Asking the question "Where are Quirpinis going and why?" Stuart Rockefeller’s book is about movement and also about spaces. Balancing theory with ethnography, Starting from Quirpini provides a rich description of the significance and politics of movement for the Quechua-speaking community of Quirpini (Chuquisaca, Bolivia) in the mid-1990s.
Through a historically informed and multi-scalar analysis from small to large—from the intimate spaces of houses and community to the region, the Bolivian nation, the border with Argentina, and the metropolis of Buenos Aires—Rockefeller’s main theoretical goal is to examine the dialectical relationship among place, movement, and power. Specifically, he seeks to demonstrate how places—ranging from houses and cornfields to schools and churches, and from communities and their boundaries to destinations abroad—are not prior to social action, but are rather constituted through practical movements themselves. Due attention is paid to the precise patterns, forms, and contexts of such practical movements, whether this be in the circulation of corn between the chakra and the house, the ritualized visits during Carnival, or the movements of truck traffic (once llama caravans) in regional trade. Moreover, Rockefeller has carefully considered the constraints—political, economic, social, and even geographic—that shape such movements. Much of this involves the activities of the local mestizo elite of Quirpini’s bordering San Lucas, and the ways they have utilized their privileged relationship vis-à-vis the Bolivian state to constrain the movements of goods, information, and people to their advantage.
Rockefeller’s attention to power relations, seen through localized discourses of race and ethnicity, religious and civic morality, and economic progress, allows him to show how and why places are enacted and inhabited in particular ways, and how and why places evolve over time. By treating the movements linking places (themselves continually made and remade), Rockefeller succeeds in showing that there is no radical disjuncture between scales (i.e., that what happens in the house or cornfield is intimately linked to what is happening elsewhere, even abroad). In the end, Rockefeller is able to show that although "community" (i.e., Quirpini itself) might be "ephemeral," it is nonetheless significant when Quirpinis variously invoke it across a range of settings.
By tracing the movements of Quirpinis across a range of scales, often intersecting and nested one within the other, Rockefeller has provided a rich ethnographic portrait of a region undergoing significant transformations (as of course it has been since at least the Spanish invasion). In this work, the reader will find this corner of Chuquisaca (if not Quirpini itself) registering a number of transformations in full swing in the mid-1990s. Among them are the ways the regional mestizo elite must negotiate its power vis-à-vis a growing Sindicato Campesino (and eventually the neo-liberal 1994 Ley de Participación Popular); the ways a proliferating evangelical Christianity challenges traditional Catholic-Indigenous practices and hierarchies; the ways an evolving commercialism (often a function of out-migration and the increase in cash and wage labor this introduces at home) challenges and/or shapes a traditionally egalitarian ethos in the comunidad campesina. The ethnography also provides a very useful portrait of what motivated out-migration in this area of Chuquisaca in the mid-1990s: effects of the collapse of the mining economy, environmental degradation/change, minifundio/shortage of land, and desires for cash income to purchase land/pay for fiestas.
As the book comes to an end, Rockefeller looks to be done doing research in the Bolivian Andes: his next project is an analysis of Bolivian participation in social movements in Buenos Aires. It is of course premature to determine whether these people do this as "Bolivian immigrants" or as "workers" among the Argentine working class.
It should be pointed out that in Rockefeller’s detailed analysis of the politics of movement for Quirpini, an important issue remains unexplored: what Quirpinis actually say about their movements across such multiple scales. After reading Starting from Quirpini, one is left wondering why Quirpinis are on the move, and how they say it. In Spanish? In Quechua? What vocabularies do they use? Missing in this ethnography are the voices of the agents themselves, individual Quirpinis who might well be caught up in various kinds of contradictions, conundrums, etc., and who may well have anxieties over the changes to their traditional way of life. What are the Quirpini ideologies of place/movement? Indeed, providing an analysis of how Quirpinis themselves frame their movements will reveal culturally- and historically-specific conceptions of just what is going on. What is the Quirpini ideology of "home"? How do they conceive of it in their own words? More could have been said about the consequences of these movements on a more individual level of analysis. Specifically, one is left thinking: how are individual Quirpini subjectivities produced by these movements and engagements? Also, how do Quirpinis talk about their collective subjectivity as a function of these movements?
Notwithstanding this lack of evidence at the individual or subjective level of analysis, Starting from Quirpini is an important contribution to the existing bibliography on the politics of movement. In addition to those with an interest in the social construction of place, this book will be of interest to those doing ethnographic work in the Bolivian Andes, to those studying Bolivians abroad (specifically in Argentina but also in Spain and in the U.S.), and to those interested in circulation, performance, indigeneity, nationality, and globalization.
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[Review length: 875 words • Review posted on May 4, 2011]