Every once in a while I get feedback of various sorts on my blog. Often, these fall into two camps: 1) why don’t I post more about Bolivia news? or 2) why do I let my biases keep me from reporting certain things? Oddly, I the second criticism comes from those who think I’m too anti-MAS and those who think I’m not critical enough of the MAS government.
The dilemma, of course, is that I don’t have time to cover everything. Nor do I think it’s my job. There’s a growing blogosphere out there w/ a number of voices. If you want rabidly pro-MAS apologetics, visit El Duderino’s blog. If you want rabidly apocalyptic anti-MAS venom, visit the folks at AROFL (they’ll be happy to put you on their mailing list).
But my blog was never meant to be a newspaper digest or a what’s-going-on-around-the-blogosphere service. I have limited time to spare blogging (though I’ll have more in a few months, whew!). There are plenty of great blogs that provide that kind of service. I highly recommend Global Voices Bolivia. Now that Blogrolling is back up (it was down for months), I can update my blogrolls & provide you w/ more links (all the ones followed by ••• are Bolivia-themed blogs).
Thus, I limit myself to the kind of things that particularly interest me. For example, I’ve pretty much stayed away from all the corruption scandals affecting the government, or the international relations tiffs w/ Peru/Chile, or the legal case moving forward against Goni. I might get to some of them eventually, but I’ve not had the time. Instead, I’d rather focus on issues more related to my research interests: elections, electoral laws/systems, and political parties. (I’ll write about the proposed changes to the electoral system later today.)
My blog has evolved over the past seven years. When I started in 2002, I hardly ever posted about politics of any kind. I mostly blogged about books, films, music, and goings-on in my little corner of the Kalamazoo “scene.” Only in 2003, as I set out to start my research fieldwork in Bolivia did I start blogging more extensively about Bolivian politics—but mixing in a dose of culture, travel, daily life, music, film, etc.—as a way to keep my friends & family back home informed. Returning in 2004, I continued to write about Bolivian politics as a way to keep myself on task while writing my dissertation. And I continued the personal blogging. Only recently has my blogging been more exclusively about Bolivian politics. But that’s more a product of moving to little Carlisle, PA, and the birth of my son (no time/opportunity for films, music shows, etc.). Basically, people are mistaken if they think my blog is only about Bolivian politics (even if in recent years it has been mainly about Bolivian politics).
So. I’m going to make a concerted effort—especially now that we’re moving to Oxford, Mississippi (an amazing college music scene) & Javi is getting a little older—to post more regularly, and more about the other things I love (music, pop culture, good books, teaching, sports, etc.). I’m also going to continue posting frequent, but more “essay” driven posts about Bolivian politics as they intersect w/ my research interests. My apologies to those who look to me for daily doses of Bolivian political news, but I haven’t provided that for a while anyhow.
