A draft on methodology Pablo Regalsky CENDA-Cochabamba, Bolivia. 2008 regalsky@gmail.

com Place and time methodology This methodology should be understood as the result of a reflexive analysis of my own practice. Even if part of what is explained here is about the research practice as it happened, not all this methodological discussion would have been possible before the research was done. Part of this discussion was defined through discussions with the research team that produced the edited volume {Calvo, 1994 #539}. Part of this methodological approach has also been defined through discussions in the CEIDIS Masters course on Territory and Interculturality (CESU-UMSS)1 since 1999. A great deal of this methodological discussion is more about doubts than about certainties. It seems to be a paradox that this study is about the collective subject, but that the deduction of many of its conclusions is the result of my solitary confinement in Newcastle. This geo-socio-anthropological longitudinal research is based on two case studies incorporated into a multiple scale analysis2. Continuous fieldwork was done during the last 10 years in the municipal sections of Ayopaya province: Morochata and Independencia, in the Department of Cochabamba. In order to answer the questions posed, this is a diachronic follow up of the process of incorporation of rural Andean communities into decentralized state institutions from when the law was first approved in 1994 up until the fall of President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada in 2003. To see how that process took place, in which ways it has affected indigenous communities and to analyse how the outcome at the local municipal level may have had repercussions in governability at different state levels and at national level as a whole, a combination of techniques have been used. This exploration looks at processes with timings: cycles of hegemony, waves of modification in relations of
1

CEIDIS Consorcio de Educacion Intercultural Sur Andino: Southern Andes Educational Consortium. CESU-UMSS: Centro de Estudios Superiores Universitarios de la Universidad Mayor de San Simon (Postgraduate Studies University Center at the San Simon Major University, Cochabamba. 2 [A]s major influences on geographical practice[t]he impact of strands of anthropology is notable, for it could be argued that it is in this discipline that the interplay of case study, method and theory has been most clearly articulated (Smith 1988:255)

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forces, social differentiation and mobility; and processes that imply place in social and physical space: ethnic boundaries, territorialisation, jurisdictions, management of vital space, access and control over resources. The context for municipalisation in connection with indigenous territoriality is analysed in three dimensions: the Andean indigenous peasant management of vital space, the configuration of indigenous national organizations based on the interconnections between networks of Andean communities with networks of urban population and the state, and the governmentalisation of those spaces attempted through the participatory legal framework. Peasantry politicization and the increasing electoralism is studied as part of the corporate tactics which have taken place since the return to democracy in 1982. I used a multi- or cross-disciplinary approach to follow up the two municipal case studies and the two processes already stated in the introduction. This can be named a human geography study with a socioanthropological perspective based on a politico-historical contextualization. {Olivier de Sardan, 2005 #1245:12} expressed it as development anthropology with entangled social logic approach that breaks away from the culturalist ideology that formerly predominated in this field and uses interactions as analyser of phenomena of broader import, examined on a variety of scales This qualitative research methodology, and perhaps all social science research in my limited understanding and experience, can be considered at three levels. The research techniques are the most obvious of those components and depend on the object of study selected, so techniques are defined by a second component or level. The second component or level deals with method of analysis, field of vision, and the unit of analysis chosen by the researcher. Those components relate to the research problem that concerns the researcher, while it is this problem that sets the questions to answer and the hypothesis to be tested or to be falsified {Popper, 1973 #1204}. However, this second level is closely related to a third level of analysis. The third component or level has to do with the position of the researcher, his own objectivation, i.e., how he perceives himself in his own standing and through his own action as a researcher and as an active subject with regard to the other actors he relates to in his own practice. Consequently, an appropriate methodology implies organising a proposal that leads to an adequate use of research tactics (techniques) in proper 33

connection with our field of vision whilst having an understanding of how these relate to our own conscious or unconscious strategies of positioning ourselves. In practice what happens is that the unconscious positioning of ourselves pre-determines our field of vision which leads us to a prejudiced selection of the object of study, a choice that the formal academic proposal will only rationalize ex-post. The question of method as it has been posed by {Pickles, 1988 #1200:236}: phenomenology turns away from the objects themselves and to the way in which the objects are given, is a selfdefeating solution to the question of how to approach inquiry. The acceptance of the limitations and uncertainties of social and geographical theory may lead instead to a solution like the one {Foucault, 1991a #595:81} proposes:
this difference is not one between the purity of an ideal and disorderly impurity of the real, but that in fact there are different strategies which are mutually opposed, composed and superposed so as to produce permanent and solid effects which can perfectly well be understood in terms of their rationality.

