"Andrew Canessa makes superb use of more than twenty years of ethnographic experience with Andean villagers of Wila Kjarka to give us a beautifully detailed and intellectually stimulating account of the changing meanings of 'indian' and 'indigeneity' in Bolivia. His focus on the intimate and the public spaces of everyday life, and on the local and the translocal flows of people, ideas, and things, provides a wonderfully engaging picture of how villagers in the Andes think of themselves and others. His deep commitment to the people of the village gives us a refreshing and important perspective on the concept of 'indigeneity,' which is too often taken for granted in the context of contemporary identity politics. Intimate Indigeneities will prove very attractive to students and scholars alike."--Peter Wade, author of Race and Sex in Latin America"Focused on topics of great interest to contemporary readers--race, inequality, gender, sexuality, social and political change, education, military service, and domestic violence--and written with verve and style, Intimate Indigeneities draws on long-term, detailed ethnographic work that is impressive and rarely achieved. Andrew Canessa presents unique, novel knowledge about a place, a time, and a people."--Mary Weismantel, author of Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes"Using telling case histories, Andrew Canessa explores how indigeneity appears in the local and national arena, what it means to be indigenous in contemporary Bolivia, and why the villagers he has studied for more than twenty years reject this term. This is a major contribution, a splendid example of a twenty-first-century ethnography.

"--Jean E. Jackson, coeditor of Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation, and the State in Latin America"Andrew Canessa's beautiful new book builds on two decades of ethnographic research in the rural highlands of Bolivia focusing on gender, history, and racial difference in the Andes. [.] By pushing the boundaries of identity politics and indigeneity, this book makes an important theoretical contribution to anthropological thinking, underlining how people experience various notions of exclusion and belonging in different moments and from different positions. [.] Overall, this book speaks to the complexity of approaching topics such as indigeneity, ontological difference, indigenous politics, citizenship, and belonging in the context of enduring (yet contested) colonial power imbalances, especially at the community level. Canessa's rich case study provides a compelling argument about both the ongoing meanings and the limitations of the notion of indigeneity as a theoretical concept and category of rights."--Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.