GAI Supports Natalia Chavez’s (G'25) Dissertation “The Gendered Expansion of History: Techniques and Materiality of Womanhood in Bolivian Undefined Expressive Artifacts”
With the support of the Georgetown Americas Institute, Natalia Chavez (G'25) traveled to Bolivia in July 2023 to conduct research on womanhood, spirituality, and devotional items in the country.
Chavez used funds from GAI to travel to and from Bolivia, where she visited three cities, in July of 2023. While in Bolivia, she went to La Paz, Cochabamba, and Sucre aiming to conduct field and archival research for her dissertation project The Gendered Expansion of History: Techniques and Materiality of Womanhood in Bolivian Undefined Expressive Artifacts. On top of the field research, the GAI research grant allowed her to advance in other fundamental aspects of her research.
The field work consisted in visiting the memorial sites (graves) of four assassinated Bolivian women that are regarded as folk saints by mainly (but not only) the closest communities around the sites. In these visits, she observed and recorded devotional objects, and ritualistic practices connected to ideas of postmodern Andean reciprocity, faith, and spirituality. While doing her field observations, she also informally interviewed cemetery workers, and the memorial sites’ visitors -specifically in Cochabamba and Sucre- inquiring about their devotional practices.
This almost three-week long trip also helped her to keep developing her ideas around the political atmosphere in Bolivia for women that are in different positions in the socioeconomic spectrum, which is a fundamental aspect of her doctoral dissertation in progress.
Additionally, she did archival research of the media coverage of the cases in the time of the five crimes (years 1977, 1988, 1996, 1999 and 2003) at the Archivo Nacional de Bolivia in Sucre, where she also presented part of her dissertation’s preliminary results about the recent history (1990 to this day) of the Bolivian feminist movement in the XI biannual convention of the Asociación de Estudios Bolivianos (held from July 17th to 21st, in Sucre).