This book attempts to engage theoretical questions of ethnicity, ideology, and identity as they are lived out by Aymara students in a small teachers' college in rural Bolivia. A year of fieldwork at the Escuela Normal Rural "Kollasuyo" focused on the experiences of Aymara students during their intensive training to become rural teachers, the primary disseminators of "national culture" to the rural population. On one level, the book is about analyzing "the way things are" in Bolivian teacher education--how certain conceptions of teachers and teaching arise, what conditions maintain these concepts, how educational practices affect students, and how students resist these practices and their effects. On another level, it is about questions of identity in modern nation-states, the school's role in the reproduction of the social order, subjects' resistance to that order, and the uses of language for both reproductive and resistant ends. Chapters are: (1) Ethnicity and the Construction of Nationhood; (2) Rural Schooling in Bolivia; (3) Student Life at the Normal School; (4) Curriculum and Identity; (5) Commodified Language and Alienated Exchange in the Normal School; (6) Student Resistance to Commodification and Alienation: Silence, Satire, and the Academic Black Market; and (7) An Alternative Vision: Notes toward a Transformative Bolivian Pedagogy. An appendix briefly describes the students interviewed. Contains approximately 225 references, extensive notes, and an index. (SV)