Kallawaya, Inc.  the making of the Kallawaya (1532-2008): a historical, relational, and comparative approach

Abstract

The Kallawaya are a Bolivian ethnic group well known for ritualism and naturopathy. This paper explores the ‘making’ of the Kallawaya as a polity emerging, modifying, and adapting over time according to its political and economic needs, at the intersection of local conditions and of global developments. The case of the Kallawaya shows how processes of ethnicization unfold through the interplay of primordialist and of instrumentalist logics. An important vehicle for ethnicization is resilience as expressed by the cultural memory.