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Indigeneity and Decolonization in the Bolivian Andes: Ritual Practice and Activism explores how Evo Morales's victory in the 2005 Bolivian presidential elections led to indigeneity as the core of decolonization politics. Anders Burman analyzes how indigenous Aymara ritual specialists are essential in representing this indigeneity in official state ceremony and in legitimizing the president's role as “the indigenous president.” This book goes behind the scenes of state-sponsored multiculturalist ritual practices and explores the political, spiritual and existential dimensions underpinning them.

La finalidad principal de este trabajo consiste en la descripción del lenguaje empleado en los ritos adivinatorios difundidos en las zonas de habla quechua y aimara de la cordillera centro-andina. En particular, se analiza el lenguaje utilizado durante los ritos oraculares de interpretación de hojas de coca. Los resultados de las investigaciones de campo – desarrolladas en Perú y en Bolivia – han identificado, en primer lugar, algunas fórmulas y estructuras lingüísticas establecidas como elementos nucleares del evento ritual. En segundo lugar, algunas formas esquemáticas de dialogar relativamente homogéneas. El trabajo representa una investigación pionera, ofreciendo una imagen coherente de un fenómeno comunicativo unitario, documentado, sin embargo, de manera fragmentaria en la literatura etnográfica contemporánea.

Nearly five centuries after the first wave of Catholic missionaries arrived in the New World to spread their Christian message, contemporary religious workers in the Bolivian highlands have begun to encourage Aymara Indians to return to traditional ritual practices. All but eradicated after hundreds of years of missionization, the'old ways'are now viewed as local cultural expressions of Christian values. In order to become more Christian, the Aymara must now become more Indian. This groundbreaking study of the contemporary encounter between Catholic missionaries and Aymara Indians is the first ethnography to focus both on the evangelizers and the evangelized. Andrew Orta explores the pastoral shift away from liberation theology that dominated Latin American missionization up until the mid-1980s to the recent'theology of inculturation,'which upholds the beliefs and practices of a supposedly pristine Aymara culture as indigenous expressions of a more universal Christianity. Addressing essential questions in cultural anthropology, religious studies, postcolonial studies, and globalization studies, Catechizing Culture is a sophisticated documentation of the widespread shift from the politics of class to the politics of ethnicity and multiculturalism.