchen. One would expect it to be the other way around, but for reasons unknown to me, barely any of the women ever seem to need to cook, and I see them only in passing, in the hallway or entering or exiting the bathroom. I've speculated that perhaps they have family members they eat with here in the city, or perhaps it is easier for them to find jobs than boys (the informal service sector in Bolivia does tend to have more opportunities for women, particularly because of the gender bias in domestic service and street vending), and thus they have more money to eat out and less time to cook. It could also be that some of the newly arrived ones are simply too shy and timid to go out and find food in the busy markets and then figure out how to cook it, when some of them, as I know to be the case of two sisters who live here together, have yet to learn how to cook. Much to my delight, however, this past week one girl has started coming down and making her lunches, because her married brother with whom she was eating moved further away. She has shared her boiled yucca and fried plantains with me, and I have shared my fried sweet potatoes and toasted corn with her. I found that she immediately opened up to me when, on a whim, and despite the fact that I wasn't sure if she would understand it or appreciate it, I shared with her about my eerily sycnhronistic relationship with the number 11:11 and the age of 22. In turn, she told me about her struggle to get used to living away from her family and home when at the age of 15 she was sent to live with her older brother and keep him from taking to drinking or other distractions while he studied in Llallagua. Then she explained that she, too, has felt a fortuitous opening to possibility inside herself now that she is 22. She also told me stories of her disturbing struggle to distance herself from a mentally ill ex-boyfriend, as well as her dream of starting a non-profit organization to help young adults with substance abuse problems. It's amazing how far a few fried plantains and sweet potatoes and a little risking of your vulnerability can take you. Aside from the personal connection, I felt like it was some kind of research breakthrough to actually be talking about more personal and meaningful themes with a young woman my own age, particularly since one of my main research ideas was to focus on younger women.

I certainly developed deeper connections with some women from the start, however. Aside from the three FEFEME leaders—Hermana S. with her prickly cactuses and clever peeing techniques, Hermana M. with her reflexively natural kisses, back rubs and other physical affection, and Hermana J. with her devilish sense of humor—I have developed a very important relationship with the caretaker of the hospedaje and her two children. I have taken on something like a godparent relationship with the family, in the traditional Latin American sense of godparents who are, ideally, better-off than the real parents and help with practical needs for the children. The hermana, a struggling widowed mother, cautiously asked me soon after arriving if I might be able to give English lessons to her children, as she had been thinking of sending them to an institute for it but didn't have the money. I agreed, since I got along well with her kids and I knew what a godsend it would be for her and what a simple, small thing it really is for me. Since then she has reciprocated in every way possible. She sends her daughter to help me cut vegetables or she herself helps me with my food preparation, and sometimes she offers me food from their lunch or dinner, passing it through a window, covered by Health Ministry posters with cartoons promoting vaccination against rubella, that separates the big community kitchen from her tiny, closet-sized one. Her daughter also helps me with my Aymara, sometimes in the morning before school, and sometimes in the evening, along with her brother, after our English lesson. The kids' enthusiasm and dedication to learning English is reward enough for me, and I find myself buying them candies and cookies from street vendors to brighten their day.

Just two days ago, the caretaker hermana accompanied me at the last minute to go find a mini-refrigerator for my bedroom, after I discovered that the already problematic industrial refigerator in the kitchen had broken down entirely. She went into the shops while I waited outside, so that she could negotiate the best deal before they knew it was a gringa who was buying it. This new refrigerator was, in fact, the topic of conversation just before I had mounted the steps and ran into the hermanas with my new hat last night. The guard of the hospedaje grounds wanted to see for herself this beautiful mini-fridge. I unlocked my door and ushered them in, and they stood admiring the fridge as if it were an elegant evening gown or a pricey original painting. Once inside my bedroom, however, the guard hermana was dismayed at my lack of suitable furniture that she felt should be provided for me. She henceforth set out to drag up a coffee table from the common room downstairs to elevate my fridge, and provide extra space for the radio she was going to bring me tomorrow. As she had explained to me previously, the other hermanas might not realize what it's like to live alone, since they have their husbands or at least their children, and as a woman who has remained unmarried and childless, she understood the necessity of having a radio to keep you company. She also decided my little end-table-size desk was insufficient, and I needed a bigger table to eat and write at, which was also brought up from the common room. Then chairs with cushions were in order, because, as the guard hermana explained, the hermanas who wore polleras must not understand that those of us who dress in European fashions don't have so much cushioning for our butts.

Now, with my new hat, fridge, and furniture, I am feeling utterly settled in and satisfied here. I am recalling how I turned down the offer to move into a whole apartment of my own across from the hospedaje a couple weeks ago, when I was still more frustrated with the kitchen situation. Now I'm so glad I didn't give up having to ask my 10-year-old hermanita to open the kitchen or the shower for me, which she always does with the sweetest enthusiasm as she scuttles around in her bear slippers and thick woolen cap. Nor would I want to give up my chance encounters in the kitchen, sharing substances and dating advice with my young hermanos and hermanas. Most of all, I wouldn't give up for anything my perfect view of Mount Illimani beyond the colorful skyscrapers and green mountains of La Paz.

But because I am trying to be an anthropologist, I always like to relativize my own perception of things. For example, I was just thinking yesterday how for one of the ants that I mercilessly kill as they seep into my room through the cracks in my windowpane, my lace curtain might be their Mount Illimani.

The Moveable Feast

2010-03-24T20:26:00.017-04:00

This past Thursday, I again hit the road with the FEFEME hermanas, the pastor who is the national director of Life and Mission, and the pastor who is the coordinator of the El Alto district, a satellite city of La Paz and the urban Aymara-speaking center of the country. After five days on the road together, making our way through copious amounts of fruit and hundreds of kilometers of dangerous mountain roads, sleeping in various lumpy and sagging beds of questionable cleanliness, clapping mutely but enthusiastically along with countless indecipherable hymns sung in Quechua, and pushing, dragging and sputtering a broken down jeep through the remote countryside, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say I came out with a familial sense of belonging with my hardy travel companions.

