Bolivian Duality: from religion to modernity

From noon on November 1st to noon on November 2nd is All Saints Day in Bolivia. If I’m not mistaken it’s more or less the same as Mexico’s Day of the Dead and I found it a beautiful celebration and time of remembering. I’m certain there are various traditions, but the one in which I participated in went as follows: by noon on November 1st you prepare a table in your home by filling it with candles, special occasion sweet breads (including bread people in photo), other favorite foods of your dead, glasses of alcohol, coca-cola of course, family photos if available, and anything else that might lure your ancestors to the table. Then you leave it out overnight as an invitation to dine. The next day there is a little remembering ceremony; ours included a time of silence for prayer or meditation, and then slowly eating specific pieces of food in remembrance of a specific deceased loved one. Afterwards, you head to the cemetery, decorate your loved one’s tomb, bring offerings, eat lunch with family, or play music at the gravesite. Or if you’re like me, get yelled at by an Aymara woman while your friend tries to take a photo of said woman, family and ancestral graves. (Yeah, one of my worst fears in Bolivia realized.) Regardless of the threatening woman, the cemetery was quite a site to see.

Although I’ve yet to really investigate the origin of the tradition, a friend first provided a very indigenous interpretation of the holiday explaining it in line with the Quechuan Cosmo-Vision: a two world cyclical system in which you’re born an infant and die old in this world, but born old and die young in the next. She also shared the history of Quechuas painting corpses even years after their death and how much this frightened the Spanish conquerors. Later however, a mestizo family I know, instead related the day to catholic tradition and thought that it came about intentionally to combat the evils of Halloween, (Halloween is little celebrated and even less appreciated in the country.) hence, November 1st: day after Halloween. So I’d venture to guess, that even if All Saints Day was originally a Papal Decree, years later syncretism finally had its say, as in all the colonized countries and today it is enjoyed by indigenous and mestizo alike.

But there is a new duality brewing in the nation. No longer is the debate: Catholicism vs. the Andean Cosmo-Vision.

As a student of International Politics, one of the reasons I love Bolivia is Evo’s foreign policy. Bolivia may be just a small country, and its leader may be friends with crazies like Hugo and Fidel, but he’s one of the only presidents I can think of trying to change the world order in favor of the long oppressed peoples, without the use of suicide bombers. But now that I’m here, it’s not an option to only observe the dreamy foreign policy of the administration, when domestic politics are marching by your door (literally). Unfortunately, however, I often find domestic politics extremely disheartening because from my foreign eyes, the national debate really boils down to what I identify as the new duality. On one side is indigenous traditions, neo-socialism, communal sharing, nationalizations, social movements, Evo. On the other side is private companies, private properties, standard world order, the law, industrialization, mestizo people, the department of Santa Cruz.

It’s Indigenization vs. Modernity and it seems very few people, perhaps myself included, have a balanced concept of what the two mean for Bolivia. And what’s worse, it’s not just a question of natural resource industry nationalizations vs. private companies. Sometimes I think the debate is really a disguise for racism.

Yesterday I sat in on a conference where school administrators were presenting their annual school management plans supposedly with the common theme of democracy and gender equality. An administrator from El Alto had a nice PowerPoint presentation with slides both in Aymara and Spanish. I was expecting to hear how his plans to improve the education of girls, and teach an inclusive curriculum. But I swear, all he talked about was how he wanted his students to greet one another, because that’s the Aymara way. I don’t want to belittle the significance of cultural greetings, but I hope they’re learning something more than cordiality. The presentations at the conference were a great example of the “if only we could return to the traditional indigenous ways everything would be perfect” syndrome.

On the other hand, in the city of Cochabamba, it’s now forbidden for families to enter the cemetery for All Saints Day. This year all festivities took place outside the gates, because the Prefect (governor) says the tradition is barbaric and shouldn’t be practiced anymore. He represents the other extreme, which will choose modernity in all areas of life, even if it has nothing to do with commerce and is really just a supplanting of cultures.

Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera says these divisions are nothing new, it’s just that now they’re exposed:
“We've always been divided. It's just that now we're seeing ourselves with all our divisions and tendencies. The illusion of a monolithic, cohesive unity has broken like a glass thrown to the ground. And it can never be put back together. We can't go back to living with illusions.” (http://americas.irc-online.org/am/4715)