Healing as political care:Kallawaya ethnomedicine in Bolivia’s plurinational state

Abstract

Bolivia’s transformation into a plurinational state, explicitly recognising the existence and rights of its Indigenous peoples, was ideologically underpinned by an agenda to decolonise quasi-colonial political structures while being unable to escape them. This article engages with Dürr and Rohrer’s call to recognise Indigenous practices of healing as crucial responses to the planetary crisis, through ethnographically examining how the Kallawaya, an Andean Indigenous nation famed for expertise as healers, engages with the environment and political institutions that impact life at different levels of scale, through an idiom of healing. Kallawaya healing practices act on recursive relations between the human and more-than-human world, constituting forms of socio-ecological repair that address both colonial legacies and ongoing disruptions in the Plurinational State of Bolivia. Such healing imagines socio-ecological transformation beyond resilience or adaptation, suggesting that decolonial healing must be understood as a project of world-making that is at once political, ecological, and ontological.