That rationality is not a hidden general meaning but sets of reasoned prescriptions, would in fact mean the researcher is always left in a position where she/he accepts not being able to grasp a totality. That would be a confession of irrelevance, and what Foucault is trying to find is the totality as it appears within the fragments, as does any self-respecting scientist. What he would not deny is the climate of uncertainty and the mood of self-defeat in the social sciences as quoted above. Any social process involves contradictions between the different actors bringing up change and uncertainty. Nevertheless the dramatic turnabout of the 1990s with whole political systems even empires collapsing and sites of struggle multiplying, scattering of antagonisms, indeed by a fragmentation of the political itself while experiencing the disintegration of modernity {Watts, 1991 #844:9} took a toll on academic pride. This made it even more difficult to understand the real and prompted some academics to take refuge in solipsistic discourses. {Punch, 1986 #1202:13,} when analysing the hidden political and moral agenda of fieldwork, states the social and political processes inextricably surrounding fieldwork are of crucial interest in scrutinizing the method itself. What he believes are the dilemmas associated with the area of fieldwork can be summarized crudely in terms of getting in and getting out, and of ones moral and social conduct in relation to the

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political constraints in the field (my emphasis). He goes even further and, using the word infiltration, compares the investigator with policemen and espionage agents. That is in fact the crude situation of the academic researcher from a middle class background, whether she/he is looking to the higher elites or to the lower subordinated strands of society, she/he is, in the end, outside: Of such marginal material are sociologist made(op.cit:52). The matter of objectivation Bourdieu proposed in the manner of an old sorcerer passing on his secrets, the Participant Objectivation methodology as a technique, a method, or, more modestly, a device (un procd) {Bourdieu, 2003 #1181:281}. As his proposal means the objectivation of the subject and operations of objectivation, and of the latters conditions of possibility it enables the social analyst to grasp and master the pre-reflexive social and academic experiences of the social world that he tends to project unconsciously onto ordinary social agents. His is a very substantial critique of the current narcissist reflexivity of postmodern anthropology so I will try to apply this critical methodology to myself. Therefore, I record here some segments of the story of this thesis and my personal practice for the purpose of examining the third more subjective level. The second and first components of the methodology should follow from this one, but in practice they are immediately interrelated one with another, as the practice is only one. How does methodology relate with the everyday practice of the researcher? This question cannot be answered just by giving recipes for techniques of research, techniques of interviewing and so on. It is the question of the positioning of the researcher in the everyday, as identified by that is, as the researcher has been structured through habitus, a process that results in the subject identifying himself with. That construction of the researcher, the process of the academic or not-so-academic socialisation process of the subject-researcher is what should be exposed to reflexive critique. As I suppose it should be in most cases, the whole construction of this research, not only this written thesis, has been a process sometimes hard of selfcritique. I am aware this may have disappointing results: Whether or not any work presents us with reality or illusion cannot be determined by knowing the life that the thinker has 35

led {Gouldner, 1971 #1198:id}. But at least the direction of his work could be understood by knowing something of the experience of the author. In any case, the experience of the author of this thesis dealing with the people in the province of Ayopaya is so much richer and more complex than what the present linear systematisation can encapsulate through the written formalisation of knowledge. So in order to have at least an approximation to ones own positioning, this thesis is a struggle for the objectivation of the authors own practice. For, surely men (sic) may be led to truth no less than to falsehood by their socially shaped personal experiences in the world. Indeed, there is no other way in which they can approach truth.{Gouldner, 1971 #1198:482}. Professionally speaking, I introduce myself as a geographical-anthropologist, as my drive to do research was always pulled by two main topics: territorialisation as a result of globalisation and an obsession to de-mystify the concept of culture and link it to that of space management. Yet, since I see myself as the result of a personal story that sets me in a long history of militant practice before I finish this thesis, I may not be as scholarly as usual. I am a second generation descendant of Jewish migrants who arrived in Argentina in the first decade of the nineteenth-century. At that time cultural integration was forced, I was born in the middle of the rise of nationalism, during Perons government, and through my school days I was educated into an adherence to the imagined community of Nation. In my early years, I developed a particular sensitivity to the question of territoriality in my relation with boys with national surnames (names of Spanish origin, that is), from an appropriated space of their own; to the sense of being alien and distant; and to the sense of borders. It was not until my long years in the field with Quechua communities in Cochabamba that I realized how much I was socialized into that sense of being part of something called a Nation that is nowhere, an abstract notion of authority and an abstract notion of territory. In 1975, after Deputy Ortega Pea was murdered and my own wife Gemni Serra met her death in a climate of political persecution, I left Argentina when it surfaced that my name was in the triple As black list for executions. At this time I was a factory union and university leader. I did not then seek shelter in far-off Europe, but rather headed for Gemnis country, Bolivia. At the time, Bolivia was being ruled by one of 36

