Full Description
Bringing into dialogue the fields of social history, Andean ethnography, and postcolonial theory, The Lettered Indian maps the moral dilemmas and political stakes involved in the protracted struggle over Indian literacy and schooling in the Bolivian Andes. Brooke Larson traces Bolivia's major state efforts to educate its unruly Indigenous masses at key junctures in the twentieth century. While much scholarship has focused on "the Indian boarding school" and other Western schemes of racial assimilation, Larson interweaves state-centered and imperial episodes of Indigenous education reform with vivid ethnographies of Aymara peasant protagonists and their extraordinary pro-school initiatives. Exploring the field of vernacular literacy practices and peasant political activism, she examines the transformation of the rural "alphabet school" from an instrument of the civilizing state into a tool of Aymara cultural power, collective representation, and rebel activism. From the metaphorical threshold of the rural school, Larson rethinks the politics of race and indigeneity, nation and empire, in postcolonial Bolivia and beyond.
Contents
Preface xi
Introduction 1
1. To Civilize the Indian: Contested Pedagogies of Race and Nation 23
2. Lettered Aymara: The Insurgent Politics of Literacy and Schooling 70
3. Warisata: Forging an Intercultural School Experiment 110
4. Whose Indian School? Revenge of the Oligarchy 160
5. Instigators of New Ideas: Peasant Pedagogies of Praxis 192
6. Enclaves of Acculturation: The North American School Crusade 229
7. The Hour of Vindication: Rural Literacy and Schooling in the Age of Revolution 269
Epilogue. Silences, Remembrances, and Reckonings 315
Acknowledgments 339
Notes 345
Bibliography 423
Index
