Resumen de After Interculturalism in Bolivia. A Review of Bret Gustafson’s New Languages of the State: Indigenous Resurgence and the Politics of Knowledge in Bolivia (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009.)
Gustafson has written a magisterial book on Indigenous politics in Bolivia that should be required reading for all graduate students interested in Indigenous politics, decolonization, and political ethnography. That said, my heart goes out to those students who read Gustafson’s first book in hopes of finding a model for their dissertations. As they look for clues on how one actually does “engaged anthropology” in Latin America, they will find that Gustafson has raised the bar substantially for anthropologists (and for those of us non-anthropologists who think we do ethnography). To follow his example in writing this book, students will learn that they should not only become fluent in Spanish and conversant in anthropological and social theory, but also spend time working with Mayan linguists in Guatemala, study Aymara in the Andes, then spend years (fourteen in Gustafson’s case!) acquiring fluency in Guarani and working closely with Guarani and karai (non-Guarani) intellectuals.