the dictators of the Latin American military cycle, General Banzer. There, I married Canddy, a orurea living in Cochabamba, and had my first two boys with her. I joined a political group directed by Filemn Escobar, a mining leader of Trotskyite tradition. In 1979, when the peasant movement emerged suddenly to paralyse the entire country with a general road blockade of a magnitude unheard of for many centuries, I decided to retake anthropology and work to understand what was happening in the Andean peasant communities. A few years later, along with Zenobio Siles, I started a rural newspaper in Quechua as part of an engagement in actionresearch3. This work with Quechua communities became institutionalized when we founded CENDA (Andean Development and Communication Center) in 1985. The institutionalisation and bureaucratisation of this engagement with the Quechua communities went further when CENDA became an established institution and was recognized for its high level of action-research. In 1995 it became part of a network of four NGOs and four Universities from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru teamed up to join CEIDIS, the Intercultural and Development Consortium in the Southern Andes in 1997. The specific link between the University of Cochabamba (Universidad Mayor de San Simon UMSS) and CENDA was the institutional framework for organizing a Masters course on Territoriality and Interculturality that set the scenario for the research in the Ayopaya province. It also established an academic link with the Geography department at the University of Newcastle that is a key referent for this thesis. Interpretative premises Wolf protests that we actually know a great deal about power, but have been timid in building upon what we know. This has implications for both theory and method, for assessing the insights of the past and for raising new questions.{Wolf, 1990 #911: 586}. He describes
different modes of structural power, which work through key relations of governance. Each such mode would appear to require characteristic ways of conceptualizing and categorizing people. Key to the discussion of methodology is the insight that the arrangements of a society become most visible when they are challenged by crisis. The role of power also becomes most
3

This was an attempt to improve reflexive schemes as established by Fals Borda (1979) and emancipatory or critical action-research as advocated by Carr (1986) aiming to make explicit connections between critical rigorous research and social movements.

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evident in instances where major organizational transformations put signification under challenge.

The enactment of power always creates friction, disgruntlement, foot-dragging, escapism, sabotage, protest or outright resistance; a panoply of responses well documented with Malaysian materials by James {Scott, 1985 #951}. () Organization is key, because it sets up relationships among people through allocation and
control of resources and rewards. It draws on tactical power to monopolize or share out liens and claims, to channel action into certain pathways while interdicting the flow of action into others. Some things become possible and likely; others are rendered unlikely. At the same time, organization is always at risk. Since power balances always shift and change, its work is never done; (id:590)

I have followed and admired Eric Wolfs studies as he knew how to place anthropology in the site on which social scientists really stand, which is the worldsystem. Anthropologists, as authors seem to feel part of a different planet, withholding a secret known to no other, the secret of somebody who was there and unravelled that very particular culture {Geertz, 1988 #1174}. Imaginations abound to this end; I would just mention {Goudsmit, 2006 #1228} as an example of cutting a small community out of the historical and political context and applying a synchronic ethnological methodology in order to, supposedly, demonstrate the need to eliminate the state from social analysis (op.cit:214). Instead, I find people sharing a common human experience across boundaries. In the midst of a Quechua community my past as a worker helped me to identify with the community. Even my white skin and urban origin did not necessarily become a sign of otherness4. I had already glimpsed those same peasant Andean cultural codes in the metallurgic factory where I worked in Buenos Aires. Workers culture, with its sense of collective subject at least in those times when flexible labour had not destroyed its morale made me feel at home in a community where the same sense of collective subject permeates apparently deep within. At the same time, neoliberalism was also seeping into Andean communities. I admit that my period as a member of the working class greatly influenced the ways I understand Andean reality. I also acknowledge being struck by what sets Andean societies quite apart from working class culture: territoriality and indigenous jurisdiction.
4

I was nicknamed puka kunka in the community, Quechua for red neck.

