Embodied Protests by Maria Tapias

Author:Maria Tapias [Tapias, Maria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Women's Studies, History, Latin America, South America
ISBN: 9780252097157
Google: iyFqCAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2015-05-15T04:07:07+00:00

Figure 3. Image of Bombori

Those who pray to Bombori often fear or seek protection from envy, believe they are ensorcelled (or at risk of being hexed), or find their problems or illnesses to be a “lost cause.” The trip to Bombori, for those who can afford it, is often a last-chance effort to address their maladies or ill fortune. In addition to visiting the shrine, many pilgrims go to Bombori because during the festivities numerous traditional healers, coca readers, and ritualists from all over Bolivia “set up shop” in the streets and are available for consultations and healing sessions. The pilgrimage thus often serves as one preventive or curative strategy in people’s long quest for well-being across different health sectors.

The narratives of Bombori devotees highlight the uneasy and embodied ways in which women reconciled their fears of being the object of envy with an emergent subjectivity that included desires for the prosperity and wealth promised by the Bolivian state. As detailed in chapter 1, the neoliberal economic reforms fostered free trade, encouraged privatization of many industries, and also propagated notions of individualism, “doing well,” and competing in the market economy. While entrepreneurship, self-reliance, and independence were valued and encouraged at the state level, public displays of ambition locally were viewed with ambivalence. When wealth was displayed, the act was often seen as an incentive or justification for friends and family to ask for favors and money. When these requests were ignored or went unfulfilled, the groundwork was laid for envy to flourish. The apparent (but not always secure) economic success of certain market women often indexed them in the eyes of the community as individuals who privileged their own self-interests, eroding in the process the local moral codes regarding social and material reciprocity. The rituals performed either during the pilgrimage or through devotion at home provided women with both public and intimate avenues to construct a strong religious identity and also obtain protection for their entrepreneurial endeavors. In the following pages I examine how devotion to Bombori was one mechanism to manage the social costs of success. The pilgrimage and hosting of local fiestas in the saint’s honor were a way to “finance” tranquility, secure a pathway for future economic success, and mitigate the envy that might flourish because of entrepreneurial activities.

Entrepreneurship among market women was not a new phenomenon, nor did it begin only after the implementation of the economic reforms. Several scholars have discussed the savvy and astuteness of Andean market women (Buechler, Buechler, and Buechler 1998; Seligmann 2004; Weismantel 2001). What had changed during my fieldwork, however, was an economic crisis that created increased competition between vendors, precarious living conditions, and erosion of people’s ability to make ends meet (Gill 2000). In Bolivia and throughout the Andes the reforms profoundly rearticulated the contours of social, community, and familial relations across class, gender, and ethnic lines. For example, in some households male unemployment caused by privatization was accompanied by the formation of new gender roles as women became

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