Inventing Indigenous Knowledge

Archaeology, Rural Development and the Raised Field Rehabilitation Project in Bolivia

Lynn Swartley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780415935647
• eBook ISBN: 9781317794202
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume provides a multi-sited and multivocalic investigation of the dynamic social, political and economic processes in the creation and implementation of an agricultural development project. The raised field rehabilitation project attempted to introduce a pre-Columbian agricultural method into the contemporary Lake Titicaca Basin.

CHAPTER ONE
Introduction

RAISED FIELDS ARE A FORM OF INTENSIVE AGRICULTURE THAT WAS IN widespread use by the inhabitants of the Lake Titicaca Basin during pre-Hispanic eras. However, it was not until the advent of high resolution aerial photography, which provided detailed images of the wide distribution of these pre-Hispanic raised fields, that research on this ancient technology began to generate increasing interest among geographers and archaeologists (Smith et al. 1968; Erickson 1988a). In the early 1980s, North American archaeologists working in the Lake Titicaca Basin of Peru and Bolivia led teams in the excavation of pre-Hispanic raised fields (Erickson 1985, 1987, 1988a; Kolata 1986, 1991, 1993). Raised fields are a system of raised bed agriculture that was practiced extensively throughout the Western hemisphere in the pre-Hispanic past (Turner and Denevan 1985; Smith et al 1968). Remnants of pre-Hispanic raised fields are found throughout North and South America, though they are most common in Central and South America (Parsons and Bowen 1967; Turner 1974). Raised fields had virtually disappeared by the arrival of the Spaniards (Graffam 1990, 1992; Seddon 1994) with the exception of the floating gardens of the Aztecs in Mexico (Armillas 1971; Coe 1964).¹

Raised fields are elevated platform beds that raise plants above the waterline in the seasonally inundated land of the high plains that surround Lake Titicaca in Peru and Bolivia (see Figure 1—Wankollo Raised Fields). A key component in the construction of the fields is the building of canals that surround the fields on all sides. The canals collect and hold excess water, retain sediments and soil eroding from the planting surface, and generate nutrients for maintaining soil fertility on the fields by creating a green manure in their stagnant waters (Erickson 1988a; Carney et al. 1996). Researchers have also found that if adequate water levels are maintained in the canals, the water retains solar heat during the day that is released at night creating a microclimate effect that helps protect plants from frost damage on the excessively frost prone plains of the lake basin (Kolata and Ortloff 1996; Sánchez de Lozada 1996).

By the mid-1980s, excavations of raised fields in the Lake Titicaca Basin led to practical experiments reconstructing the fields, with the goal of better understanding the function and productivity of the fields in order to identify the social organization and economic potential of pre-Hispanic societies. These initial experiments produced amazingly positive results, with the newly reconstructed raised fields offering extended protection to young plants from frost and producing impressive initial yields, often several times as much as the regular dry flatland fields that contemporary farmers cultivated (Erickson 1988a; Kolata et al. 1996). The high production yields of these early experiments engaged the interest of agricultural researchers and social scientists.

However, there were other factors that gave raised fields an instant appeal to researchers and development workers, both in Bolivia and abroad. Not only were the fields highly productive per unit of land cultivated, but they were also considered an “indigenous” and ancestral form of knowledge that had been rediscovered through the work of geographers and archaeologists. Since the fields were labeled as “indigenous agriculture,” they came to be considered an aboriginal form of agriculture that was native to the lake basin. This stands in sharp contrast to the “green revolution” agriculture that was perceived as a foreign, Western style of agriculture. Examples of Western agriculture include farming machinery and chemical soil additives, as well as Western methods of agriculture such as monocropping. The rediscovered raised field system was promoted as indigenous, not needing any chemical soil additives, and using only manual labor. The ancestral and indigenous pedigree conferred to the raised fields led researchers to uncritically assume that the fields were ecologically compatible with the lake basin environment; the fields were native to the lake basin, thus it was assumed that they were a natural fit with the social and physical environment of the contemporary agriculturalists.