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These programming of behaviour, these regimes of jurisdiction and veridiction [] are fragments of reality which induce such particular effects in the real as the distinction between true and false implicit in the ways men 'direct', 'govern' and 'conduct' themselves and other {Foucault, 1991a #595}

Following Foucaults stimulating teachings this thesis is a critical appraisal of the events, within its limitations of time, space and understanding, to find out which are the regimes of jurisdiction effectively working through the way people are conducting themselves in Bolivia. This is a period of time seismic and disruptive seen from the hegemonic point of view, but it is at the same time a period of construction, seen from the point of view of the social movements. This is an attempt to describe and understand what systems of practice are in place for certain peoples, at certain localities, to govern themselves in this particular period of time. The thesis tries to explain which rationalities (true or false) govern those systems of practices and how they may differ from the way the state programs (or attempts to program) the conduct of conduct of its subjects. This diachronic study is focused on trajectories rather than merely policy formation [which] more clearly demonstrates the influence of class coalitions over state policy {Winders, 2005 #1230:387}. Class coalitions are understood as dynamic processes of integration and disintegration that could take the shape of a molecular aggregation or disaggregation in periods of relative stability or assume mass proportions in times of crisis. Western social sciences try to unravel the world by training students to fragment it, while socializing them into a system of ideas the centre of that world-system uses to legitimise its hegemonic position. Insofar as the researcher does not identify where his research is coming from, he will be a blind instrument. In order to stop being blind, there is no other alternative but to see. In that sense I identify with researchers shaping, in noticeably different ways, dissimilar parts of the world-system approach {Hall, 2000 #1176}. In my research the topic of cycles of hegemonic rise and decline is present. Naturally, I have not reached the multi-scale dimension that Wolf masterly attained in studies like Europe and the People without History {Wolf, 1982 #1068}, but I must confess that to emulate him was my hidden desire and I must at least let my intention be known. Very briefly: the method understands each fragment as part of the world as a single system in a historic dynamic perspective. The meaning of each

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practice is understood through the lens of the positioning of the subject in a social multilayered system. The quality of the subject (individual or collective) corresponds to the relative situation and positioning of the observer. As already stated, the case study is one basis for the thesis. The case is integrated in a multiple-scale perspective and as a multi-layered object of study. Through the Ayopaya municipalities case, this study shows how the multilevel relations of Andean peasantry networks get intertwined with the social coalition of state. The long duration of the study allows us to capture different moments in this relationship, the ups and downs and not just a transitory expression of the relationship, in order to understand the effects of the Popular Participation law and municipalisation on communities territoriality; how the law enforcement affects the ways in which the communities organise their space of reproduction in Ayopaya. The Ayopaya case and the multilayered network of relations in which this case is situated provides valid evidence to generate a comprehensive understanding of the national municipal crisis in 2003. This thesis represents also an effort to overcome methodological individualism and understand what tools should be used to understand the construction of the collective subject and let it speak. Methodological individualism is grounded on the assumption that the basic unit of the social structure is the individual and social change is the product of individual purposes and their unintended consequences.{O'Neill, 1973 #1203:10}. While I do not subscribe to some collectivist methodology, I do understand that it is not possible to understand group behaviour from the sum of individuals behaviours. Social systems are the condition of existence of individuals and the activity of social systems can be examined through the differentiated social groups and layers that interact in historic settings of relations of force {Gramsci, 1971 #847}. The need to better understand each of these levels or to stress the decisiveness of any of them depends on the contingency of those relations of force. I examine a process of agglutination of Andean communities, which takes place under enabling conditions that in turn produce favourable relations of force with respect to other social actors. Reciprocally, favourable relations of force would help communities to agglomerate in a sort of molecular process into aggregate networks.

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The actor in this thesis is a collective subject Andean community networks , that is not expressed only through individual testimonies and discourses. The collective subject could be understood in its own language, which is basically the language of action, while the language of discourse through an individual bearer or emitter requires a different decoding. A most powerful example of this are the films of Eisenstein and Bolivian director Sanjines: Battleship Potemkin and El Coraje del Pueblo (Peoples Courage). The individual actors in both films are part of collectives, the argument is expressed through mass action, individual faces and actions being just illustrations of, and contributions to, a general atmosphere that challenges a social order based on (social) capital accumulation in individuals. The process of individualisation within Andean communities as a result not only of long term civilizatory processes, but also as the result of short term governmentality has been one of the questions/problems encountered by this research.. As a result it has ended up becoming one of its substantial conclusions: individuals with stronger personalities act as spokespersons for the collective, the collective meets forces of differentiation acting upon or through those individuals. Many such individuals are thereafter dragged against their conscious mind or incorporated with individual intention into specialised layers of intermediaries. This is how most strata of peasant leaders, some formed by outstanding community members, but most being first or second generation peasant migrants to the cities, become sooner rather than later a phenomenon of intermediation with the state. Understanding the dynamics acting upon the intermediary layers resulting in factionalism on the one hand and in state building from the bottom up on the other, is one aim of this thesis. What we mean by dynamics of internal differentiation and factionalism is a different process from that of the established intermediating layers developing outside the community. The vecinos, a layer of commercial and political brokers living in small urbanized villages, usually a municipal or provincial capital, are interrelated with community members but from the outside. Each one of these levels of intermediation feeds one another at the same time that they compete for their own space. One of the interpretative premises of this thesis is the production of tensions between individual and collective interests within the boundaries of the community: By this we are not talking about different people, each defending itself against the 41

