Enganchada

One of my favorite concepts from Feminist – particularly Mujerista and Womanist (black feminist) – theology (yeah, theology) is the “community of accountability”: that those of us working in academia must have communities that hold us accountable for our work and that keep us grounded – that prevent us from floating away on clouds of theory that don’t relate to real people’s lives.

Repeatedly throughout my visit, people I interviewed expressed their frustration and hurt at the number of researchers – especially foreign researchers – who conduct interviews, promise to keep in touch, and then disappear. They are viewed as aprovechando (taking advantage) and as personalista (ego driven by their own careers). People express their suspicion that I will do the same. Anthropologist Silvia Rivera has a scathing critique of Euro and American scholars working in the Americas – whom she views as elitist and co-opting postcolonial knowledge generated by Bolivia’s social movements to advance their careers in academia. As such, scholars are engaged in a kind of colonial enterprise themselves, mining Bolivia for knowledge and escaping off to their own enclaves.

Of course, people make similar critiques of NGO workers and other foreign aid programs that seem short-lived, paternalistic/neo-colonial, and self-interested. Political geographer Juan Arbona, who works in El Alto, recently told me about a project he and other Alteños are developing to try to prevent that pattern from repeating – creating a forum for foreign researchers to present their work back to the communities where they have worked, and demanding of those researchers a kind of compact to translate and return their work to Bolivia, where it can be discussed, critiqued, interpreted, found useful, appropriated or challenged and rejected.

I’ve been thinking about these issues as I find myself increasingly enganchada (hooked in) to friends’ lives through the compadrazgo system I described in an earlier post – particularly as a godmother of baptism now for two children (Mao and Sofia) and a godmother of rutucha (first haircut) for a third.

I’m also thinking about the challenges of maintaining those ties and cumpliendo mis responsabilidades (coming through on my responsibilities) as a godmother, friend and researcher in an era of multi-sited ethnography and as my own research interests may lead me to work in other regions of Bolivia and perhaps even in other countries…