Technicalizing Indigenous Expertise

Prior to Christmas 2008, the Vice-Ministry of Planning and Coordination organized an internal meeting with its staff to discuss the content and meanings of the notion of vivir bien. The invited guest of the meeting in which I participated was Simon Yampara, whose ideas I presented in Chapter Four. The meeting was part of a series of discussions with indigenous intellectuals, anthropologists, and academicians such as Javier Medina and

Xavier Albó, who were expected to share their intellectual ideas related to the notion of vivir bien with the staff of the vice-ministry. The aim was to help program managers, consultants, and public servants to understand the new policy concept better and to give them practical tools to proceed with concrete programming. In a sense, these intellectuals functioned as brokers of knowledge between state bureaucrats and indigenous communities (Lewis and Mosse 2006). Instead of consulting Aymara, Quechua, Guaraní, Chiquitano, Mojeño, and other indigenous leaders and members of communities about what good life means for them, the bureaucrats of the vice-ministry opted for expert translation of indigeneity.

Nearly thirty people were packed into a small, glass-walled conference room off an open space office, but all quieted down when Yampara entered. The meeting was opened by a program manager in charge of development planning. He explained to the crowd of young, urban, middle-class consultants and public servants present that the Ministry of Development Planning wanted to collaborate with Bolivian intellectuals who have examined the notion of vivir bien, in order to learn from their indigenous expertise. He told us that his personal interest was to learn how to set up technical tools, such as measurable indicators, for this new indigenous policy idea. In an apologetic manner, he explained to Yampara that Western culture; of which bureaucratic practice, in his opinion, was part, is constructed upon the idea of change that has to be measured through technical means. Therefore, he said, for them as public servants, it is not enough to hear about worldviews and indigenous traditions on a general level; they had to be given concrete tools in order to work with them in practice. This was clearly a wish and a request directed at Yampara. The program manager also said that he would like to know how it would be possible in the future to compare Bolivia statistically with other countries, if the new policy concept were so different from universally comparable policy ideas (such as those related to economic growth or poverty reduction) used by earlier regimes.

As a fierce promoter of Aymara traditions and self-governance through ayullus, Yampara ignored the program manager’s requests and rather concentrated on explaining his understanding of the notion of suma qamaña. Before he started, Yampara gazed at the audience and stated sarcastically that it seemed that the people who had invited him were not taking the meeting seriously. “If this was a meeting to be taken seriously,” he said, “coca leaves would be distributed to each participant. We would share coca-leaves with each other as a sign of reciprocity and we would chew coca together as a sign of respect towards our ancestors and ancient Andean civilizations. Only after that we would talk.” Young consultants and public servants smiled briefly and glanced at each other bemused. They were clearly impressed by Yampara’s straightforward, and slightly aggressive, insight. After a pause, Yampara started to lecture those present. He pointed out, critically, that the staff of the ministry was working with the concept of vivir bien in a very “light” and superficial way. In his opinion, public servants were using the term in policy documents

and programming without any content: “The notion of vivir bien is just words on paper.” Additionally, the NDP, in his opinion, still reflected the “monocultural logics” of Western bureaucracies, though it should rather be based on the logics of plural Andean worldviews. After this harsh criticism, Yampara explained that, for him, the notion of vivir bien paralleled Andean cosmological convivence (cosmo-convivencia andina), with the notion of suma qamaña being the Andean paradigm of life. In respect to technical inputs, Yampara refused to answer. He criticized the idea of formulating measurable indicators about the notion of good life by saying that it is not possible to quantify everything. “Suma qamaña is life,” he said, and added that “it cannot be quantified”. In other words, Yampara was not willing to use his indigenous expertise in the translation of indigenous ideas into technical solutions.

After the meeting, I discussed with three young consultants in their office space about their views of the meeting. One of them, with a background in radical left-wing student movements, suggested that, in his opinion, many indigenous scholars, Yampara included, provide overly idealistic images of indigenous communities. He regretted that their research is seldom based on empirical analysis of the everyday lives of indigenous communities; in a politically motivated way, indigenous communities are too often represented as havens of harmony and reciprocity that have no internal hierarchies or conflicts. Another consultant, originating from a highland Aymara community, defended Yampara. He said that he could recognize the principles and ideas of suma qamaña that Yampara presented as part of everyday lives in Aymara rural areas. He himself, for example, had worked for a year as a community leader providing his time and resources to the decision-making of the community as was demanded by community rules concerning rotational leadership. By doing that, he had complied with his share of community obligations and could continue with his university studies at the capital.

The third consultant, a university-educated woman from an Aymara background, commented that she had great sympathies for indigenous intellectuals, such as Yampara, because their ideas, in her opinion, were responses to centuries of dominance by “Western universalist views of knowledge”. In her opinion, it did not matter whether Yampara’s ideas were solely ideals. What was important, she said, was that he was showing that indigenous communities have positive features, such as reciprocity and harmony, principles that each of us should, she said, cherish. The consultant with the left-wing background noted that they were referring here solely to Aymara perceptions and experiences. He said that lowlands indigenous organizations, among others, had already accused the Ministry of Development Planning of being too Aymara-centric, and the visions of suma qamaña that Yampara presented did not help to solve these tensions. He said that, as technical advisors and consultants, they were “screwed” because they should incorporate indigenous worldviews and ideas of good life from more than thirty indigenous groups into viable planning mechanisms and they had no idea how to do it. Yampara’s presentation had not

given them technical tools to solve these critical questions. Yet these young consultants at the Ministry of Development Planning were in charge of generating guidelines for the implementation of the notion of vivir bien throughout state institutions.

An important issue in the use of indigenous expertise was the role given to indigenous communities themselves. In the second sectoral workshop, two stakeholders from the education sector pulled me aside and wanted to have a walk with me outside. They wanted to share with me their worry about the lack of grassroots representatives in the sectoral plan workshops. This was an issue that had also caught my attention. When they had confronted Aguirre with the question of indigenous participation, Aguirre’s response, later repeated to me in an interview, was that the elaboration of sectoral plans was “a purely technical task”. Therefore, it was the task of public servants and technical consultants, he said, and added that “social movements and indigenous organizations were to be included in the planning processes later on, when technical issues had been solved”. This remark caused confusion and disbelief among the education experts who came to talk to me. They were outraged that development planning, in their opinion, still appeared to be solely a matter of technical exercise rather than a manifestation of new decolonized state practices. The inclusion of social movements and indigenous organizations later on, when priorities were already set up, appeared to them an example par excellence of the use of civil society participation as an instrument legitimizing top-down technical approaches: an issue all too familiar in Bolivian policy making (Booth and Piron 2004; Molenaers and Renard 2002; Morrison and Singer 2007). And yet, even during neoliberal governments, they commented, there had been a tradition of inviting indigenous experts to planning events. Curiously, the governing regime promoting indigenous ideas as state policy seemed to be neglecting the participation of social movements, indigenous organizations, and peasant unions in state technical affairs. There did not seem to exist systematic ways of incorporating indigenous views from the grassroots.