The purpose of the trip was to attend an annual national church encuentro (encounter) called Misión Quechua, which unites all the Quechua-speaking members of the Methodist Church for administrative coordination, the inspiration and planning of evangelical efforts, a Christian Quechua music competition, and lots and lots of hymn singing. The meat of the encounter itself was, in the end, of little interest to me,

which probably has a lot to do with the fact that I know approximately 10 words in Quechua, and at least half of them are sexual innuendo. However, the encounters around the periphery and in the incidental margins of the journey there and back were fascinating. I also enjoyed the chance to visit Sucre, the de jure capital of Bolivia (despite the fact that La Paz, as the seat of the government, is certainly the de facto capital in the imagination and daily speech of Bolivian citizens). Sucre sits at a relatively lower altitude for Bolivia, and enjoys a mildly tropical climate. It is a city full of palm trees, shady parks and plazas, fascinating miniature shrines dedicated to rich families in a cemetery so lavish that it is a tourist attraction, and a considerable portion of the country’s young adults, who arrive there to study and leave their impassioned political graffiti on all available walls.

The most important thing you need to know about what it is like to travel with my fellow hermanas and hermanos in the faith in Bolivia is that everything involves the consumption of almost superhuman amounts of food. I admit that I’ve never read Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, but I imagine that an exhaustive travelogue of my time in Bolivia would produce a book with a very similar feel. The significance of food in these contexts could be a research topic onto itself. At the least, it is safe to say that the amount of food consumption and the process of consuming it certainly has much more multilayered purposes than simply satisfying hunger or craving. The moment I got in the jeep to set out with my lunch of re-heated lentils in tow, I was offered soup and the segundo (entrée) of a Bolivian version of lasagna, leftover from a hermana’s lunch in a restaurant. Oranges, chicles (gum), and butterscotch candies soon followed. Dinner was soup and seco de pollo (chicken stew in a light pesto-like spinach sauce) at a restaurant in a small town, where the grubby-looking men drinking Coca Cola and beer at red plastic tables stared at me as if I were a unicorn or some other mythological creature they had a similar likelihood of encountering.

The next day began bright and early in the city of Potosí, the old boomtown and primary generator of colonial-era South American wealth, which is elevated even higher than La Paz, at 13,500 feet above sea level. Before setting out, we ate on benches at the stand of a street vendor who made api, a thick, mildly sweet purple and white corn drink that is somewhat reminiscent of tapioca pudding, and is typically served with big, delicious and ridiculously greasy disks of deep-fried bread.

At a highway tollbooth en route to Sucre, we bought baggies of charqui (extremely salty, naturally cured llama meat jerky, which is in fact the “original” jerky, as evidenced by the semantic trail of the word from English to Spanish to the Aymara ch'arqi), which came with cooked corn and aji (hot chili sauce). Then, in the tradition of J.R.R. Tolkein’s hobbits with their “second breakfast” and “elevensies,” immediately upon arriving at the church in Sucre at just about 11:00, we were served salteñas (deep-fried pastries filled with meat, vegetables, hard-boiled eggs and gravy, which I think must require years of experience to eat without spilling their “juice” everywhere).

The trip back was, if anything, an even more intensive gastronomical marathon. Setting out after having had both breakfast and a lavish 11:00 lunch in rapid succession, we snacked on an abundant supply of peaches, apples, chirimoyas (custard apple), tunas (cactus fruit), and watermelon bought on our way out of Sucre, along with a couple big bags of panes (little single-serving bread loaves, as they are most often baked in South America) and more candy. The following day this sort of snacking was supplemented with a lunch of chuleta de vaca (beef chops) with a sort of white rice porridge and potatoes in the mining city of Oruro. And this is not even to speak of the endless supply of food that proceeded from the kitchen adjacent to the church in Sucre throughout the weekend.

To understand the significance of all this eating, it’s important to indicate that, in the case of the road food, it was almost always bought on one person’s initiative, with their own money, and then shared freely with everyone else. The importance of “inviting” someone to food is also reflected in my daily life in the hospedaje. (The Spanish verb invitar serves the same purposes as its English cognate, but also is often used for offering someone food, and carries the implication of paying for whatever you are “inviting” someone to.) When I go down to the community kitchen to cook my lunch each day, a crew of boys usually assembles around the same time to cook their lunch together. If they can reasonably spare a plate, they will always offer me whatever they are having (which is, with little exception, the all-weather classic of white rice, fried potatoes and fried eggs) along with whatever they have prepared for their mate (water boiled with toasted wheat, corn, or herbs and sweetened with sugar). Similarly, if the caretaker of the hospedaje can spare some of the food she has prepared for her and her children in her little kitchen adjacent to the community kitchen, she will invite me to a plate. This is all regardless of whether I am already cooking myself a veritable feast, and regardless of the fact that I don’t “invite” them to my food as often as they do to me, though I am certainly learning to do so more and more. Food seems to have an extremely important function as a shared substance, expressing acceptance, hospitality, appreciation and above all cariño (love, affection or caring) to the recipient.

On the other hand, I wonder if the endless moveable feasts of road trips are also a response to the rigorous sleep schedule of "late to bed, early to rise" that is certainly common in the Protestant work ethic of the church but seems perhaps to be a typical practice amongst Bolivians in general. Food provides fuel for the body and breaks up the monotony on long journeys and at intensive church encounters where one might be tempted to succumb to sleep deprivation. Furthermore, the fruit in particular might help to provide water content in the body. I’ve noticed that Bolivians, like the Peruvians I lived with last year, have the maddening habit of barely ever getting thirsty, and those in the Methodist Church seem to drink mostly either soda or the mates mentioned earlier, and this usually seems to be more for pleasure than for thirst, and takes the form of a loosely ritualistic exchange similar to that involved in sharing food.

