Bolivia s informal economic sector is the largest in Latin America, and women-owned businesses tend to be overrepresented in the informal sector and to be less profitable than firms in the formal sector. This study seeks to better understand gender-based differences in firms tendencies toward formality, the impact of formality on profits, and the productivity of small informal firms. Using data from firm surveys, national household surveys, and qualitative data from focus groups, the study conducts a gender analysis of formality and productivity in six different sectors in Bolivia. The findings shed new light on how gender-based differences contribute to a firm s decision to become formal and the consequences of this decision for profitability. The outcomes of the study suggest that policies should focus on increasing the productivity and scale of women-owned businesses. Two general priorities emerge: promoting women s access to productive assets to facilitate growth and productivity and providing an enabling environment for women s entrepreneurship by expanding women s choices and capacity to respond to market opportunities.

In Andean Bolivia, racial and cultural differences are most visibly marked on women, who often still wear native dress and speak an indigenous language rather than Spanish. In this study of modernity in Bolivia, Marcia Stephenson explores how the state's desire for a racially and culturally homogenous society has been deployed through images of womanhood that promote the notion of an idealized, acculturated female body. Stephenson engages a variety of texts-critical essays, novels, indigenous testimonials, education manuals, self-help pamphlets, and position papers of diverse women's organizations-to analyze how the interlocking tropes of fashion, motherhood, domestication, hygiene, and hunger are used as tools for the production of dominant, racialized ideologies of womanhood. At the same time, she also uncovers long-standing patterns of resistance to the modernizing impulse, especially in the large-scale mobilization of indigenous peoples who have made it clear that they will negotiate the terms of modernity, but always "as Indians."

In Andean Bolivia, racial and cultural differences are most visibly marked on women, who often still wear native dress and speak an indigenous language rather than Spanish. In this study of modernity in Bolivia, Marcia Stephenson explores how the state's desire for a racially and culturally homogenous society has been deployed through images of womanhood that promote the notion of an idealized, acculturated female body. Stephenson engages a variety of texts—critical essays, novels, indigenous testimonials, education manuals, self-help pamphlets, and position papers of diverse women's organizations—to analyze how the interlocking tropes of fashion, motherhood, domestication, hygiene, and hunger are used as tools for the production of dominant, racialized ideologies of womanhood. At the same time, she also uncovers long-standing patterns of resistance to the modernizing impulse, especially in the large-scale mobilization of indigenous peoples who have made it clear that they will negotiate the terms of modernity, but always "as Indians."

Fray Bernardino de Sahagún-INAH Award in Mexico for Best Research Work in Anthropology Gabriela Zamorano Villarreal examines the political dimension of indigenous media production and distribution as a means by which indigenous organizations articulate new claims on national politics in Bolivia, a country experiencing one of the most notable cases of social mobilization and indigenous-based constitutional transformation in contemporary Latin America. Based on fieldwork in Bolivia from 2005 to 2007, Zamorano Villarreal details how grassroots indigenous media production has been instrumental to indigenous political demands for a Constituent Assembly and for implementing the new constitution within Evo Morales's controversial administration. On a day-to-day basis, Zamorano Villarreal witnessed the myriad processes by which Bolivia's indigenous peoples craft images of political struggle and enfranchisement to produce films about their role in Bolivian society. Indigenous Media and Political Imaginaries in Contemporary Bolivia contributes a wholly new and original perspective on indigenous media worlds in Bolivia: the collaborative and decolonizing authorship of indigenous media against the neoliberal multicultural state, and its key role in reimagining national politics. Zamorano Villarreal unravels the negotiations among indigenous media makers about how to fairly depict a gender, territorial, or justice conflict in their films to promote grassroots understanding of indigenous peoples in Bolivia's multicultural society.

