Coca communications: tales from the Bolivian coca field.

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in Bolivia’s coca-growing Yungas region, this thesis is concerned with how, on the most practical level, development projects might hold more relevance to the lives of their target groups than they have hitherto tended to do, as well as how the power imbalances that characterise the relationships between development organisations and local people may be understood and addressed. Beginning with the concept of ‘communicative ecology’ (Tacchi et al 2003) as a framework for exploring the multifariousness of communicative avenues and the interconnectedness of these within a system, I focus my analysis on the ecosystem of coca communications. I argue, however, that the concept of communicative ecology on its own has little meaning without adopting a political economy approach, which incorporates the work of attempting to understand the social and power relations that surround the production, distribution and consumption of resources, both material and cultural. As a way of analysing the strategies and potentials of people within the ecosystem of coca communications, I utilise Bourdieu’s (1990) notions of field, habitus and forms of capital, where the coca field characterises itself by virtue of the fact that all those who are a part of it are linked in some way through the production, exchange and consumption of both the coca leaf, and the values, meanings and discourses that surround it. It is concluded that the ecosystem of coca communications is linked intrinsically to the coca production system, in that individuals and groups have differential access to, inclination to use, and success in influencing the discourse via different communicative media, depending on their situation within the coca field. This refers to land ownership, labour, organisational participation, exchange and consumptive practices, which is translated into a system of capital accumulation and exchange. The thesis argues that development organisations will do well to consider a given locality in these terms in order to facilitate the implementation of ICT projects that are relevant and compatible with local social and communicational systems, and further, that these organisations must reflect upon their own role as ‘introduced organisms’ within local communicative ecologies.