‘Indigenous Comrades, for the first time we are Presidents!’ These words marked the end of five years of political crisis in Bolivia; thousands of protesters had taken part in mass demonstrations, ousting political elites through an insurgent and now institutionalised questioning of the very basis of Bolivia state and society. Nancy Postero's timely study points to events in Bolivia as part of a new historic moment with resonance beyond its borders, something she refers to as an era of ‘post-multiculturalism’. Crucial to her understanding of this moment is the idea of change from a time of controlled citizenship to one in which possibilities have been opened for marginalised groups (and indigenous peoples in particular) to not only gain a seat at the table of political decision-making, but to take a central role in the formation of its agenda. Postero furthermore proposes that in this moment, the agenda is not only concerned with a politics of recognition but also with a politics of re-distribution. She arrives at these conclusions through the ethnographic study of a Santa Cruz Guarani community's experience with recent neoliberal political reforms, and particularly those aimed at creating an environment for multiculturalism in Bolivia.

Through careful and long-term field study of the local dynamics of this community and its organisation in the 1990s, she tells of their meeting, adaptation and growing frustration with state and NGO policies for their development. She demonstrates how the Guarani actively responded and ultimately rejected the limits of policies aimed at their cultural recognition and the internationally backed formation of self-realising indigenous citizen/subjects. Through an often moving account of the lives of individuals in the community, Postero reveals the social stresses of this period as the Guarani are forced to face problems of increasing urbanisation as well as the concrete organisational and representational challenges of political reforms aimed at changing their relationship to the state, most notably the Law of Popular Participation (LPP).

Although the LPP established the political institutions and practices that promised to make all citizens equal through access to political participation at the local level, the evidence she details demonstrates that because of persisting racial prejudices and tendencies to control the planning agenda in this context, the reform delivered little more than an NGO educated sense of injustice. Despite its promises of securing local democracy and cultural recognition, the LPP is seen to have reinforced the ways in which indigenous people's relation to the state is mediated by the dominant elite, traditional political parties, and individualised clientelism. It therefore served to recontextualise existing hierarchies of exclusion within new ‘multicultural’ reforms.

Postero's detailed ethnographic study of the Guarani provides an important grounding for a series of reflections on the historic development of ethnic-state relations in Bolivia and the more recent crystallisation of a movement against historic marginalisation demanding an end to the structured inequalities that continue to characterise Bolivian society. Neoliberal multiculturalism's new language of citizenship and formation of new aspirations are shown to have unexpected consequences. Rather than accepting the limited gains of multicultural citizenship, the Guarani's local struggle for survival and representation played into a much larger movement of the excluded that recast the country's history of identity politics, aiming to transform fundamental ideas about the basis of the nation-state and the extent of existing discourses on rights and democracy. Postero argues that this process marks not only the death of the nationalist revolutionary state of 1952, but also an end to until recently embedded cycles of protest and negotiation aimed at diffusing radical demands through the formation of a social pact between elites and indigenous peoples in the country. Neoliberal definitions of public and private were also challenged, as the protest movement pushed for an end to the hegemony of the market and demanded increased rights to participate in public-decision making. As she highlights, new alliances were formed within this process, with social movement activism taking on a ‘multitude-form’ in which people have reconsidered the essentialism of their identities and agreed to cooperate across ethnic and class lines.

Postero builds on her valuable ethnographic study to make a powerful and subtly evidenced argument for the fitting together of local social processes with macro-level events. This partly involves the successful utilisation of the extensive existing secondary anthropological sources on the changing nature of indigenous-state relations in Bolivia and Latin America. However, Postero's more theoretical insights, inspired by existing secondary sources, are less original and perhaps demonstrate weakness through oversight of important detail. This leads her to overstate her case for historic rupture: whilst perhaps not quite such an exuberant moment as the present, earlier writing on Bolivia and the Andes not only demonstrates indigenous peoples' desire for citizenship, but also their active engagement with the state to create the conditions for the improvement of rights. Whilst serious problems of prejudice and racial ambivalence meant that these rights were often curtailed, indigenous peoples in Bolivia and elsewhere in the Andes have long thought and demonstrated themselves to be citizens.

A close reading of existing literature on political reform, development and multiculturalism also suggests cause for scepticism about the dawning of the ‘post-multicultural’ era. An over-emphasis on the multicultural reforms belies their connections to a series of much wider international economic and developmental policy initiatives aimed at reconstructing the state and economy. Seen in the light of these wider reforms, but perhaps also reflecting on the contrast between radical rhetoric and the reality of implemented social democratic and market-oriented policy, we might conclude that there is more continuity of neoliberal governance than rupture. Indigenous peoples can now be presidents, but few real signs so far exist in the past or present to suggest innovation in government, or more than genuine intent to move on from imported tried and tested ideas for the re-foundation of Bolivia's political and cultural life.