other and each representing different interests, but the same people acting as individuals (that is, factions or families acting through the voice of individuals) and at the same time and the same people expressing themselves as a collective. The collective will is not the sum of the individuals or factions, but a level of conduct as a result of the construction of the collective. The construction of the collective is not necessarily a discursive space, but the result of the build up of relations of forces, the transformation of power relations between different social forces that will become expressed in particular locations. One extraordinary and simple example that helped me to understand this tension happened long ago in a community that held a general assembly to discuss the commercial intermediaries that controlled their potato sales. They consensually decided to put up a road control where all merchants and truck drivers would have to pay one Peso for each hundred kilos of potato they bought from the community so that the money could be used for infrastructure in the small new village they were building together. This did not work while each of the peasant families had a special relationship ritual kinship with one merchant who used to buy their harvest. So when this merchant/buyer transported the potatoes he or she bought from the peasant family out of the region, the peasant/seller would ask the barrier keeper not to charge him, even if that same peasant had approved the decision in the name of collective interest to charge all merchants. Each peasant thereafter continued to defend the collective decision: we have to charge those exploitative merchants who come and get rich with our sweat and the product of Mother earth. It was not until the peasant organization attained a more sophisticated level of social control and the power of the commercial intermediaries diminished that this individualized behaviour was diminished and the collective will prevailed. The Institutional framework and the Exploration Methodology In 1999 I coordinated a Masters programme on Territory and Interculturality with CESU at UMSS. A formal agreement was signed with Morochatas Municipal mayor Sinforiano Crdova and Ayopayas provincial peasant leaders to focus our students work on the municipal section of Morochata in order to design a territorial management plan for the Municipality {CEIDIS, 2001 #981}. 42

I had previously worked with the mayor of Independencia Moises Torrez during 1996 in a similar experiment that failed to produce good results, at least not for the mayor himself who was removed from his post early in 1997. This previous experiment in Independencia led the mayor and the peasant leaders of Morochata to change their political strategy. In order to build the Morochata plan a participatory survey and planning process would take place with workshops in at least some of the 48 peasant Subcentres (Subcentrales) organized into 10 regional peasant centres comprising all the 192 rural communities of that municipal section. The feedback of the research was the most important part of the planning process. This feedback led to growing tensions within the parties of the agreement and the mayor later turned against the feedback process to the communities. That is part of the case study of popular participation explained in Chapter VII. Thus began action-research work that would end up producing several outcomes, this thesis being one of them. Cooperative practice between the academic field, the local state institutions and the peasant organisations was defined with a basic understanding of its practical outcomes. This focused on the fact that it was necessary for the peasant organisations, which took control of the municipal government through elections in 1996, to have a territorial management plan. This was the main basis for an actionresearch plan. In reality it did not happened that way. Instead of a municipal planning process controlled by the grassroots communities the outcome was a municipal crisis. My practice should not be identified as one of applied anthropologist, an association that {Bennett, 1996 #1195} rejects because he sees his applied work as an extension of scholarly or theoretical activities and scientific knowledge establishing the field practice. In my view, it is the other way round: the academic knowledge justifies, legitimises or criticises the social practice, but does not anticipate it. Thus one key to overcome this limitation of the academic production of social knowledge is that the critique of practice should proceed, as feedback, almost immediately after practice, and not wait for three, ten or twenty years until the researcher publishes his or her work. The assumption was that the participatory planning work and the accompanying critical work would not be an extension of scholarly activities, but a transformative practice, or at least an attempt at transformation. The aim assumed was that bureaucratic municipal planning would be replaced by participatory planning supported by systematic research. The source of knowledge that would provide a more objectified input for scholarly work was not the isolated job of a researcher but a 43

