A complex legal universe in motion: Rights, obligations, and rural-legal intellectuality in the Bolivian Andes.

摘要

This dissertation is an ethnographic and ethnohistorical study of legal culture in rural Bolivia. The author conducted fifteen months of research primarily in one province in rural Bolivia: Alonso de Ibanez in the north of Potosi Department. The dissertation has four major findings.;First, it is difficult to say that there are actually any discrete sources of law in the province. Rather, law is embedded in the ever-shifting processes and performances that are found in legal locations like the juzgado de instruccion and the house of the corregidor titular of Sacaca and the courtyards of the province's jilanqus and corregidores auxiliares. Nevertheless, these legal locations are not coextensive with the contours of the province's legal universe. "Law," rather, must be understood in Alonso de Ibanez as a fundamentally porous and historically contingent set of meanings and meaning structures. Second, ayllus still remain important for people in the province and continue to serve as fundamental ordering principles, although at smaller scales than previously thought and in competition with other social formations. The minor ayllu level has become the central unit of ayllu organization, which means that there is much more division and lack of uniformity in the absence of larger units of ayllu identity.;Third, the narrative of power relations in Alonso de Ibanez will have to be rewritten. In relation to legality, people living outside the town actually have more institutional options for advancing their interests, and people make strategic use of these options in ways that run counter to prevailing assumptions about the way power is diffused in the rural Andes.;Finally, because of the influx of non-governmental organizations during the 1990s, Alonso de Ibanez's legal universe was transformed through the introduction of western human rights discourse. More specifically, through the work of a legal services center that operated in the region in the mid-1990s, and the work of a prominent local rural-legal intellectual, people throughout the province have had their legal consciousness and identity altered.