Decolonial Time in Bolivia’s Pachakuti

Abstract

Debates about cultural practices in Bolivia have increasingly unfolded around questions of which practices are deemed essentially indigenous or essentially Western and demands for decolonization, or the reestablishment of indigenous cultural hegemony. This article examines cases in which the construal of time (through calendars, clocks, and notions of the past and future) is depicted as being either essentially Andean or a colonial import and, thus, a target for reform. Advancing competing construals of time has become a feature of such contemporary state-led political interventions as reorienting clock faces on public buildings; reconciling the Gregorian calendar with an agricultural, Aymara one; replacing Spanish loanwords for the days of the week with neologisms; and framing the launching of a telecommunications satellite as the reconstitution of pre-Hispanic astronomical science. These debates draw on a salient difference in the space-time semantics of Andean languages. Aymara and Quechua are typologically unusual for linking front space with past time and anterior space with the futurity and for sharing a unified concept of “space-time,” or pacha, a term that has become popularized through the widespread use of pachakuti ‘the turning over of space-time’, to refer to what, in other contexts, might be called revolution.