Our moveable feast was made more exhilarating by the way in which it moved. The Life and Mission pastor who was driving, not at all untypically of drivers in Bolivia, has the habit of honking at everything that he might collide with instead of actually take any measures to slow down or steer clear of it. Presumably the idea is that when inevitable collisions with things occur, at least said "things" won't be able to claim they weren't warned. The pastor also doesn't think twice about passing in no-passing zones or when oncoming traffic is present and nearing quite rapidly, and he surely cuts many fractions of kilometers off of our trip by whipping around sharp mountainous curves in the left lane. Furthermore, we are all disencumbered from the seat belts in which we North Americans usually insist on restraining ourselves. Functioning seatbelts seem to be nonexistent in back seats in Bolivia, and go unnoticed in front seats. If you're the intercessory prayer type, I would recommend praying that I don't die in a car crash.

Between feasting and narrowly avoided collisions, we found the time to stop every hundred kilometers or so for Hermana S. to climb up or down some mountain or other to collect various huge and menacing-looking cactuses for her to transplant into her garden when she got home, because "they don’t have these in La Paz." She would then happily station herself on top of our luggage inside the hatchback of the jeep and keep her gradually mounting, prickly collection company. Hermana S. is a retired gardener and the oldest of the FEFEME leaders. She is always quick to laugh, quick to forgive, and highly cordial and gracious. She is the FEFEME leader I work closest with in my volunteer work for them, and I have latched on to her as a comforting but feisty mother figure, whose thick mantas (shawls) keep me warm and whose patient explanations of our surroundings keep me sharp.

When Hermana S. wasn't stopping to collect cactuses and try the patience of the pastor of Life and Mission, she was stopping on the side of the road to "desaguar" beneath her full skirts. Though I was clever enough to wear a skirt for the entire journey this time, the reality of inevitably spilling some portion of my pee on my shoes and the hem of my skirt a few times a day still took some getting used to, and I found comfort in reciting to myself a tidbit of medical trivia I heard somewhere once: Urine is actually sterile, you know.

Hermana S. also proved an enthusiastic Aymara teacher on our long drives. I would go through my flash cards with her and she would tell me if my understanding of the word was correct, and often break out laughing with some double entendre suggested by a word. She even humored me in my rehearsal of the names for genitalia in Aymara, through conspiratorial whispers and giggles as we tried to hide the topic at hand from the El Alto pastor. He had otherwise been joining in to help with my Aymara education, but he had been embarrassed enough when, in response to his ambiguous question, “What is the physical difference between men and women in the United States?” I had been unable to resist offering: “Well, men have penises and women have vaginas.” Best keep a discussion of Bolivian genitalia, then, between just us ladies.

This sort of joking and tangential, vague references is pretty much all I've gotten so far in terms of ideas about romantic relationships, sexuality and the gender roles encapsulated therein. However, my time in Sucre over the weekend offered me an opportunity to observe some of these themes concretely in action for the first time. Unfortunately, my experiences were perhaps a bit too concrete in that I was the female protagonist in these romantic scenarios: I received no less than two overtures towards marriage proposals over the course of the weekend. The first was from a middle-aged, upper-middle-class mestizo man who cornered me the instant I came downstairs from the nap I took shortly after arriving and eagerly invited me to go out and see all that his beautiful city has to offer. The FEFEME hermanas were nowhere to be found, and the El Alto pastor told me they had gone out to pasear, so I figured I’d go along with this hospitable man to pass the time. However, before we had even finished crossing the street just outside the church, he had already not-so-subtly informed me that he had been praying for a Christian wife ever since switching his career from history teacher to lawyer (the connection between the Christian wife and the law practice eludes me), and that she had yet to arrive. As we walked, I called one of the hermanas on my cell phone and happily agreed to meet them back at the church where a late lunch awaited me, despite my sucreño host’s protestations that he was going to take me to a café instead. As I ate, I told Hermana S. about the impropriety of this supposed “man of the church,” and she agreed that this was gravely inappropriate behavior for such a man. For the rest of the evening, I stayed glued to the hermanas, making a second approach impossible for him. This protection of female sexuality was a surprisingly nice change for me, as someone who as always insisted I could fend for myself, has deftly handled all kinds of attention from shady older men, and sometimes even felt flattered by them. It was somehow refreshing to be able to glare at and pointedly ignore my would-be fiancé from the looming, large presence taken up by my church sisters’ billowing, multilayered pollera skirts and shawls.

My second suitor was considerably more endearing, and thus proves a more difficult nuisance to shake off. A Methodist Evangelical Bolivian folkloric music band was in attendance, and their lead singer was, apparently, fascinated enough by my unicorn-like gringa presence to ask me for a photograph with him, for no apparent reason, after having exchanged nothing more than the customary hand-shake-and-kiss greeting.

After watching me dance to his band with my characteristic unbridled, ear-to-ear-grinning fervor in the semi-structured delightful chaos that seems to characterize all dancing to traditional folk music in the church, he had apparently grown even more enamored, and asked me for another picture.

When I protested that he already had one and began to tease him about it in my more or less fluent Spanish, he was clearly stoked to discover that I could intelligibly speak his language, and he didn’t have to use photo shoots as an excuse to get near me. He proceeded to provide me with a condensed version of his life in an almost resume-like form, being sure to inform me that he had his own farm where he grew wheat and soy as cash crops, that he was the president and lay pastor of his local church, that he was dedicated above all to his music ministry, and that he was most definitely single. After telling him I was a singer/songwriter and exchanging a few songs out on the patio, this sealed the deal on his decision to fall hopelessly in love with me and to do everything he could to gain my trust, friendship and cariño during my five months in Bolivia, with the hopeful end of marrying me. He began this project by showering me in the most stereotypical gifts imaginable: a heart-shaped box of chocolates, a bouquet of red roses, and an earthy, “ethnic”-looking necklace and pair of earrings. In contrast to the middle-aged lawyer, the hermanas were encouraging and cajoling about this potential suitor, recommending I tell him to buy me gold earrings next time, which would be better for my sensitive, easily-infected ears. The Life and Mission pastor, for his part, smiled and told me, "estás con suerte" (you have good luck). I suppose a good, clean-cut, economically established and devoutly Christian young man with musical talent would be a reasonable enough marriage choice for me, but I really can’t deal with any marriage proposals in my inbox right now, as I am already quite happily occupied with research proposals.