Music and the Poetics of Production in the Bolivian Andes is a musical ethnography of a Quechua speaking community of northern Potosí, in the Bolivian Andes. Through rich and evocative ethnography, the book delves into the powerful meanings ascribed to sound; charts unfamiliar aesthetic territories; suggests how modernity can contribute to indigeneity; and reveals remarkable musical perspectives on llama husbandry and potato cultivation. As we follow the lives, shifting fortunes and musical year of this, in many ways, fragile community, a seasonally shifting array of musical instruments, genres, dances and tunings are introduced. The book is accompanied by an audio CD, photographs, musical transcriptions and explanatory diagrams.

Fray Bernardino de Sahagún-INAH Award in Mexico for Best Research Work in Anthropology Gabriela Zamorano Villarreal examines the political dimension of indigenous media production and distribution as a means by which indigenous organizations articulate new claims on national politics in Bolivia, a country experiencing one of the most notable cases of social mobilization and indigenous-based constitutional transformation in contemporary Latin America. Based on fieldwork in Bolivia from 2005 to 2007, Zamorano Villarreal details how grassroots indigenous media production has been instrumental to indigenous political demands for a Constituent Assembly and for implementing the new constitution within Evo Morales's controversial administration. On a day-to-day basis, Zamorano Villarreal witnessed the myriad processes by which Bolivia’s indigenous peoples craft images of political struggle and enfranchisement to produce films about their role in Bolivian society. Indigenous Media and Political Imaginaries in Contemporary Bolivia contributes a wholly new and original perspective on indigenous media worlds in Bolivia: the collaborative and decolonizing authorship of indigenous media against the neoliberal multicultural state, and its key role in reimagining national politics. Zamorano Villarreal unravels the negotiations among indigenous media makers about how to fairly depict a gender, territorial, or justice conflict in their films to promote grassroots understanding of indigenous peoples in Bolivia’s multicultural society.

Bolivian Labor Immigrants' Experiences in Argentina examines the projects, trajectories, and everyday lives of Bolivian immigrants. It gathers research results of specialists who have studied the various ways in which these immigrants participate in certain labor markets in different urban and rural areas of Argentina. It covers many aspects, including future prospects, and the influence of the juxtaposition of various inequalities. It highlights the ways in which xenophobic mechanisms naturalize harsh working and living conditions. The volume opens new horizons regarding novel migratory territories recently built by Bolivian laborers in Argentina. It collects the results of longstanding anthropology studies in different Provinces: Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Mendoza, Río Negro, Salta, and Tierra del Fuego. It refers to the trajectories of some Bolivians who had previously migrated to Spain and returned to Argentina after the European crisis in 2008. It also compares the south-south labor migration from Bolivia to Argentina, with the north-north one from Tajikistan to the Russian Federation. Bolivian Labor Immigrants' Experiences in Argentina highlights key issues regarding the structural factors that pattern the integration of Bolivian immigrants in certain labor markets segmented by inequalities based on class, gender, “ethny-race”, nationality, and migratory and legal status. It provides ethnographic insights about the various ways in which Bolivian immigrants experience harsh living and working conditions. Finally, it helps to understand that these men and women are capable of dealing with oppressive situations and of performing particular ways of resistance. The focus on labor migrants does not lead to a reductionist economic analysis of their trajectories, experiences, and prospects for the future. On the contrary, they are studied from a holistic anthropological approach, considering that migrants make sense of their territorial mobility from complex points of view anchored in their life experiences. Therefore, contributors consider that migration is a process that involves economic, social, cultural, and political dimensions

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.

Based on an ethnographic study on the Andean Tri-border (between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia), this volume addresses the experience of Aymara cross-border women from Bolivia employed in the rural valleys on the outskirts of Arica (Chile’s northernmost city). As protagonists of transborder mobility circuits, these women are intersectionally impacted by different forms of social vulnerability. With a feminist anthropological perspective, the book investigates how the boundaries of gender are constructed in the (multi)situated experience of these transborder women. By building a bridge between classical anthropological studies on kinship and contemporary debates on transnational and transborder mobility, the book invites us to rethink structuralist theoretical assertions on the elementary character of family alliances.