Salamanca and the city: culture credits, nature credits, and the modern moral economy of indigenous Bolivia

Abstract

This article draws on fieldwork carried out in a Guaraní‐speaking community in the Bolivian Chaco – Isoso – between 1997 and 2000. At the time, some Isoseño people were employed in urban‐headquartered projects that revolved around Isoso’s environment, culture, or identity and that were funded multilaterally by grants, loans, or other foreign aid. The article describes a set of fantastic discourses circulating in rural Isoso that seem to compare a magical place called Salamanca to the city where some Isoseño people now work. The article argues that these Salamanca discourses are an Isoseño‐specific way of talking about a general set of unprecedented processes. It takes up the fact that undertakings of the kind in which the Isoseño are involved create new calibrations among radically different systems for moral/qualitative and material/ quantitative evaluation which can most ‘economically’ be expressed in terms of credit and debt. Finally, it considers why it is that for all their strange magic, Isoseño ‘Salamanca and the city’ discourses put an extremely recognizable suite of moral considerations at their centre.

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