Paper short abstract:

In highland Bolivia, adaptation of a heritage of pre-hispanic communitarian practice has arguably shaped the development of much of civil society. It may also shape informal rural-urban food trade.

Paper long abstract:

In developing strategies of resistance, informal traders draw on pre-existing, and often pre-urban socio-cultural resources. In highland Bolivia, adaptation of a heritage of pre-hispanic communitarian practice has arguably shaped the development of peasant unions, trader guilds and urban neighbourhood governance, as well as life in the country. Communitarian practice is arguably perpetuated and adapted as a practical cultural asset which enables particular livelihood strategies and collective action in the supposedly fragmenting environments of the city. The sister cities of La Paz/El Alto and their rural hinterland provide the multi-sited field for investigation into whether such cultural adaptation also impacts the informal trade of food, and the trajectory of the rural-urban relationship. Indeed informal traders of food must not only create urban, but also rural-urban networks in order to survive. An emerging class with rural-urban livelihood strategies draws on its ´in-betweeness´ to its political-economic advantage, and is perhaps an adaptation of the rural Andean strategy of spatially discontinuous community landholding.

In contrast, perhaps, to global trends, the altereity of the social-economic organization developed by Bolivia´s indigenous people is now reflected in the explicitly post-neoliberal national ideology; the MAS government asserts its ambition to move towards a post-capitalist plural economy by drawing on the ´communitarian element´ in society. The importance placed on plurality; on the co-existence of capitalism and ´pre/post- capitalism´ in many levels of the economy is an assertion by the government that ideological conflicts about economic trajectory can be moved beyond, yet in this ambitious balancing, conflicts nevertheless play out.