About

Economists say important things, sociologists say useful things, but anthropologists say fascinating things – Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Bolivia’s fascinating. Bolivian politics is one of the things that makes it so. Presumably, you’re already at least halfway convinced of this, or you wouldn’t be reading this blog. But why should you believe what I have to say about it?

Perhaps because I have been professionally fascinated by it for several years, and because I spent an extended period of time living in rural Cochabamba. I’m a mostly-British social anthropologist with journalistic ambitions: I started focusing on Andean anthropology and leftish politics as an undergraduate in the early 2000s, and the happy marriage of these two things led me to Bolivia, where I did fieldwork for my PhD.  I arrived a month before the election of Evo Morales (whose career I had been following fannishly for a few years by then) and left very reluctantly a year and a half later.  I now live in London, and have been in the final year of my PhD since, er, 2007.   I read the Bolivian newspapers for fun (furreals!) and write news briefings for the Bolivia Information Forum, a London-based research NGO. The opinions, bad language and worse jokes of this blog don’t represent the viewpoint or stance of the BIF, though – they are mine own. Please give credit/apportion blame accordingly.