HLAS annotation: An excellent example of political anthropology, based on careful fieldwork in Quillacollo (a mid-sized provincial city in Cochabamba department), focusing on municipal elections during the 1990s. Like others, Albro argues that the rise of Evo Morales was largely due to slowly emerging political processes, primarily in the arena of local politics and the institutional structures introduced by decentralization reforms. The book's main contribution - and what sets it apart - is an empirically rich, careful analysis of how that process unfolded in one municipality. The emphasis on Quillacollo as a semi-urban, "peripheral" city provides a much-needed corrective to the traditional emphasis on major metropolitan areas or rural regions (thereby ignoring the "in-between" spaces many Bolivians occupy) and sheds light on the emerging "ethnicization" of Bolivian politics throughout the 1990s. [HLAS Contributor: Miguel Centellas]

HLAS annotation: In this book Gutiérrez Aguilar documents mass collective actions that took place in Bolivia between 2000 and 2005, and in doing so, she contributes not only to the history and anthropology of Bolivia but also to multidisciplinary scholarship on social movements. Intimately involved in Bolivian politics as an activist and radical intellectual, Gutiérrez Aguilar is uniquely positioned to write about these events; she also includes careful interpretation of data from interviews, political documents, and print media. She examines the Water War in Cochabamba in 2000; the overthrow of then president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in 2003; and the coca leaf growers movement in Chapare which resisted the US-led War on Drugs. The book is organized into two parts. Part I, "Community Uprisings and Grassroots Democratization," includes three chapters, each of which focuses on one of the cases described above. Part II, "From Governmental Collapse to Pachakuti's Suspension," also consisting of three chapters, considers the years between 2002-2005 when these movements coalesced. These popular indigenous uprisings against Bolivia's neoliberal and antidemocratic policies reverberated throughout the country and in many ways laid the foundation for the emergence of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) government lead by Evo Morales. The author considers the practical scope of each struggle as well as the "internal horizon," or the desires and intentions, which may only be implicit in the actions of individuals. Finally, she articulates some alternative "popular-communitarian" possibilities that were suggested by these social and political movements, but were not ultimately realized in the state-centered political projects of the Morales government. [HLAS Contributor: Krista E. Van Vleet]

HLAS annotation: This book gathers a series of ethnographic studies on Indigenous leaders in Peru, Brazil, Bolivia, and French Guiana who exemplify the creation of flexible and adaptable forms of representation to best engage with the rapid changes introduced in the Amazon by transnational extractivist practices in the world's "largest remaining frontier of natural resource exploitation, settler colonization, and financial speculation" (p. 7). Uncovering Indigenous perceptions of power and the relationship between culture and politics is at the core of this collection that seeks to explore the chasm between public discourse on Indigenous rights and state practices that prioritize fiscal balance over social policy. A theme that links all of the studies featured here is the stark contrast between the wealth of resources and the harm to the original inhabitants of this land. Most alarming are the numerous cases detailing how prospecting and drilling for oil and natural gas often takes place in areas that, until recently, were protected natural parks, and zones reserved for Indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation or in the initial phases of contact. A combination of poor education, economic hardship, disappearing cultural practices, and widespread corruption create a fraught and complex situation in which Indigenous leaders attempt to delicately balance cultural and territorial integrity and incorporation into a globalized society. There are no easy answers to this struggle. The narratives in this volume demonstrate that leaders who acquire the skills to engage with the state effectively often do so at the price of becoming so removed from their roots they no longer represent their communities' best interests. The authors call for a restructuring of the understanding of Indigenous politics in Amazon studies where an intricate landscape with multiple forms of Indigenous leadership lies at the junction between decolonization and participatory democracy. This book should be required reading to scholars of Amazonia, Indigenous politics, and applied and practicing anthropologists and their collaborators. [HLAS Contributor: Isabel M. Scarborough]

HLAS annotation: Babel's study demonstrates how linguistic theory combined with long-term ethnography can yield a detailed scan of the intricate relationships among regional, gender, political, ethnic, and class identifications and affiliations. Switching between first-person accounts of her experiences during nearly two decades and the voices of her consultants, Babel paints a picture of life in a rural Bolivian town. The town of Saipina, located in a valley between the country's Highlands and the Amazon and Chaco Lowlands, is a point of contact between the two regions that are culturally, ethnically, politically, and economically distinct. Babel uses language morphology and speech contact features between Quechua and Spanish to tease out how people in the region - and in Bolivia more broadly - build their cultural communities within a nation known for its Indigenous diversity. The author examines binary oppositions through a series of situated practices and discourses that craft the categories of social identification for Saipina's residents. The categories are analyzed as part of a semiotic field showing contrasts between binaries and defining the community's social norms. More importantly, the binary pairs and semiotic alignments showcase the highly asymmetrical relations of power in Bolivia's social system. Notable material in the book includes how Sapina residents firmly embed themselves into Quechua-speaking or Spanish-speaking camps (quechuista and castellanista), which transcend phenotypical features, dress, and other easily observable identity markers. The Indigenous identity that is most readily attributed to Bolivians is transformed and reinvented in Saipina as past "tradition," while its residents incorporate themselves into the nation state through an urban modernity negotiated by the younger generations working in nearby cities. The book provides a fresh look at the complexity of the rural/urban dichotomy, evidencing how an ethnographic description of "one particular place and one particular time" (p. 237) can provide an improved understanding of a society's system of meaning. [HLAS Contributor: Isabel M. Scarborough]