Product Description

In this age when many trumpet the shrill fanfares of market triumphalism, few stop to ask how global political and economic restructuring is affecting impoverished states and transforming the daily lives of ordinary people. Teetering on the Rim asks just that question as it offers a critique "from below" of what has been called neoliberalism -the latest set of capitalist-inspired policies that posit "the market" as the remedy for all social and economic problems. Focusing on an impoverished city on the periphery of La Paz, the Bolivian capital, Lesley Gill examines the ways in which neoliberal policies reorder social relations among poor men and women -and between them and the state. These vulnerable low-income people teetering on the edge of survival are forced to contend not only with the state but with each other as well as an array of international organizations to get what they need to continue to live. In an effort to understand ordinary people's changing sense of what is, and is not, possible, collectively and individually, after more than a decade of economic restructuring, Teetering on the Rim reveals the vast and relentless changes wrought in the fabric of social life and offers an instructive example of just what is wrong with the global economic order.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #743670 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05-15
• Released on: 2000-05-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

About the Author
Lesley Gill is an associate professor of anthropology at the American University. She has written two other books based on her fieldwork in Bolivia, where she has been conducting research since 1980: Peasants, Entrepreneurs, and Social Change: Frontier Development in Lowland Bolivia, which received an Outstanding Academic Book Award by Choice, and Precarious Dependencies: Gender, Class, and Domestic Service in Bolivia.

Customer Reviews

The Country That Wants to Exist
Eduardo Galeano calls Bolivia "the country that wants to exist." This is an apt description of a country whose history, consistently since Spanish colonial times, is characterized by a tradition of exploitation and a people struggling for equality. As current events in La Paz and its poor sister, El Alto, demonstrate, exploitative government policies are being met with massive popular resistance. Gill details a tragic confluence of circumstances and the resulting misery for and action by poor Bolivians. External pressure by the U.S., World Bank, and the IMF on Bolivia for neoliberal economic reform, coupled with the proliferation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to allow the state to withdraw from its basic obligations to the Bolivian people.

Because of the inherent instability of political power in Bolivia and its dependent position to stronger countries, this "different type of conquistador, the well-dressed officials of the World Bank and IMF," has been able to force continued compliance of these reforms, even though evidence has not substantiated that the life of the average Bolivian is improving. Certainly governance is not any more stable than at the start of neoliberalism in the mid-1980s. Gill refutes the neoliberal model as a path to economic stability and fairness in Bolivia. The Washington Consensus would have one view everything through a positivist lens, but that obscures the struggle, competition, and uncertain living conditions that characterize much of the Bolivian experience. Gill uses a set of vehicles for illustrating the state of living conditions and the modes of social organization, which are themselves vehicles for quantifying the retreat of the Bolivian state.

In terms of living conditions, Gill takes particular note of the state of health care, the housing crisis, the quality and availability of education, new and evolving forms of social and economic competition, and what she views as exploitative neoliberal welfare programs, such as Food-for-Work and microcredit schemes. In terms of social organization, Gill emphasizes the corruption and distrust of government, the heightened role of the government, the decline of the miner as political force and the subsequent rise of the teacher, and the proliferation of NGOs in Bolivia.

Gill focuses on the lives of Altenos as affected by the larger situation in Bolivia. While Bolivian politicians were eagerly complying with IMF/World Bank restructuring programs, they attempted to reduce the individuals within the state to numbers in a problem that could be solved through formulaic means. For example, the programs of the New Economic Policy launched by President Paz in 1985 were tools for the state to reassert control over a shattered economy and to return capacity to state institutions. Although Paz's shock therapy did stem hyper- inflation, the closure of mines dislocated tens of thousands of miners who had no guarantee of security.

These miners and their families flooded cities, such as El Alto, in search for survival. Instead of a stable life, they were forced into new modes of competition with alteños for already-scarce basic resources, such as food, housing, and jobs. Sánchez de Lozada's extension of these policies in the early 1990s, in his Education Reform Law, Capitalization Law, and Popular Participation Law, did reduce the burden of the state and allow it more room to comply with structural adjustments. However, the effect on ordinary Bolivians was to put a higher burden on their municipalities to supply services that the state traditionally provided, even though towns and local governments were clearly unable to meet such demands.

Especially noteworthy in terms of the state abdication of responsibility is the attention that Gill pays to the role of NGOs in Bolivia. Originally hostile toward the state during the period of military rule, NGOs established themselves as proponents of democracy in the 1960s and 1970s. During this time, NGOs became especially attractive to the MIR, which supported NGOs as a means "to influence and protect a political base when open debate was impossible." Once the government returned to democracy, NGOs began to cooperate with the government, eventually benefiting from the surge in development assistance resulting from structural reforms in the mid-1980s. Here, Gill is unflinching in her criticism of NGOs, because the cozy relationship they had with the state enabled them to essentially share power, blurring the responsibility of the state to the general population. In exchange for power, NGOs increasingly assumed the roles of job creation, health care, emergency assistance, and other responsibilities of the state. In turn, the state could downsize those costs from the federal purse, allowing it to comply with the international demands for structural reform.

The resentment that the total effect of these policies has engendered in Bolivians has led not only to the formation of local support organizations, but also to a broad-based struggle against the Bolivian government. Gill focuses on the decline of political might of miners and the grim chances for improvement in the life of ordinary Bolivians. Indeed, history may work against those who would interrupt the cycle of elite exploitation of the masses and grinding poverty.

However, Teetering on the Rim was published prior to the recent revolts, and the rapid rise of indigenous leaders, such as Evo Morales and Felipe Quispe, is part of a very recent history. Bolivians have a "good memory," and Morales and Quispe, among others, have emerged as serious indigenous contenders to the status quo. Morales, the leader of the cocaleros, nearly defeated Sánchez de Lozada in recent presidential elections. Quispe organized the blockade of La Paz that helped to force Sánchez de Lozada from office. The mobilization of the masses against elites is gaining momentum, which may translate into control of the government and political agenda. Whether this political strength would guarantee progress in the lives of ordinary Bolivians remains uncertain.

Also worth reading:

Galeano, Eduardo. 2003. Bolivia: The Country that Wants to Exist. The Progressive, 67(12), 12.

Schultz, Jim. 2003. A New Day for Bolivia. NACLA Report on the Americas, 28(6), 8.