Nonetheless, the experience got me thinking about the nature of courtship, falling in love and getting married in the context of Evangelical Protestantism in Bolivia. Despite the fact that my second would-be suitor’s fairly unequivocal suggestions of marriage plans sounded insanely premature and immature to me, the manner in which he attempted to initiate a romantic relationship with me might very well be every young Bolivian evangelical woman’s dream. (The irony, of course, is that he seems to be so very enamored with me because I am different than most Bolivian woman.) I am smelling here the beginnings of more clearly defined and focused research questions. You might call it an investigation into the anthropology of romance, as it raises questions about expectations of sexual conduct, sexual purity, courtship, dating, the decision to get married, and what people do when these ideals aren’t fulfilled (in the cases, for example, of the two young women I’ve met already in the church who have babies with absentee fathers). I like the idea of writing about the anthropology of romance, because it has an initial tone of being an appropriately young-womanish and somewhat dreamy concern, yet I know it will unavoidably tie back in to the messy and often tough realities of the women with whom I live, work, worship and commune here in Bolivia.

I had plenty of time to draw out these ideas from my own brush with romance as we made our way back from Sucre. Indeed, it took us two full days to make the 10-hour trek, because of a mechanical fiasco with the pastor’s jeep. How we ever got that jeep from a stretch of road in the middle of the country, inhabited by little more than cactuses and the ruins of giant earthen ovens called huatias (pictured below), to a tiny and phone-deficient town, to the larger town of Ch’allapata where we slept, to the city of Oruro where we got its carburetor replaced, and finally back to La Paz, is a miracle only God could have pulled off.

The Most Beautiful and Chaotic Place I've Ever Been

2010-03-13T20:47:00.025-04:00

A close friend of the pioneering cultural anthropologist Franz Boas once commented that Boas was a man who was never comfortable in the presence of a generalization. I seem to follow in Boas' footsteps by nature; you give me a generalization, particularly one about human behavior, and my brain will immediately and automatically go to work searching for counterexamples. With that said, I admit that generalizations can sometimes be useful, or at the very least, amusing. And I am here on this blog, in part, to amuse you. Thus, I have decided to make two extremely broad and brash conclusions about the country of Bolivia after my weighty 11 days of firsthand experience here:

Bolivia is the most beautiful place I have ever been.

Bolivia is also the most chaotic place I have ever been.

My trip today to a remote pueblo (town) in the mountains to the north of La Paz—not far from the famous Lake Titicaca—has sealed the deal on the first conclusion. I offer you a few pieces of evidence here, but I must disclaim that I am not always in agreement with the adage "a picture is worth 1,000 words," because 1,000 pictures ain't worth nothing in comparison to experiencing firsthand the ridiculous green, the fresh dewy coolness, and the black dirt and mountain-herb aroma of this landscape:

(The keen and agriculturally-minded reader will note, as I did, the brilliant terracing cultivation techniques in the latter two photos. It turns out my high school obsession with sustainable farming and my schoolgirl crush on Wendell Berry weren't for naught, after all!)

Now how, you may ask, could such a graceful, tranquil and positively artful landscape produce such a chaotic society? I will venture to suggest that the two phenomena are not opposed to each other, and indeed might be interrelated. You see, Bolivians don't seem to be chaotic because they are trying to do too much at once, or trying to integrate their organic, unreliable bodies into unforgiving mechanistic systems of production, transportation, communication and socialization. On the contrary, it seems, most Bolivians are so laid back and so loosely bound to established mechanistic systems that the result could only be a general, almost friendly chaos. The average citizen seems to handle this chaos with remarkable patience and perseverance.

Some examples:

Do you usually think about the rules of pedestrian traffic when you are walking down the sidewalk? I don't mean rules about pedestrians and cars. I mean rules about pedestrians and pedestrians. I had never given much thought to this myself, but here in Bolivia I contemplate it almost every time I walk down the street. It seems that every other oncoming pedestrian wants to play a game of chicken with me, to see who will veer off first or if we will perhaps just go for the crash. I've tried going right. I've tried going left. I've tried heading straight at them. I've tried giving them exaggerated amounts of space. It seems no matter what approach I adopt, confusion ensues.

Motor vehicle traffic is equally as lacking in all mores and structure. Enough said. It's a good thing children in zebra costumes have made crossing guard duty into street performance art here in La Paz, or else its death rate would probably be much higher.

I might not have synthesized such relatively impersonal interactions into a generally chaotic portrait of Bolivian society if it hadn't been for my observations during my time in the pueblo of Inca Katurapi today. I should preface this by reminding you all that I am not a big fan of etiquette. I will be the first to support you in breaking all kinds of social mores if it makes you happier or more comfortable in a given situation. However, even I was vaguely embarrassed by the extent to which rules of etiquette during this church assembly in Inca Katurapi differed from my own culture's rules, or perhaps lacked certain kinds of rules altogether.

I was in the company of the bishop, the national secretary of Life and Mission, the national secretary of finances, and two of the Federación Femenina Metodista hermanas for the consecration of a new "sub-district" of the Methodist Evangelical Church, in which local leaders were elected and copious amounts of edifying or inspirational speeches and prayers were recited.

During the first part of the ceremony, I was dragged up on stage with the other church representatives to have lavish, indescribably colorful and cumbersome wreaths of fresh flowers placed around our necks. After the customary welcome song, a series of church elders or leaders came up to shake our hands. This seemed appropriate enough to me. But then, as the assembly went on and announcements and speeches were being made, certain people continued to trickle in who would come up on the stage, without any regard for whatever was supposed to be the center of attention at the moment, to shake all of our hands. Though this was surprising to me, in a way it was also relieving, because it made me feel comfortable sitting back down in the audience so I could take pictures, and later escaping to find a bush to pee behind.