The representation of the fields as indigenous agriculture also coincided with the “indigenous knowledge” and “sustainable development” trends in academic theories of development. The concept of sustainable development attempts to incorporate environmental concerns into the development agenda by making them integral facets of development, development policies, and development projects. This new environmental component of development policy came to be called sustainable development. Linked to this trend towards sustainable development was a coinciding interest in theories of development that privileged local or “indigenous” culture and knowledge. As I will argue, the linking of sustainable development and theories that privilege indigenous knowledge is partially due to North American and European preconceptions of Native Americans as being innate environmentalists and conservationists. Krech (1999) argues that North Americans constructed an image of Native Americans as “ecological Indians” who understood their environment better than Europeans, and whose cultural practices were more closely tied to nature conservation.

As North American and European development agencies were celebrating indigenous knowledge as a possible solution for the new sustainable development trend, in Latin America there were increasing demands for indigenous social rights. Indigenous social movements were widespread across Latin America in the 1980s (Hale 1994), with the Katarista movement led by Aymara speaking intellectuals gaining political power in Bolivia in the late 1980s (Albó 1987, 1994). As the Kataristas gained power in Bolivia, many of the traditional parties of the country soon began adopting and integrating indigenous symbols and discourse into their own political platforms (Albó 1994; Rivera Cusicanqui 1993; Van Cott 2000a).

These simultaneous and interconnected trends in environmentalism, sustainable development, and interest in indigenous knowledge in Europe and North America, as well as the concomitant rise in indigenous social movements in Latin America, created an ideal context for raised field agriculture to capture the attention of development workers and development agencies in Bolivia, the U.S., and Europe. By the late 1980s, several archaeologists and development NGOs, both in Peru and in Bolivia, were interested in reconstructing and rehabilitating raised fields in contemporary Lake Titicaca Basin communities. In Bolivia, the NGO Fundación Winaymarka, headed by the director of the Bolivian National Institute of Archaeology, led efforts to rebuild the raised fields. By the early 1990s, this NGO had recruited 55 Lake Titicaca Basin communities in Bolivia to participate in the raised field project and had reconstructed over 94 hectares of raised fields.

The reconstructed raised fields were hailed as an instant success story and news of the wondrous rehabilitation of ancient raised fields made it into North American newspapers, a National Geographic special, and into anthropology and archaeology text books for college students in the United States. In all of these public forums, the fields were represented as offering bountiful crop production far superior to the techniques of contemporary farmers of the Lake Titicaca Basin. A number of scholarly works (Erickson 1992a; Kolata et al. 1996) hypothesized that this ancient indigenous technology contained a possible solution for increasing the agricultural production of contemporary smallholder farmers in the Lake Titicaca Basin.

Raised fields were portrayed as superior to the production increases achieved by the costly application of green revolution chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The high productivity on raised fields was attained through the application of an “all natural” and “organic” method of cultivation that had been practiced by indigenous peoples who had inhabited the Lake Titicaca Basin over a millennium ago. Raised fields cost little to build (except for the manual labor of the farmers), needed few production inputs besides seed and access to land, and supposedly were capable of continuous cropping without the need for long fallow periods as normal potato fields required.

In addition to the economic appeal of the raised fields, they also acquired symbolic value as a symbol of indigenous culture and heritage. In Bolivia, the raised fields were associated with the pre-Hispanic Tiwanaku civilization of the southern Lake Titicaca Basin. The epicenter of Tiwanaku, and what has been called the “Tiwanaku heartland” (Kolata 1986), lies within the borders of the current nation-state of Bolivia. The site and civilization of Tiwanaku are a symbol of the contemporary Bolivian nation-state. The pre-Hispanic raised fields, which were popularly associated with the Tiwanaku civilization, also became symbolic of national cultural heritage. Furthermore, the fields were considered in Bolivia to be an agricultural method of “los descendientes de los antiguos tiwanakotas” (the descendents of the ancient people of Tiwanaku)(Rojas-Velarde 1996:1), because most archaeologists believe that the Aymara people who now live in the Lake Titicaca Basin are the descendants and rightful inheritors of the former Tiwanaku polity (Browman 1994).

