ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the music festivals in Norte Potosi as sites for working through and performs the contradictions of experience and identity and thus consider these festivals as sites for constituting and performing an indigenous subjectivity in a particular regional context within a modern postcolonial state. Counter to a reading of these festivals that would see them as vehicles for the commodification of indigenous cultural expression, the chapter argues that the festivals provided performers and local spectators with a means for reflecting on and creatively constructing their own identity as indigenous people, explicitly in articulation with other social groups within the Bolivian state. The province of Bustillo in the northern tip of the department of Potosi in the Bolivian highlands, the region known in Bolivia as Norte Potosi, contains nine indigenous groups that self-identify as ayllus. Recently influential post-structuralist approaches to the constitution of subjectivity, following Lacan's famous aphorism "The subject is spoken rather than speaking".