(On this latter matter, I must commend Bolivian women for their sensible and well-planned wardrobe choices: those giant, pleated, multilayered pollera skirts make it so you could probably squat and have a pee while standing around in a circle with a bunch of men and no one's propriety would be lost nor voyeurism gained.)

On the other hand, perhaps the eager church elders who came up and shook our hands in the middle of speeches were complying quite well with their own rules of etiquette. And as I mentioned, their laidback behavior that broke the sacredness of lengthy orations spoken through a microphone was somewhat of a relief for me. I found a bit more manifestly rude, however, the constant coming and going and chattering at the back of the church. I was able to duly take this aspect in while lingering at the threshold after returning from my visit to the bush (during which I was genuinely concerned that I might encounter some of the same sort of adolescent boys who had just called out "buenas tardes" as I passed and had responded with peals of gleeful laughter when I—rather uninterestingly, in my opinion—returned the exact same greeting). At the same time, this commotion in back might not have been all that different than what happens at interminable, community-wide meetings all over the world. Furthermore, it offered me an endearing glimpse into some of the children's and adolescents' interactions:

I was more unsettled, however, by the complete lack of reserve and considerateness during the wedding-line style greeting of the newly elected leaders. I fell into a place in the line to shake their hands, and was surprised to discover that every single person I thought was in line behind me pushed ahead of me heedlessly to greet the elects. I eventually had to get a little pushy myself so as not to be left standing there dumbly, with a sea of people pushing past me to shake the elects' hands. Perhaps it is significant that all of the people who pushed ahead of me in this way were also older adults, as were the ones who came up on the stage to shake our hands. Maybe there was some sort of elders' privilege at play that I was just not picking up on. Nonetheless, the shorthand reaction to this experience that I jotted down in my pocket notebook reads: "Rude people pushing in front of me in line."

With all this said, I don't mean to assign a necessarily negative value to Bolivia's chaotic nature, or even to suggest that I personally dislike it. In fact, some of the finest examples of chaos I encountered today were also the finest moments I spent in Inca Katurapi. For example, congregational prayer in this community is truly a group effort, if not a coordinated one. I had noticed already in various events of the church administrators in La Paz that when someone was designated to pray out loud, many others simultaneously prayed their own prayers in whispered tones. The churchgoers of the newly christened "Valle Verde" sub-district, however, are not so reserved. As the local pastors, the bishop or the pastor in charge of Mission and Life prayed during the service, a great wailing cacophony arose amongst the congregation as everyone offered their own words up to God, many raising their hands towards heaven with expressions of the deepest untold longing on their faces, and some weeping freely as they prayed. The palpable earnestness of these devotions sent shivers down my spine, even though the confusion of voices, and the predominance of Aymara over Spanish, made it impossible for me to understand any of the words themselves. Meanwhile, I derived some secret satisfaction from the fact that the paternal, pastorly voice of the bishop, who prayed in Spanish rather than the group's preferred Aymara, was mostly drowned out and certainly ignored by the congregation.

Finally, there was the dancing. In preparation for this finale, I was served what I believe was the hip or knee joint of an alpaca, along with numerous potatoes, yams, ukas (similar to yucca but much smaller and slightly more flavorful), and plantains. The bishop is pictured here partaking in his portion, which was ridiculously larger than my ridicously large portion, and after which he was given a whole other serving of a similar size. After this, we were sent outside straight away to join the congregants in their musical revelry. A delightfully noisy rhythm and woodwind section provided the backdrop for what I can only describe as a combination between a drunken dance train started at a wedding reception and a wild rumpus straight out of the book Where The Wild Things Are. Better yet, no one was actually drunk, because they're evangelicals. We skipped around in concentric circles and then in an elaborate

spiraling pattern; we changed directions abruptly without much rhyme or reason, and in fact at one point the person on my left decided to go in one direction at the same time that the person on my right chose the opposite direction; we broke out of the circle of onlookers into an open grassy field and ended, in a nicely misshapen conglomeration, with the bishop's insistent clapping. When all was said and done, as we drove away from Inca Katurapi, along a terrifyingly narrow and bladder-bursting bumpy mountain road that gave new meaning for me to the word "remote," I was happily resting in and ruminating on Bolivian chaos. I was also pleasantly surprised with the way our time there unfolded in comparison with the vague and less-than-exciting idea I'd been given of the purpose of the trip before we got there. Another possibly chaos-producing trait of some of the Bolivians I've met is their aversion to answering any questions too directly or clearly. A sample conversation from about 5:45 AM today, recreated from memory and translated from Spanish:

Sari: So, what are we going here for?

Hermana M.: For a visit.

S.: What kind of visit? What are we going do there?

H.M.: It's an assembly.

S.: Oh. What kind of assembly?

H.M.: A general assembly.

S.: So, is it like, a special assembly, or a regular assembly that happens every month or something?

H.M.: A special assembly.

S.: So then what's it for?

H.M.: It's for the sub-district.

S.: But what are we going to be doing there?

(Pastor D. intervenes)

P.D.: It's for the consecration of a new sub-district that is being formed.

S.: Ohhhh.

In other news, another empirical generalization I have arrived at is that I have a unique talent for saying things that make Bolivians crack up. Whether they are laughing at me or laughing with me isn't really important, because it clearly works in my favor, as this picture demonstrates without further explanation:

The crowning moment of my jocular antics so far was last night, when I was somehow able to draw upon my miniscule vocabulary in Aymara to get an entire room of 17- to 20-year-old boys and girls and two matronly Aymara women cracking up over the impossible conversation I was having with a boy while I spoke English and he spoke Aymara. We switched to Spanish in between so I could reveal the merciless pit of sexual innuendo I was providing for my conversation partner to bury himself in deeper and deeper with each unintelligible exchange.