two way interaction between the academic field and the people who would become the political subject of the plan. The applied work in this case is not the equivalent of laboratory practice in predetermined conditions, but an exploration of the social realm through the participation of the research team in a conscious plan for the transformation of the relationship between the people and the state institutions with which the different participants of the agreement were dealing. That is what {Olivier de Sardan, 2005 #1245:35} plainly names as populist anthropology. If I recollect and write my experience of action-research it is not to assert an authoritative written text on how to use knowledge to challenge authority and power. I recognize that power certainly is very much infused in this text as much as it was infused in the participatory process in the field. There is an obvious contradiction in any authority-challenging project being promoted from the place of authority, which in our case was the CEIDIS consortium with the University. A methodological text is a partial answer to the complexity of contradictions that only the ability to make a difference in the practical world will solve. The ability to produce change was not embedded in the knowledge process itself, but in the organizational resources that made possible the appropriation of knowledge by the indigenous communities networks in Ayopaya. The production of a text will partially answer the question of what activist research is as posed by {Gitlin, 1994 #1246} if it can provide tools for exploration in everyday interaction with those networks. Again: things never work out as planned but the composition of diverse strategies will produce results that can be understood in terms of its rationalities. And this is always an open ended exploratory process. The fieldwork for Morochatas territorial plan was conducted through workshops at each rural Subcentre and regional Peasant Centre and was accompanied by a simultaneous systematization and analysis in workshops held at the city headquarters of CESU or CENDA. The fieldwork and workshops plan formed part of the syllabus for the Masters in Territory and Interculturality between 1999 and 2000. The collaborative work with communities to develop a territorial plan was part of the field training for all the 15 students registered on the course, under the guidance of a select group of lecturers at the University of San Simon. Amongst an excellent group of guest lecturers who took part in the Master course I would identify the key roles of 44

Rene Orellana as the coordinator of the fieldwork team, and Adolfo Mendoza and Sarela Paz as part of a permanent academic staff. All of them participated in the debate as part of a teaching-learning process for the whole group of teachers and students. This was an innovative methodology that was implemented thanks to the financial support of the Kellogg Foundation5. The student training process during fieldwork was dealt with alongside the construction of the territorial plan. Among the students were Alejandro Almaraz (current Vice-minister for Land), Gonzalo Vargas (lecturer at the Catholic University), Emma Lazcano (collaborator with CENDA) and Alberto Borda (then director of the NGO INCCA), and many other people with good experience in the field. Some mayors and peasant leaders from Ayopaya also participated, not only in workshops in the field, but also in more theoretical seminars and workshops during the scheduled course. (For example Moises Torrez the mayor of Independencia, Luciano Sanchez, Luis Ramirez, Isabel Dominguez and other brilliant leaders at provincial level). In parallel with the workshops my own ethnographic observation provided a critical view of what happened in those events. There was a constant discussion within the CEIDIS team on the methodology, outcomes and training. The plan was to be the result of a sort of Rapid Research Appraisal (RRA or PRA) 6, but debate followed about whether in depth research was necessary to better understand the communal space management strategies. In my opinion the RRA was only meant to produce a provisional plan. The promotion of this provisional plan would generate new practices and reactions allowing the research to enter into new explorations. Only an understanding of the complex peasant strategies involved and affected by the plan would lead to a comprehension of those processes unleashed by its introduction . The RRA, the Plan and the in-depth research would therefore have to be interrelated in long term follow up. The techniques Different techniques for data collection were used in three different contexts. The first context is the case study in the Ayopaya province, the second context is that of the
5

A similar training scheme was implemented in parallel at the UMSS by the PROEIBANDES master course financed by the GTZ (German Technical Assistance). 6 See http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/sourcebook/sba104.htm

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national and departmental peasant organizations, and the third one is that of the national government policy-making context. In the case study the networks of Andean indigenous peasant communities are the subjects. Although the main actor of the case study is the collective subject, the individual actor is not a separate one; quite the opposite, it is part of the collective and emerges as social differentiation takes place, the study makes it speak and examines it. Therefore, I worked at three levels and with three techniques: the first technique, which is granted key importance, is the one of participant observer and part of the technical team for the design of the Territorial Plan. This constitutes work at the collective subject level by participating in community networks collective activities. I attended more than thirty meetings between 1996 and 2003 where communities grass root delegates, both male and female, participated. Many other meetings where I could not be present were recorded.. The communitys collective dimension can be observed in the physical arrangement, the body language, the degree of interest and motivation awoken by each topic, by how the leaders relate to their grass root fellows, the degree of respect he or she commands, and by how he or she tackles the debate. In most meetings there were factional confrontations, sometimes radical, that made grass root opinions easier to notice, both during and after the meeting.. Meeting attendance revealed the prevailing degree of mobilisation or passivity, the political climate in the peasant movement, and the readiness for struggle or, on the contrary, for resignation or un-interest elicited by certain topics. In the end, crises are always societys scalpels, observed at any scale. Field observation helps to perceive what mobilizes the collective subject and the process of social fusion, or otherwise and what happens to dissolve it and promote factionalism. Personal testimonies help to understand what is perceived in changes of patterns in collective behaviour. {Bourdieu, 1990 #1180:110} refers to the alchemy in the logic of practice through the power of representations where the unanimity of the group, realizes the most indisputable form of objectivity. The production of sayings, often kept in an ambiguous field as pre- (or sub-) oral communication allows social energy to be organized, synergized in the collective, and transmitted through these meetings. In this way, one can learn a lot from words, from oral communication with persons, with individuals. These conversations can help to decipher what is otherwise 46