I argue that the raised fields were an “invented tradition” created by archaeologists who were investigating and experimenting with the ancient remains of raised fields. I use the term invented tradition to emphasize the set of practices and social organization that archaeologists proposed for building and cultivating the raised fields in contemporary communities. The social organization and methods of rehabilitating raised fields reflected the values of the archaeologists, while overtly implying that these values shared continuity with the pre-Hispanic past (Hobsbawm 1983). I argue that the contemporary practice and social organization of raised field development reflected preconceived notions of indigenous peoples and the peasantry in Latin America. Raised field agriculture was not an actual system of knowledge that was intact and in practice by contemporary inhabitants of the Lake Titicaca Basin. The contemporary practice of raised field agriculture was an invented tradition, which maintained ethnic and class boundaries through the symbolic appropriation of the past.

In addition to the symbolic value of raised fields, there were also social and economic factors that caused problems for the contemporary rehabilitation of raised field agriculture. When proposing that raised fields be rebuilt and rehabilitated, archaeologists placed much more emphasis on the notion that raised fields had been used extensively over a long period of time in the distant past. Thus, archaeologists concluded that raised fields were ecologically well adapted to the harsh, high altitude environment of the Lake Titicaca Basin. Less attention was given to the social, political, and economic contexts of raised field use, which had changed drastically since the height of pre-Hispanic raised field cultivation in the past. Therefore, a second goal is to explore and explain some of the social, political, and economic factors that conflict with and constrain raised field cultivation in contemporary Bolivian communities.

I arrived in Bolivia in May of 1994 to do initial reconnaissance research for my doctoral dissertation on the social economics of raised field cultivation as it was being practiced in contemporary Bolivian communities. Once in Bolivia, I joined a team of researchers hired by the Inter-American Foundation (IAF), which had been one of many organizations that had funded various raised field rehabilitation projects in Peru and Bolivia. The research team was contracted by IAF to do a survey of a dozen communities that had participated in the rehabilitation project conducted by the NGO Fundación Winaymarka, to assess the implementation and relative success of the rehabilitation project. During the course of fieldwork with the team, which was carried out over my two-month stay in Bolivia, it became apparent that the raised fields had not been quite the long-term success that initial experiments and reports had indicated. Many of the communities that had built raised fields in the late 1980s and early 1990s had seen sharp declines in production in recent years, and some raised fields had already been abandoned and returned to fallow.

By March of 1996 when I returned to Bolivia to begin dissertation fieldwork, the NGO Fundación Winaymarka, which had had an office and several workers in 1994, was no longer building raised fields and had completely disbanded. Upon my return to the countryside and the Lake Titicaca Basin, it was immediately apparent that all of the communities that had participated in the raised field rehabilitation project with the NGO Fundación Winaymarka had discontinued cultivation of the raised fields. Academic and development interest in the raised fields also seemed to have tapered off. For example, in 1994 Bolivian archaeologists and rural development workers who knew of the raised fields had been eager to talk about them and had discussed them with some pride as a Bolivian agricultural success story. However, by 1996 their enthusiasm had waned. In 1996, I spoke to many of the same Bolivian archaeologists and development workers with whom I had spoken to previously and who had been interested in the raised fields. Yet many of those who I re-interviewed in 1996 were no longer interested in the raised field project and in recovering an ancient indigenous technology, even when that knowledge was depicted as a uniquely Bolivian heritage.

Why had the raised fields been abandoned? Why did the development groups who had implemented the raised fields in Bolivia consider them a failure in 1996 when they had produced such prodigious initial yields? Why was the development of raised fields as a form of indigenous knowledge so appealing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but less so by 1996? It is the asking and the answering of these questions that forms the basis of this work.

