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Reciprocity and Realpolitik: Image, Career, and Factional Genealogies in Provincial Bolivia
Author(s) -
Albro Robert
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.2001.28.1.56
Subject(s) - performative utterance , realpolitik , politics , rhetoric , contextualization , sociology , ethnography , political rhetoric , indexicality , persona , reciprocity (cultural anthropology) , identity (music) , aesthetics , political science , social science , epistemology , law , anthropology , linguistics , humanities , philosophy , interpretation (philosophy)
In this article, I analyze the persuasiveness of ritual libations in provincial Bolivia as populist spectacles. During an era of extensive national reform, these libations are prototypical definitional performances within a changing regional political arena. I argue for an approach to the contextualization of factional politics that resituates both performance based theories of rhetoric and ethnographic treatments of life histories in a more comprehensively synthetic public interpretive frame. I treat libations as part of a local political process attuned to the perceived truthfulness of personal indexical references in performative frames. The plausibility of sponsors' self‐images turns on the potentially conflictual shadings of their public careers, shades often unintentionally generated by such spectacles, [political ritual, popular identity, life histories, indexicals, Bolivia]