I wish I could put up pictures from moments like those, but unfortunately I have yet to capture on film and perhaps even in writing my daily life around the hospedaje, with the FEFEME hermanas in the church offices, going to the market or going jogging in the beautiful and impossibly hilly cobbled streets of La Paz. I suppose these are the hardest moments to capture. I would like to represent them here, though, because I don't want to give the impression that my life in Bolivia is nothing but visits to exotic, remote mountains and quaint Bolivian farming villages. I would hate to do nothing more than fulfill expectations of properly "exotic," "traditional," "indigenous" and thoroughly "othered" Bolivians. So, forget all the generalizations I just made, and all the fascinating points of difference I just cited. When the congregants were praying, I felt a surge of emotions and devotion probably not so different from theirs. When I consumed that alpaca limb, the delight in smoked animal protein and fat was probably manifesting itself within me much as it does in my hosts. When Hermana S. "covered me" with her shawl so I could "desaguar," I was peeing basically the same stuff she peed a minute later, only I didn't have the skirt to make it easier.

The most important thing for you to know is that I am very happy here, and I am building up friendships, sacred spots, slang words, cookware, and nostalgic memories that I will be very sad to part with when I leave.

Homesickness, Kari Kari Sickness, and the Unique Anthropologist Syndrome

2010-03-09T10:03:00.008-04:00

On Thursday evening, after having gotten lost approximately seven times earlier that day—even with a map to consult!—while trying to find the house of the American missionary where my groceries were held hostage, then going through somewhat of an ordeal to find even a distant refrigerator in which to keep said groceries, and finally being dragged endless blocks to buy a wireless internet antennae for my computer that it turned out I couldn’t afford and a prepay cell phone they couldn’t actually sell me, perhaps it was inevitable that I would start to feel that deep, irremediable loneliness unique to strangers in a strange land. When I came home phoneless, internetless, worried about my higher-than-expected living costs, and exhausted from altitude sickness and/or dehydration (which seem to be one in the same problem for me), it suddenly dawned on me that there was absolutely no way I could possibly communicate with anyone who had known me for more than 36 hours. I wanted my mommy. Crying ensued.

But I pulled myself together and went down to the kitchen to cook a meal with the hermana who oversees the hospedaje and her 10-year-old daughter. After all, I had two beef chuletas to cook that would otherwise go to waste, nor am I one to waste an opportunity to invite my new Bolivian hosts to dinner. As we waited for the brown rice to cook (which didn’t, by the way, really cook—but at least my first attempt at brown rice 12,500 feet above sea level proved highly education!), I asked the hermana about how she came to live in the hospedaje and work for the Methodist church. In the story she elaborated for me, I learned that her husband had died of an illness called kari kari, which, if I understood her correctly, results from a malicious individual performing a procedure on you when you are unaware and vulnerable, perhaps sleeping on a bus, for example. This procedure creates an abscess in your stomach or your lung (via the back) or sometimes your thigh. At first, you don’t feel anything and go about your life as normal. But within a week or a month, perhaps, you are bound to eat something fresh such as fish, eggs, or cheese, and this activates the dormant abscess, at which point you begin to feel a screaming, constant pain, as unbearable as being in labor. Finally, you bleed to death out of your nose, mouth and anus. The evil stranger is then able to collect this blood somehow and sell it. The doctors don’t believe in this illness, she explained, thus it is no use going to the hospital, where they will inject you with poison in any case. The only cure is an herbal remedy that her husband did take, but as she found out later, he did not take enough of it, which is why he died. She told me that another hermana, the gatekeeper of the hospedaje, cured herself from the same illness using this remedy.

It would, of course, be natural for most anyone from my cultural context to side with the Bolivian doctors in their disbelief. However, as I listened to her story, I was reminded of a book I just finished reading before I left for Bolivia that gave me some reserve in denouncing the hermana’s understanding of bodies, illnesses and medicine as categorically less enlightened than my own understanding. In this book, The Woman Beneath the Skin, Barbara Dudden examines the case files of a 17th-century German doctor who attended primarily to women. In the world of this doctor and his female patients, not only the medical explanations of illness and the cures prescribed were strange to my medical understanding, but even the physical symptoms themselves were almost completely alien to any types of diseases and conditions of the human body that I am familiar with. In this small town in 17th-century Germany, women would urinate pins and other household objects; bizarre swellings and abscesses on the skin would be encouraged and nurtured as semi-permanent cleansing outlets for the body as they emitted varied substances that I don’t associate with bodily fluids; and men frequently menstruated as well as women, sometimes from the penis but more often from other body parts, such as the fingertips. It was seen as a grave sign when men’s flows stopped, just as such stoppage was grave for women. Unless I am to believe this ordinary but meticulous doctor was inventing every single thing he wrote down, I am forced to allow my own solid notions about what the body is and how it works to be challenged, and to recognize that our understanding of the body shapes our experience of the body, and, perhaps more importantly, our experience shapes our understanding.

Needless to say, my conversation about the kari kari illness, as preliminary and poorly understood as it may have been, made me feel like quite the anthropologist. Here I was learning about folkloric medical notions, without even prompting! I felt the same way on Saturday at the house of a woman who works for the three FEFEME leaders. She told me about her struggle to pursue a college-level degree with three children and an unsupportive husband, whom she had only married to escape the abuse of her older brother. She indicated that her relationship with her husband had improved considerably since he stopped drinking after getting a testicle cut off by muggers while drunk, but she was still saddened by the fact that he was unable to show much tenderness and love to his children. Perhaps even worse, from my perspective, was that he only gave her Bs. 200 (US $28.50) per week to contribute to her own income as the primary breadwinner for the family. On top of providing the lion’s share of the income for household expenses, she also did all the household work, with help from a cleaning lady one day a week. Despite all these classic conditions of “gendered oppression,” however, she positively glowed with pride at having loved herself enough to pursue her own education, and she also explained that working as a leader of women’s causes in the church has given her confidence and a sense of meaning in her life. Later in the afternoon she agreed to let me record her while I asked her to elaborate on various themes she’d brought up while we went to the market and cooked. Our conversation was cut short because her son was ready to drive me back home, but I walked away with fifteen minutes of conversation on my digital voice recorder—to be continued soon—like they were gold star stickers affirming my anthropologist-ness.

