The ‘postulate of abundance’. Cholo market and religion in La Paz, Bolivia

Abstract

In Bolivia's capital city, La Paz, urbanised indigenous highlanders (cholos) have produced one of the most successful experiments of indigenous entrepreneurship in the region. Rejecting locally dominant bourgeois values, for example modesty and thriftiness, cholos run a thriving transnational economy of conspicuous consumption placing moral emphasis on spending in excess, and rapidly materialising profit into abundant display – whether through dress, through exhibition of goods or through religious parades. Despite their economic affluence, cholos remain a rather discriminated group from the rest of the mestizo urban population for their supposed failure to submit to laws of economic rationality. This article is an attempt to redress the misunderstanding between cholos and elites and to understand the functioning of cholos’ postulate of abundance both in religious and economic practices. I argue that ‘abundance’ is a salient economic and cosmological value associated with the reproduction of goods and cosmological relations. I suggest that cholos’ postulate of abundance may provide an insight into a form of market economy in which excess, rather than scarcity, operates as the motivating force for exchange.

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