I've studied in the Andes (in Ecuador) and I've experienced the living Andean culture there myself.
I accept your assertion of expertise. It implies you know a great deal more about the subject than I. I hope I can ask you to check my prior statements again, as it seems from my perspective that you misread my position.
There is a tremendous wealth of sources relating to the thriving indigenous cultures in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and throughout the rest of Latin America, for that matter.
There are indeed many such sources. There are, unfortunately, also a great deal of sources discussing the decline and extinction of native languages and cultures throughout the Americas. Now admittedly this particular area - highland Peru through Paraguay - is the worst region with which to demonstrate my argument, and probably the best (excepting the Yucatan or Nunavut) for your own.
Indigenous peoples in the Andes go to great lengths to preserve their identities and it's actually one of the defining issues of the region's recent history.
Absolutely it is, and this is likely one of the few areas where I approach the same level of familiarity with the subject matter as you. However, where you take the strong political move to preserve heritage as an indicator of cultural survival, I interpret it differently.
Historically, early nationalism in Europe (and Japan and Turkey) developed as much in spite of as because of the machinations of any government or propertied class. It largely developed
from grassroots movements, then graduated
to the political level. The primary driver of these efforts was not the strength of the cultural object in question (whether dance, craft, folklore, or whathaveyou). Instead it was a reaction to the perception that the practices faced imminent extinction.
At root it was a consequence of the breakdown of the traditional unit through all of human history - the village. As the number of large communities grew and smaller ones withered, traditional local practices tended to fade. Political efforts to preserve old customs did in point of fact manage to preserve real cultural practices. I won't deny it. But in practice they actually preserved only a tiny fraction of the original cultural wealth of each country.
The cause was fairly simple. If you want to preserve peasant folk songs like the ones you grew up with, you're going to need a large group of people to cooperate. You certainly have a large group of peasants, but each is from one of thousands of villages, each of which had its own songs. The very act of attempting to organize the preservation of these songs will see the movement focus on at best a few hundred, of which, in practice, perhaps a few dozen will survive in popular as opposed to occasional use. Of course those few dozen would tend to be those that overlapped many communities or (importantly) were catchy enough that they leave the preservation movement and simply enter into the new "national" culture. This is all in the early years of the process, and long decades would threaten even those few dozen. A great deal would survive only or mostly in written form, to be brought out on festivals and through lack of practice sung unimpressively.
Allow me to offer an example. A five years ago I was living in Italy. There the process of nation-building threw up a dance called
La Tarantella, originally from roughly around modern Naples. What fascinated me was that I could have conversations with Italians from vastly different ages and backgrounds, and they would have the same attitude toward the dance. They weren't terribly interested in performing it, but had a certain pride that it was still commonly known enough to be practiced on demand
because it was the Italian peasants' dance. These very same people would admit without a second thought that it was actually the Calabrian (IIRC) version that anyone ever did, and that the dance was
the Calabrian version of
one South Italian folk dance. In practice, a large number of well-intentioned people, whose aim was to preserve their traditional culture, actually extirpated the vast majority of traditional folk dances in their efforts to rescue the one they'd decided was the "authentic version." Impressively, while records document this as a common and normal process, the myth of preserving national values has been remarkably successful in forgetting such casualties.
My interpretation then, would be that this is a hot-button issue precisely because traditional cultures are under threat. You do not
need to go to great lengths to preserve your culture when it is not in decline. I do not claim that nothing will be left when the process is over, but that the politicization of Indian-ism will tend to itself rub out village-level practices in favor of shared values that the entire region can agree on. In point of fact, vastly disparate peoples with dialects approaching mutual incomprehensibility and (again, IIRC) outright separate languages are all attempting to take a unitary stand in defense of Indian-ness. The end result will inevitably be a definition of the term that will fall far short of the diversity of cultures it claims to represent. Much of what survives will be what can be "packaged" - culturally or economically - for global consumption.
That's just the tip of the iceberg, too - Even the mestizo cultures across Latin America carry varying degrees of indigenous influence in their diets, musical traditions, art, vocabulary, and spiritual beliefs, particularly in rural areas.
I'm dedicating my entire future toward studying surviving indigenous culture in the Western Hemisphere. It's my passion and it's something I know a great deal about. Trying to argue with me that these cultures are dead is an argument based on pure ignorance - It's like trying to convince me that there's no tree in my front yard when I'm looking right at it.
Having said all that, there remains a caveat.
You.
It isn't 1880 anymore. Modern Western (or, if you prefer, Global) culture puts a tremendous value on preservation of languages and dialects above and beyond (or rather below and within) the national level. To back it are recorders who not only have a relatively scientific motivation (and so are less likely to homogenize in describing), but also have access to tools that make recording and preserving information much more feasible. The Soviets made a truly impressive demonstration of the results that follow a state promoting and protecting minorities as opposed to assimilating them.
The West also offers a strong and growing market for goods produced "locally" and/or "authentically." It also promotes tendencies to seek out roots in a way that has been infrequent in human history, and has resulted in some cases in the recreation of cultures on the brink.
So, hopefully, we don't lose too much more of the interesting bits.
It is at this point that I'll point out that I certainly did not say that the native cultures of Bolivia were dead. I did exaggerate for effect in referring to them as a backwards fringe, but I hope that my comments here will make clear the sense in which I meant that. One, I admit, not entirely clear in my original post.