New Languages of the State: Indigenous Resurgence and the Politics of Knowledge in Bolivia – By Bret Gustafson

Abstract

Reviews the book, New languages of the state: Indigenous resurgence and the politics of knowledge in Bolivia by Bret Gustafson (2009). This book development of bilingual intercultural education (EIB) among one of Bolivia’s largest Indigenous nations, the Guarani. The book is organized into three parts with seven chapters and six 'interludes,' short segues contributing welcome narrative flow across the chapters’ disparate ethnographic sites and historic periods. This book is primarily a cultural anthropological investigation of Guarani political mobilization’s interface with international development and the Bolivian state. Although the ethnographic lens in the book focuses less on classrooms and schools than on government ministries, development agencies, teachers’ union and Guarani movement spaces, the author skillfully shifts and refocuses his work’s temporal and spatial scope across many sites, capturing these diverse actors’ interventions in education reform. The effect is a rich composite picture of the processes unfolding around education policy in Bolivia. Throughout the book the reader encounters portraits of the individual actors who embody distinct articulations of EIB, making for excellent reading and also underlining Gustafson’s point that EIB is not merely a policy but a network of practices. These portraits also complicate easy dichotomies between Western and Indigenous epistemologies, underscoring the hybrid character of the practices unfolding around EIB. Rather than reproducing such a dichotomy, the author explores ' the production and deployment of indigenous knowledge not as a symbolic or textual corpus, but as a hybrid, networked form of sociopolitical and cultural practice that articulates with other forms of knowledge production and practice'. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)