RIGHTS IN CONFLICT. DISPUTES AROUND THE INHERITANCE OF A SAYAÑA IN AYMARA TERRITORY
DERECHOS EN PUGNA. DISPUTAS EN TORNO DE LA HERENCIA DE UNA SAYAÑA EN TERRITORIO AYMARA
Alejandro Isla
This article describes the practices of different actors in a 100-year long legal dispute for a plot in the Community of Guaraya (today ayllu), which adjoins the town of Tiwanaku in Bolivia. The plot is a sayaña, a type of Aymara property that relates (the ayllu’s) collective interests with the interests of families, who have occupied and worked it, as well as performed the corresponding rituals in it for years. Thus, the trial reveals individual logics inspired by liberal traditions, which are in opposition to the collective ones prevalent in the community. These families, however, do not give up disputing with wisdom and ingenuity in State courts, which are alien to their customary law. The vicissitudes of the trial -whose roots go back to the late nineteenth century- in national courts of different jurisdictions, geographical scope, across all judicial instances, demonstrate forms of micro-resistance, as well as adaptation, in the construction of community autonomies before or in the margins of the Nation State. The text is based on the interpretation of a judicial file, guided by the author’s ethnographic fieldwork in Guaraya.
