Healing as political care: Kallawaya ethnomedicine in Bolivia's plurinational state.
Bolivia's transformation into a plurinational state, explicitly recognising the existence and rights of its Indigenous peoples, was ideologically underpinned by an agenda to decolonise quasi-colonial political structures while being unable to escape them. This article engages with Dürr and Rohrer's...
| Published in: | European Review of Latin American & Caribbean Studies no. 121; pp. 101 - 121 |
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| Format: | Article |
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Centre for Latin American Research & Documentation (CEDLA)
Jan-Jun2026
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=196102799&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ssf uiTerm: 196102799 longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 09240608 LU9 jtl: European Review of Latin American & Caribbean Studies issn: 09240608 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Jan-Jun2026 iid: 121 pid: 12159 pub: Centre for Latin American Research & Documentation (CEDLA) artinfo: ui: 196102799 ppf: 101 ppct: 20 formats: fmt: @attributes: type: P size: 2.7MB tig: atl: Healing as political care: Kallawaya ethnomedicine in Bolivia's plurinational state. aug: au: Alderman, Jonathan affil: University of St. Andrews keyword: Bolivia decolonisation healing Kallawaya recognition descolonización reconocimiento sanación Bolivia decolonisation healing Kallawaya recognition descolonización reconocimiento sanación ab: Bolivia's transformation into a plurinational state, explicitly recognising the existence and rights of its Indigenous peoples, was ideologically underpinned by an agenda to decolonise quasi-colonial political structures while being unable to escape them. This article engages with Dürr and Rohrer's call to recognise Indigenous practices of healing as crucial responses to the planetary crisis, through ethnographically examining how the Kallawaya, an Andean Indigenous nation famed for expertise as healers, engages with the environment and political institutions that impact life at different levels of scale, through an idiom of healing. Kallawaya healing practices act on recursive relations between the human and more-than-human world, constituting forms of socio-ecological repair that address both colonial legacies and ongoing disruptions in the Plurinational State of Bolivia. Such healing imagines socio-ecological transformation beyond resilience or adaptation, suggesting that decolonial healing must be understood as a project of world-making that is at once political, ecological, and ontological. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: N holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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