Indigenous citizenship: historical struggles for equality and colonial difference in Bolivia

Abstract

This paper argues that historically, indigenous peoples in Bolivia have been aware of the limits of citizenship and Western politics in countering the exclusion of their life-world from modernity. However, notwithstanding this, they have not entirely discarded the concept of citizenship, but have supplemented it in novel ways in order to reinstate a place for their own life-world. Two key concepts guide the discussion. This first is the concept of equality inspired by Jacques Rancière’s emphasis on a presupposition of equality by the excluded, those who do not count, and the literature on ‘acts of citizenship’. The second concept is that of “colonial difference” invoked to modify the world that has excluded indigenous peoples and to reinstate a place for their own life-world. The paper suggests that the concept of  ‘acts of indigenship’ is a productive way to apprehend and analyze the transformative potential of combining concepts of indigeneity and citizenship.