The city of the present in the city of the past: Solstice celebrations at Tiwanaku, Bolivia

Abstract

Tiwanaku, Bolivia, is a pre-Columbian archaeological site, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the capital of the Aymara world. Annually on the Winter Solstice (June 21), Tiwanaku and its nearby quiet village of the same name are transformed into a place of national importance. Urban Bolivian pilgrims who attend the Solstice participate in a project of becoming part of the Aymara, laying claim to the abstracted Aymara as the root of the nation. This ritual event emphasizes the Aymara as both descendents of pre-Columbian Tiwanakotas and as contemporary political actors, reinforcing the category of the Aymara as a coherent political body with deep historical roots. The Solstice is a fundamentally urban event transpiring in rural space that symbolically incorporates the growing - and politically powerful - urban Aymara populations of the cities of La Paz and El Alto. This ritual is a performance of a rural ideal enacted in a nonurban urban space: a pre-Columbian city recast as both archaeological site and contemporary rural village, a place linked simultaneously to one city of the past and another of the present.