This book is not an ethnography of “the Aymara” nor is it strictly an account of rural economy or rural life in Bolivia. It is a multi-sited and multivocalic investigation of the dynamic social, political, and economic processes in the creation, implementation, and eventual demise of an agricultural development project. The raised field rehabilitation project attempted to introduce a pre-Hispanic agricultural method into contemporary Lake Titicaca Basin communities in Bolivia. Rather than simply investigating why the project did not work and trying to put together the broken pieces of the puzzle from the perspective of a failed development project, I take a broader look at the project from the perspective of Bolivian political and economic history. I establish the contexts of the raised field project by exploring the social, political, and economic trends leading up to the implementation of the project, such as the rise of ethnic politics in Bolivia, the economic crisis and structural adjustments of the mid-1980s, and the concurrent shift towards international development agendas emphasizing the environment and ecological sustainability.

To find a complete and detailed explanation of the rehabilitation project, one must unravel the story of how and why the raised field rehabilitation project came to be considered potentially “successful” and “appropriate technology” for the Bolivian highlands in the first place. One has to ask the question, why were raised fields so appealing to North America researchers and Bolivian NGOs during the 1980s and early 1990s? What was the mystique and appeal of resurrecting an indigenous knowledge that had held such a captive audience with the archaeologists who experimented with the fields and the development workers who attempted to reconstruct them on a large scale?

This book explores more than just the material factors in the life span of a development project. It considers the symbolic and cultural aspects of the project through an analysis of how academics and development groups represented raised fields and indigenous peoples. By interpreting the messages embedded in the representation of the raised field rehabilitation project, I reveal how these messages conflicted with the ambitions, goals, and desires of the Aymara smallholder agriculturalists of the Bolivian Lake Titicaca Basin. Using a diachronic approach, I examine the life cycle of the raised field rehabilitation project in Bolivia. From the “rediscovery” of this so-called lost technology, to its climax as a model of sustainable development and applied archaeology, to the forgotten and abandoned fields that dot the high plains today, raised fields have come and gone from Bolivia once again.

This work is structured by two fundamental questions. First, why did the raised field development project garner so much academic interest, media attention, and development support? The answer lies in unraveling the historical formation of several convergent processes such as the social and economic contexts of agriculture in Bolivia, emergent indigenous political movements that drew on ethnic claims to the past, and international development trends that culminated in the sustainable development of the late 1980s. Chapter Four analyzes the representations of the raised fields by development groups and academics that portrayed the fields as “sustainable agriculture,” “indigenous knowledge,” and “appropriate technology.”

The second question that frames this book is, how did the representation of raised fields—for example as “sustainable agriculture” and “indigenous knowledge”—conflict with the rural economics of agriculture in the Bolivian Lake Titicaca Basin? This question draws on the representations produced by academic researchers and development groups, and compares them with the economics of agriculture in the Bolivian Lake Titicaca Basin. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a community that participated in the raised field rehabilitation project sponsored by the NGO Fundación Winaymarka, this work examines agricultural production, land tenure, and access to labor for agriculture. Ultimately, I offer an explanation for why raised field agriculture was abandoned in communities that participated in the Bolivian rehabilitation development project after only 3 to 4 years of cultivation.

Representing Raised Fields as Indigenous Knowledge

I demonstrate how archaeologists and development workers represented raised fields as an indigenous knowledge—a form of knowledge defined in contrast to and distinct from Western scientific knowledge. Yet as many philosophers and social scientists have argued, the social foundati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One Introduction
• Chapter Two Ethnic Groups and the State: From Tiwanaku to National Revolution in the Lake Titicaca Basin
• Chapter Three The Contexts of Agricultural Development: Agrarian Policies, Indigenous Social Movements, and Sustainable Development
• Chapter Four “Inventing Tradition” and Development: The Representation of Raised Field Agriculture
• Chapter Five Traditional Agricultural Practices: Contrasting Representations of Raised Fields with Production Factors at the Local Level
• Chapte Six The “Myth of the Idle Peasant” Revisited: Access to Labor for Agriculture
• Chapter Seven Conclusion: Inventing Indigenous Knowledge and the Maintenance of Class and Ethnic Boundaries
• Appendix One Methodology
• Appendix Two Figures
• Bibliography
• Index