only intuitively understood. Collective energy, however, is not communicated through words even while this helps to connect the dots. That is why the particular perception of the researcher is so important, however, only if it has a solid historic point of reference so it is able to trace the changing relations of force both within the organisation and with other actors, such as political parties, the vecinos strata, local government, and so on. I also worked with the resolutions of regional and provincial congress commissions, some ten congresses in total. As coordinator for the CEIDIS Masters programme, former CENDA director, and worker in the Conosur newspaper, I was invited to join the debate in some of those meetings. Newspaper articles were sometimes written using those records. The second level is that of personal and collective interviews. There are several qualities of interview. Life histories are very interesting. I was able to gather the life histories of three characters who have played a major role at the provincial level or in the makings of the Political Instrument. I only used one story directly for writing up, that of Moiss Torrez, with whom I also sustained a long series of discussions on various topics. His life story helped me structure Chapter Seven. The other two life histories, a peasant leader in Mizque in one case and in the other a peasant leader founder of the Political Instrument although rarely directly used in the text have provided important insight and information. Another type of source was the informal and formal meetings with groups of leaders, where matters connected to the research and the Territorial Plan were discussed. All these meetings were organized with an agreed agenda, among other matters, the running events in the municipality, land issues and the demand for land titles, the governmental policies on the issues of land, territory and, in the last few years, indigenous and regional autonomy. I do not consider these kinds of meetings as an equivalent of focus groups as in this case the researcher was part of the team discussing a specific issue and not just an observer. I used a semistructured observation scheme to define the essential parameters and took notes around this; usually I took notes just as in any normal ethnographic observation.

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Finally, there are a number of important, usually semi structured, personal interviews held both by me and by the Conosur journalists with peasant leaders. I held interviews with government officials or former officials, including ex-Vice-president Cardenas, the Ethnic Affairs Secretary, INRA officials, Prefectural officials, the Vice-minister of Land, and the Human Development Ministry among others. I also had conversations and interviews with other researchers working in the field of popular participation, and with NGOs representatives specifically connected with the Ayopaya case with whom I shared my own information and inferences. In sum 87 interviewees took more than 400 hours, and group meetings I estimate at more than 600 hours. Communal and peasant organizations meetings took more than 250 days. A third of these were recorded and there are notes on the rest. Finally, there is a third level which contextualizes all other data, that of historical reconstruction which helps to understand the wider implications of local situations and extract inferences,. Historical reconstruction is at the same time a context and it is contextualised by the field work Interviews, personal observation, phonographic records, and daily newspaper for the period under study and an assortment of historical reconstructions both published and unpublished were the primary and secondary sources in this case7. Chapter V revisits a period that the literature on indigenous social movements has already tackled. However, in my opinion, some topics needed reconstruction because of significant differences not only in interpretations, but in terms of the facts themselves. On one hand, the fact that the municipal crisis was not scrutinized by other studies as a separate dimension, or even as part of the state crisis was an important omission that needed attention. On the other hand, I found reconstruction necessary due to the troublesome divergence of stories, reviews, and studies on CSUTCB, and its relation with the origins and development of the Political Instrument and MAS. For very understandable reasons, these matters spun a mythology around them. Feedback, validation and research political ethics

The reconstruction of historical processes is a contextual reference for understanding local events, but at the same time this historical reconstruction is contextualized by understandings learned from my prolonged fieldwork. I find constraints in subaltern studies historical approach as in Pandey (1997) which I overcome this way.

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One of the most interesting aspects of the cooperative work where a research component is incorporated into the action component is the process of continuous feedback between research, action and population. This occurs in the workshops where they start diagnosis8. Then this participatory diagnosis goes through the academic feedback cross examination where the research progress, strengths and weaknesses are analysed. These weaknesses, such as in the understanding of the space management strategies, or in understanding social differentiation in each community, should then go through a separate analysis in the investigation process. The results obtained are subjected again to the criticism of the population or, in some cases, only of the leaders where examination occurs under an agreed schedule. This has undesirable effects on issues of social differentiation. During the process of feedback, social differentiation within communities was not really thoroughly examined as it was a sensitive issue that the researchers themselves were wary about touching. It was during post action-research, when I took these issues up for a personal lonely examination. In other words, participatory research, full of feedback, is an initial process that requires not only solitary desk work, but also complementation through fieldwork later by an investigator prepared to irritate local sensitivities. The later results of this research, which touch on very sensitive issues like union bureaucratisation, and social differentiation, were only validated in a relatively small and select focus group. This informal group, usually integrated by three members of the CEIDIS and CENDA team and three peasant leaders, met during the municipal and national crisis (2003-2004) for long discussions on the political implications of that crisis and the possible course of events in relation to indigenous autonomies and the Constituent Assembly. .

