Krista E. Van Vleet

Partial Theories On Gossip, Envy and Ethnography in the Andes

Gossip is intertwined with the practice of ethnography both in the collection of evidence and in the retelling of stories about other people. Yet ethnographers have directed scant attention to goss...Gossip is intertwined with the practice of ethnography both in the collection of evidence and in the retelling of stories about other people. Yet ethnographers have directed scant attention to gossiping in particular cultural and linguistic contexts or to its methodological and epistemological implications. Drawing on fieldwork in a small community in the Bolivian Andes, I investigate gossiping as a social practice and narrative genre in which bonds of intimacy and claims to knowledge are intertwined with discourses of envy and progress. Not simply engaging in private, ‘idle’, conversation, gossipers blur the assumed boundaries between local ideals and national ideologies as they ‘theorize’ about (and dialogically produce) relationships and events. Ethnographers are no less embedded in the contingencies of interactions than their interlocutors, which raises the thorny issues of the practices and politics by which they come to present and evaluate the validity of ethnographic claims.

On Devils and the Dissolution of Sociality: Andean Catholics Voicing Ambivalence in Neoliberal Bolivia

In the Andean highlands of Bolivia, people sometimes express their ambivalence over the religious conversion of family and community members through stories about evangelical Protestants who have been possessed by Santuku or the devil. The article analyzes these narratives as part of a larger genre of devil stories and as a window onto the multiple ways Andean Catholics link migration, religious conversion, and death in the context of broader neoliberal transformations. From the perspective of those “left behind”—Catholic family and community members—conversion empties the future. Nevertheless, the necessary labor of dissolving or reconfiguring social relationships is undertaken by both Catholics and evangelical Protestants and sheds light on the production of sociality in 21st century Bolivia. [