This book explores how Evo Morales’s victory in the 2005 Bolivian presidential elections led to indigeneity as the core of decolonization politics. Burman analyzes how indigenous Aymara ritual specialists are essential in representing this indigeneity in official state ceremony and in legitimizing the president as “the indigenous president.”

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1: Los aymaras Chapter 2: Colonialism and Decolonization: Experience and Narrative Part I: The Illness (Ay. Usu) Chapter 3: Strange Patria Chapter 4: Strange Being Chapter 5: Strange World Part II: The Cure (Ay. Qulla) Chapter 6: Native Being Chapter 7: Native World Chapter 8: Native Patria Conclusions Word list Bibliography About the Author

Candidly and with respect to those that may think that ‘tradition’ is timeless, this book experiences Aymara politics as re-membering. I think of this word as a conceptual practice, proposed by young Aymara intellectuals-politicians as a de-colonial practice of the self with which to bring to awareness that which denies their possibilities of exceeding the practices imposed by modernity, while at the same time using that which modernity offers to, precisely, emerge against the denial. The book is an ethnographically brilliant and carefully composed work in which Burman does not study the yatiris; he learns with them other ways of knowing and he thereby transforms ‘participant observation’ into experience and proposes a novel notion of methods; not a practice of collecting data, but a practice of knowing through fieldwork.