With that said, however, I have to admit that at this point in my stay, I feel as if most of the people I talk to had read all the same ethnographies I did, and were dutifully representing their stereotypical cultural customs along with a haphazard unification of the sundry ethnic groups contained in their national boundaries. I am wondering what it is that I’ll have to add as a scholar, and my ego doesn't like the idea of letting go of doing something radically groundbreaking and unique with my research. I am assuming, however, that this is a common sensation for anthropologists of my generation in these beginning moments of research. Besides, there seems to be infinite layers of gleanings we can uncover with finer and finer-toothed combs as we seek the messy truths in the margins between previous social scientists' generalizations. I like the idea of being a gleaner, because it conjures the image of discovering sweet fruits left behind by chance, carelessness or callousness.

Because of course, not every interaction I've had has been a replay of my expectations. I’ve been pleasantly surprised, for example, that so far the stereotype of the guarded, impassive Andean Bolivian does not hold up all the time, as a couple of women have already shared relatively freely with me about their personal lives. And perhaps more importantly than the “uniqueness” of my findings, I genuinely like many of the people I have met, and am looking forward to getting to know them better. In that sense, my findings are bound to be unique, because truly knowing, understanding and sharing with individuals is always a lesson in the cliché snowflake metaphor: No two of us are ever made alike. The uniqueness of each human being has, in fact, always been an axial research interest for me. After all, what most effectively challenges those oppressive, monolithic cultural structures that I so earnestly seek to topple, as every good liberal-liberal arts student should? Particularity. All oppressive structures rely on the illusion of homogeneity in order to survive.

Views from Windows

2010-03-02T23:09:00.015-04:00

I arrived at the tiny, grimy La Paz airport at about 7:00 this morning, barely tired after 4 hours of restless, uncomfortable sleep on the 7-hour plane ride from Miami, apparently high on just being here. And high, literally. The airport is actually in the satellite city of El Alto, which is about 13,500 feet above sea level. It's sprung up really just in the past 25 years, as Aymara immigrants flooded into the city in the 80s, looking for work after huge factory and mining businesses became privatized and dumped their workers to fend for themselves, largely in the informal sector.

I was greeted with much decorum and fanfare by "la gente de la iglesia" (the people from the church), as I identified my hosts when I approached them, hoping I had guessed right. I felt like a visiting movie star, though perhaps one who had played Joseph in Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat, or something else of a properly religious ilk. The three leaders of the Federación Femenina Metodista (FEFEME) smiled glowingly at me every time our eyes met and gave me numerous hugs and kisses, each time overwhelming me amidst their proudly gilded teeth, beautiful, polychromatic shawls and billowing pleated pollera skirts (the traditional—and actually quite costly—"chola" dress of Aymara indigenous women, actually modeled off of 17th-century European fashions, complete with tiny bowler hats pinned at a fashionable angle atop the two customary long black braids).

After winding down switchback roads into the valley—if one can call it that at 12,500 feet above sea level—in which La Paz lies, we arrived at the Methodist Evangelical Church's colorful, sprawling compound. It contains K-12 schools, a gymnasium, basketball courts and a soccer field, an hospedaje (dormitory) for students from the country (where I am living), the national church offices, and other buildings I have yet to be able to name. In a common room on the first floor of the hospedaje, a big banner awaited me with the words "DEAR SISTER SERY, WELCOME TO BOLIVIAN UNITED METHODIST CHURCH, METHODIST’S WEMEN" and a heart to top it off. I was serenaded with a customary welcome song by the FEFEME women, two pastors, the American missionary in charge of volunteers, a Quechua lay-leader from the countryside and a young man who lives at the hospedaje, accompanied by guitar and charango, whose lack of tuning with each other ceased to sound problematic after everyone started singing and clapping. A FEFEME woman placed a beautiful garland of fresh-woven flowers and greenery around my neck. If it is true what one of the only other American missionaries here later told me about Aymaras' remarkable ability to follow all rules of courtesy without letting on a single iota of their personal feelings, these people are exceptionally skilled at simulating all the warmth in the world with their smiles. I was practically floating in a blissful cloud of welcomeness. This was helped by the fact that they all stood up one at a time to offer formal speeches about how glad they were to receive me here, how much I could count on them as friends and hermanos and hermanas (brothers and sisters) in the Faith, and how much they would pray for God to be with me in everything I do here and to use me to carry out marvelous works.

I can only hope I have the presence of mind to stay that connected to my faith. I am trying to balance this, of course, with consistency in my rigorous attention to details and the use of my critical scholar's tools. I don't mean to suggest that the integrity of the latter are antithetical to the integrity of my faith, but rather they are absolutely essential to it. Regardless, this degree of accountability that I expect of myself on a daily basis here is a lot to contend with. Perhaps too much.

My room in the hospedaje is lovely, if sparsely furnished. Here is a view from its large picture window. It's views like these that makes La Paz seem somewhat enchanted to me, even if it's that messy, clanging, solicitous South American brand of enchantment. I've barely been able to take in the feel of the place, though, because the rest of the day was marked by some mean altitude sickness. 10:30-4:30 was a blur of restless sleep, followed by my first food since 8:00 AM, during which my waning appetite, my nausea, and my throbbing headache only worsened. Over our late lunch at what she described to me as a "Bolivian Starbuck's," the American missionary I had originally contacted about doing my research here filled me in on all her own intricate gripes and struggles with the church, its leaders, and its laity during her seven years here. Of course, not all of this has to be my experience, but it was certainly a sobering reality check for the idealistic visions I had been nurturing after my blissful and surreal morning, imagining that I would be sharing my Great Love of God in an egalitarian state of communitas with everyone the whole time I'm here. Clearly, a reality check was inevitable.

