Felipe Quispe Huanca Against the Common Sense of the Dehumanizing Discourses of Bolivian Positivism

Authors

  • Irina Alexandra Feldman Middlebury College
  • Mario Siddhartha Portugal Ramírez University of Massachusetts Boston

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/bsj.2025.362

Keywords:

Felipe Quispe Huanca, Bolivia, positivism, dehumanization, violence, war, masculinism, common senses

Abstract

Felipe Quispe was a Bolivian indigenous leader whose thought shaped an ideological struggle against the dehumanizing and racist common senses of Bolivian society. These common senses, colonial legacies, were consolidated in the foundational work of national thinkers such as Alcides Arguedas and Bautista Saavedra, under the influence of European positivism. This article studies Felipe Quispe's response to two common senses. The first represents the indigenous man as an inherently violent being, and the second represents the indigenous male as a subject who does not conform to the norms of Western masculinity and is therefore unfit for full inclusion as a citizen of a modern nation. While positivist authors dehumanize the indigenous man using these tropes, Quispe turns these formulations on their head and rewrites the representation of the indigenous man as a warrior and male with a clear revolutionary and transformative mission in the history of twentieth and twenty-first century Bolivia.

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Published

2025-12-11 — Updated on 2025-12-15

Issue

Bolivian Studies Journal Vol. 31, 2025

Section

Miscellaneous Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2025 Irina Alexandra Feldman, Mario Siddhartha Portugal Ramírez

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