Forged Communities and Vulgar Citizens: Autonomy and its Limites in Semineoliberal Bolivia

This article examines the impact of processes of political decentralization upon rural indigenous communities of the Bolivian highlands. Focusing on the creation of new rural municipalities, it traces the ways in which new imaginings and institutions of national civic life engage local modes of social production that have long entangled indigenous communities and subjects within the nation and beyond. This work discusses what these experiences of this emerging administrative environment can tell us about the texture of civic and political space under neoliberalism and its aftermath. I am particularly interested in a curious synergy between neoliberal modes of governance and indigenous techniques of community reproduction. The result, in the case outlined here, has been a surprising rescaling of the indigenous social order that both enacts and confounds neoliberal imaginings of indigenous democracy.