I am now holed up at the aforementioned missionary's house, which she shares with her considerably well-off Bolivian husband. I am recovering well from altitude sickness after taking some pills and resting in a semi-comatose state while listening to the well-off Bolivian justify his conservative capitalistic Christian ethics in a very convoluted manner (notably, he supports the current socialist, indigenous president, Evo Morales, because Evo and my host, apparently, are both "socialists," not "communists.") I interjected what I thought were excellent and concise 10- to 15-word arguments in Spanish every five minutes or so, but of course this rosy self-perception could have something to do with my aforementioned comatose state, and I also think my arguments were too radical to even fully register on his radar, whether they were theoretically sound or not.

One thing is clear from my long, eventful, uncomfortable, yet somehow strangely peaceful first day. There is no way I will ever be able to write enough to feel that I am capturing everything here, neither in my field notes nor on my blog nor in my journal. I will try to spare my blog readers, then, from the sort of detail I am faithful to in my field notes, and will instead write more at random and in-depth on interesting moments of breakthrough and/or absolute failure in my research, perhaps a few personal revelations, and some of my reflections on striking differences as well as surprising similarities I observe between my Bolivian informants and myself/my culture.

This picture is a view from an upstairs window of this upper-middle-class home I am sleeping in tonight. It seems the only things I have had the where with all to take pictures of today have been views from windows. This makes sense to me on some symbolic level. I have yet to truly dive into the world of La Paz, of the leaders and members of the church, of Christian women's lives. Right now I am just looking out of framed windows of courteous introductions and brief, oversimplified cultural run-downs. Appropriately enough, in my second picture of my Bolivian adventure, you can see from a distance the studded lights of the poorer communities that get poorer and poorer the higher you get up the mountains, giving way to golden sunlight slipping away from the tips of the most distant peaks, and the snow of the great Mount Illimani where I assume no one lives, but I could be quite wrong.

A Note on Naming

2010-02-13T01:20:00.015-04:00

"Kristiyanu timpu" means "time of the Christians" in the Bolivian indigenous language of Aymara. In her work on the particular nature of Christianity in the highlands of Potosí, Olivia Harris demonstrates how the phrase not only reflects a linguistic mutation of the Spanish "tiempo cristiano," but also a deeper sort of cultural transliteration. This adapted concept of Chrisitanity accepts the tradition's infamous claims to universality at the same time that it subverts them: as "Kristiyanu timpu" affirms that we are living in the Time of the Christian, it also renders Christianity relative by claiming the Spanish conquest as the point of the Aymara's own cosmological origin as a Christian people.

Does this imply that Christian Aymara are biding their time until this era of conquest and domination, along with its pushy evangelical religion, is over? On the contrary. The concept of "Kristiyanu timpu" may dislocate the dawning of the Christian age far from our standard year 0 A.D., yet it also embraces Christianity as something that has existed and should exist for the Aymara as long as they are around to praise the almighty Solar-Christ that has come to save them. Does this then signal the corruption and loss of authentic indigenous culture? Perhaps. Yet the more I learn as I prepare for my trip to Bolivia, the less sure I am that the collision of two cultures could ever be boiled down to a simple economy of gain and loss.

In his ethnography of the K'ulta, a rural Aymara-speaking community, Thomas Abercrombie squarely criticizes the common desire to frame indigenous cultures as pure, cohesive and admirably enduring entities that have withstood the manipulative evangelization and brutal ethnocide that seem invariably to accompany European conquests. He points out that in doing so, we in fact sell indigenous peoples short of the same sort of complex engagement in historical processes that we take for granted in our more "advanced" societies. While it might be politically advantageous for indigenous groups (and the groups that advocate for them) to claim the essential uniqueness, wisdom and ethnic-y charm of indigenous cultures, it ignores the fact that the indigenous peoples of Latin America have, for the past 500 some years, made various aspects of the culture of the conquerors their own, just as the Aymaras living in what is now Bolivia surely did, to some extent, with the Inca conquerors that came before the Spaniards. Indeed, Abercrombie contends that "'ethnic' cultural survival in the Andes [has] been shaped by native peoples’ active and collective engagement with, rather than flight from, the power-infused cultural programs of state elites" (Pathways of Memory and Power, p. 22). How else to explain the indignation of Abercombie's K'ulta informants when he suggested that they had a (pre-Colombian) pre-Christian history? While they acknowledged that there was another race of people who had been devastated by the coming of the Sun-Christ, they were not descended from these people, and "[as] far as the K'ulta are concerned, they are surely Christian, and so, too, were all their ancestors" (p. 117). Abercrombie goes on to point out that a history of the defeat of a culture of "noble savages" by resource-hungry, Bible-pushing conquerors "is one that Spaniards...may like to hear but it is not so edifying to the conquered" (p. 118). Rather, the K'ulta have their own way of doing history, and "it is not, as one might suppose, simply to deny an ancestral defeat, but to learn from it, turning their past to their own purposes, as we do."

What does all this mean about my impending trip to Bolivia to study women in the Methodist Evangelical Church? It means that there are no easy dualisms (or even tripartites or quadruplets) in which to fit religiosity, ethnicity, and so many other aspects of human culture. Protestant churches might be considered doubly "imperialistic" as they only arrived in Latin America in full force about a half a century ago, and have since been engaged in what some might call a second wave of Christian conquest as they gain converts by the thousands to what might seem to be very North American versions of Christianity. And while many anthropological studies I have read tried to explain this phenomenon by examining various pragmatic benefits of joining one of these newly growing churches, they don't pay much respect to the way believers themselves might articulate their faith. Most people don't decide to join a church based on a rational weighing of economic, political and social benefits. Rather, most would cite as reason enough their sincere love, devotion, and belief in the God they worship and the religious community in which they do so.

Thus, I am calling this blog "Kristiyanu Timpu" to respect the sense of meaning that living in a Christian era can and does provide for many Aymara believers. Perhaps, after all, our world will be torn down and remade again by that great relativizing force of time, leaving only mythological traces of the previous cosmological orders of major world religions like Christianity. Then we will have to rely on some historians in some distant future to piece together the nature of the Kristiyanu timpu. For now, then, I'll enjoy it while it lasts, and put myself to seeking out the deeper truths of this Kristiyanu Timpu. For the sun of the Solar-Christ is sweet on my face.