The issues of research ethics, identification of the actors and the question of otherness, as a consequence are at stake. {Punch, 1986 #1202:41} argues on

The Conosur awpaqman newspaper has published two issues devoted to the topic of indigenous municipalities and more than ten articles on the Ayopaya case, while national newspapers took the case only during the national municipal crisis in 2003 and 2004. Conosur awpaqman is written in Quechua and is distributed within Andean rural communities while national newspapers are in Spanish and distributed in cities only. See http://www.cenda.org/nawpaqman.htm, Garcs (2005).

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the moral view that subjects should not be harmed and on the pragmatic perspective that some dissimulation is intrinsic to social life and, therefore, also to fieldwork. The crux of the matter is that some deception, passive or active, enables you to get at data not obtainable by other means

Consequently, the researcher must be dishonest to get honest data, should enter the field with a nebulous explanation of her/his purpose because it is not ethically necessary, nor methodologically sound, to make known specific hypotheses, background assumptions, or particular areas of interest {Van Maanen, 1978 #1271:334} in (Punch 1986:41) (my emphasis). Punch rejects conflict methodology as an inappropriate model for social science except when the purpose of the research is to expose pernicious institutions. The topic again here is the distinction between the interests of the individual and a collective X. It is striking that Punch looks at the interests and rights of the professional group, the collective government, society in the abstract and no other possible collective body that deserves to be taken into account. Moreover, investigators rarely take position and simply assume a framework of academic neutrality, where what they are trying to do is solely to pursue their careers within an institution. Very rare are the cases where the practitioner takes on his/her own institution and declares him/herself to hold a position that would put them in danger of being isolated in an increasingly conservative establishment. There is an implicit threat when you think in any radical sense that can put you on the wrong side of the global war against terrorism, for example9. The first aspect of professional ethics would be, in my view, to think in terms of a collective X and stop thinking in terms of the individual or the profession professed. Clearly, many professionals are motivated by an interest of their own: the mathematician by mathematics, the painter by painting and the sociologist by sociology. Can my interest and identification with the peasant as a class and the Andean community as the personal object of interest define a research ethic? The general convention is to have identities, locations of individuals and places concealed in published results, data collected are held in anonymized form, and all data are kept securely confidential (Bulmer 1982, quoted in Punch :44). In this research all data refers to the public domain, it does not enter into any private life.
9

{Price, 2008 #1206}notes: Although we routinely acknowledge the impact of colonialism on the history of our discipline, we seem to have a blind spot when it comes to the specific ways in which more recent interests of military and intelligence agencies intersect with anthropologists and their research. However, given current efforts to engage anthropologists in military and intelligence campaigns, we can no longer feign ignorance.

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Even if some peoples names could be concealed for their own security, the fact is that the people identified in the study have assumed public stances in the current circumstances. On the other hand, this study has a political background, which is my own involvement not only in the action-research for the construction of an autonomous territorial plan for the indigenous peasant communities of Ayopaya, but moreover I was also involved in what came to be identified by those same people as their own Political Instrument in its initial stages. What role do intuition and fact correlation play during the research process and what do they have to do with the research ethics? I have undoubtedly set out from a notion borne of many years of sharing experiences with leaders and community members in the region, which refers to this studys central hypothesis, i.e., the direct link between state territorial restructuring through municipalities and the international financial communitys interest in promoting land markets. By correlating facts and, especially, contrasting them with the historical reconstruction that provides the setting for the case study, unperceived novelties emerged. It would have been impossible to detect those novelties with the interview technique or with that of participant observation. The historical reconstruction and the researchers own positioning of participant objectification made possible the new truth. By objectifying myself I was able to confirm that throughout the action-research and design of the territorial management plan for the municipality I was participating, fully and as another actor, in processes of mediation that contributed to the configuration and bureaucratisation of peasant intermediary layers, the current nucleus of the MAS party and its government. A selfcritique was therefore necessary to separate me from that social role. This thesis is to express and document my repositioning. In sum, I find that the ethical issues are that of my positioning and the coherence of my work in the field of practice and in the text (and all that is linked with text, namely the academic field in general) with that of my political positioning. While in these obscure times there is little need to underline the fact that there is a hidden curriculum behind all scientific work, this text should give proof of evidence to support the relevance of the researchers positioning and make clear its arguments.

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