There have been a number of legal reforms in Bolivia since the first indigenous president, Evo Morales, came to power in 2006. In 2009 a New Constitution was enacted which included rights for women and expanded legal recognition of indigenous groups. In 2013, in order to address rising rates of violence against women, Law 348 to Guarantee Women a Life Free from Violence was established. Yet what meaning these legal changes have for Bolivian women is still unknown. This thesis explores Bolivian women's legal consciousness and subjectivities in the context of these changes, particularly in relation to law concerning violence. Twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in the city of La Paz, Bolivia, between October 2014 and October 2015. Participant observation in a women's centre was the main field site, which offered the opportunities to gather women's life stories and explore women's narratives of the law. This was further supplemented with interviews with Civil Society Organisations and government in order to add different perspectives and further map the social structures of society that both constrain and enable meaning-making. This socio-legal ethnography presents women's engagements with the law, and offers insights into women's lived experiences of accessing justice and claiming rights, both directly and indirectly, as well as the influence that legality has on women's legal subjectivity and their sense of self. Doing so provides a narrative of Bolivian women's legal consciousness and reveals the meaning that law has for women in their everyday lives. Law works to shape the way they view themselves and their experiences as they engage with the processes of accessing justice. It can be concluded that law is a meaningful yet often contradictory presence in Bolivian women's everyday lives.

This is an ethnographic study of discourses and experiences concerning sexual exchanges among kin “who are too closely related to marry each other” (OED), or what in lay language is called “incest”. I investigate the ways in which a certain kind of incest, that between older men and younger women, primarily from different generations, is experienced by women of predominantly rural origin, who have been hospitalized in the major public psychiatric hospital in Bolivia, in Sucre. In this sense, this research is as much a study of incest as it is of psychiatric institutionalization. These experiences will be considered in the context of a wider field of ethnic, class and gender discourses that are produced by medical staff, community organizations, as well as national judicial institutions. The category of 'incest' is problematized in terms of how kinship is constructed, not only as a series of dynamic discourses (as practices whose effect is the production of events) but also as mobile experiences, however socially regulated. With this in mind, I present an account of Andean concepts and treatment of incest, as well as of legal and medical categories. Specifically, I focus on the play between discourses in the context of the psychiatric hospital, the judicial court and the communities of selected inmates. I show how the inmates' experiences of intergenerational incest and sexual violence in general are related to the dominant ethnic, class and gender narratives produced by medical staff, community organizations, and judicial institutions.