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A vivid ethnography of a group of students training to become schoolteachers in Bolivia and the challenges they face as they try to maintain their indigenous identity.
This vivid ethnography of Bolivian students explores the challenges they confront as they try to maintain their indigenous identity. In examining how the concrete practices of schooling shape student identities, this book looks at how the discourses and texts produced by students themselves are appropriated toward this end, and how students mobilize their own cultural resources to contest this process, critiquing and subtly transforming the agenda of state-run education. These issues are addressed as they are played out in the lives of young Native South Americans (Aymaras) studying to become rural schoolteachers in Bolivia, the poorest and most "indigenous" of all Latin American countries. It is a vivid ethnographic account of how these students confront the assaults which their professional training wages against their indigenous identity, as they alternately absorb and contest the ethnic, class, and gender images meant to transform them from "Aymara Indians" into "Bolivian citizens."
"The Citizen Factory is a testimony to the organic character of all ethnographic interpretation...This study of a Bolivian Normal School will challenge comparative politics and comparative education scholars to rethink their studies of political socialization. Moreover, fellow anthropologists will be drawn to [the author's] theoretical model for studying ideological hegemony and identity construction. In short, Luykx has produced an 'educational ethnography' that extends the genre itself." — Douglas Foley, from the Foreword
"The ethnographic descriptions are rich, and well embedded in history and in the broader social context. The author has done a very thorough study. The book shows the links between the larger social structure and day-to-day life. In fact, it shows the work people do to create (and sometimes contest) the larger social structure—in this case, gender, ethnic, and class identities." — Kathryn M. Anderson-Levitt, University of Michigan, Dearborn
Foreword by Douglas Foley
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Educational Theory and School Ethnography
Indigenous Peoples, Schools, and the Nation-State
1 Ethnicity and the Construction of Nationhood
From Conquest to Crisis: An Overview of Bolivia's Political Development
The Indigenous Metropolis: Urban Aymarasin La Paz
Popular Culture and "The Language Problem"
Obstacles to the Construction of a Unified and Unifying Bolivian Nationalism
Race and Class in the Nationalist Project
Official History and Popular Humor: Public Tropes of Ethnic and International Conflict
Finding a "We": Defining Lo Boliviano against a Hostile World
2 Rural Schooling in Bolivia
Roots of Aymara Education: The Struggle for Land and Literacy
Rural Education in the Twentieth Century: Government Takes up the Reins
Reverence and Resentment: Teachers and Rural Communities
On the Threshold of Reform
3 Student Life at the Normal School
"Peor que nada es quedarse...": Career Choices and the Lack Thereof
Students as Regulated Subjects
Dormitory Life
4 Curriculum and Identity
The Reproduction of Ideology in Schools: Socialization as the Interpellation of Student-Subjects
The Citizen in the Nation, the Nation in the World
Proletarian Professionals: The Ambiguous Class Identity of Bolivian Teachers
The Teacher in the Rural Community: Solidarity and Social Distance
Uneasy Positionings on the Field of Race-or, "We Have Met El Hermano Campesino and His Is (not?) Us"
Gender Ideology in the Normal School: Frozen Images and Structured Silences
Conclusion: Rural Education and the Race/Class Intersection
5 Commodified Language and Alienated Exchange in the Normal School
Pedagogical Praxis and "School Knowledge"
The Capitalist Mode of Symbolic Production: Schoolwork as Alienated Labor
6 Student Resistance to Commodification and Alienation: Silence, Satire, and the Academic Black Market
Resistance in the Classroom
The Linguistic Black Market: Illicit Exchange in the Academic Economy
Student Resistance through Expressive Practices
7 An Alternative Vision: Notes toward a Transformative Bolivian Pedagogy
Día del Indio, Los Pozos (August 1, 1993)
Socialization and the Multiple Subject
Political Practice and Popular Culture
Rehabilitating Marx: Hegemonic Subject Positions as Alienated Use Values
Building a Democratic Pedagogy
Schooling as Cultural Critique
Directions for Future Research
Structural Pessimism vs. Strategic Optimism
Appendix: Interviewed Students
Notes
Bibliography
Index