- University of California, Berkeley, Anthropology, AlumnusUniversity of Chicago, Anthropology, Faculty Memberadd
- Anthropology, Authority and Obligation, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Andean studies, Bolivia, and 19 moreLatin American Studies, Political Philosophy, Critical Theory, Indigenous Studies, Settler Colonial Studies, Gender Studies, Gender and Sexuality, Sexuality, Environmental Anthropology, Political Geography and Geopolitics, Political Ecology (Anthropology), Critical Cartography, Ontology, New Materialism, Anthropology of the Senses, Aesthetics, Intimacy, History of Slavery, and Labor History and Studiesedit
- A political anthropologist, Mareike Winchell (PhD University of California Berkeley) focuses on the racialization of ... moreA political anthropologist, Mareike Winchell (PhD University of California Berkeley) focuses on the racialization of property in light of ongoing histories of Indigenous land dispossession, as well as how such formations find new expression in contemporary engagements with climate change.
Winchell's first book, After Servitude: Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia (University of California Press, 2022), traces the ways people call upon and actively repurpose the past in their efforts to navigate legacies of labor subjection and sexual violence. Such engagements reveal a more durative orientation to justice, one that departs notably from utopic projects of property that require disarticulating land and people, and the present from the past. The book received Honorable Mention for the 2022 Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (SLACA) Book Prize. This prize “aims to recognize distinguished anthropological work that advances the understanding of the Americas in innovative and potentially transformative ways.”
Winchell is currently at work on two new book projects. "Ghostly Invasions: Political Theologies of Fire" focuses on the racialization of climate politics in Bolivia. The book traces the authoritarian tendencies of environmentalisms that preserve nature's purity and reproduce narratives of racialized guilt and responsibility. Conversely, it considers grounded collaborations—feminist horticultural projects, anti-imperialist environmental organizing, and land “restoration” efforts—that seek to move past the divide of standard conservation (with the separation of people and nature) and statist approaches that have often seen land redistribution and ecological protection as antithetical.
Another book project, "The Servant’s Properties: Materiality, Gender, and More-than-Human Landscapes in 20th Century Bolivia," examines the legal claims of out-of-wedlock children born to indentured laborers after 1953. Based largely on archival materials, the book asks how incommensurate approaches to land and place came to be cemented within institutional knowledges, and what that process reveals about the remaking of property by non-secular orientations to landscapes and/as kin. More broadly, the project shows how marginalized hacienda workers transformed land relations and hierarchies through practices of bureaucratic maneuver and legal subversion.
Winchell’s writing and digital scholarship have appeared in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI), Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Cultural Anthropology, Journal of Peasant Studies, Critical Times, Bolivian Studies Journal, and Comparative Studies in Society and History. She has received generous funding from the Josephine de Karman Fellowship Trust, the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, The Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Center for International Social Science Research, and The Townsend Center for the Humanities. Before joining LSE in 2023, Winchell was assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.edit - (dissertation committee) Saba Mahmood, Judith Butler, Charles Hirschkind, Charles Briggs, Sinclair Thomsonedit
How are injurious pasts redeployed by the dispossessed? After Servitude traces how agrarian engineers, indigenous farmers, mestizo mining bosses, and rural workers navigate racial hierarchies rooted in histories of forced agrarian labor.... more
How are injurious pasts redeployed by the dispossessed? After Servitude traces how agrarian engineers, indigenous farmers, mestizo mining bosses, and rural workers navigate racial hierarchies rooted in histories of forced agrarian labor. In the rural Bolivian province of Ayopaya, where the liberatory promises of property remain elusive, Quechua people address such hierarchies by demanding aid from mestizo elites and, where that fails, through acts of labor militancy. Against institutional faith in property ownership as a means to detach land and people, present and past, the kin of former masters and servants alike have insisted that ethical debts from earlier racial violence stretch across epochs and formal land sales. What emerges is a vision of justice grounded in popular demands that wealth remain beholden to the region’s agrarian past. By tracing Ayopayans’ active efforts to contend with servitude’s long shadow, Mareike Winchell demonstrates existing alternatives to property both as an extractive paradigm and a technique of historical redress.
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520386440/after-servitude
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520386440/after-servitude
Research Interests: Latin American Studies, Anthropology, Violence, Kinship (Anthropology), Agrarian Studies, and 15 moreSovereignty, Property Law, Gender and Sexuality, Race and Ethnicity, Bolivia, Indigenous Peoples, Ethnicity, Intimacy, Intersectionality and Social Inequality, Quechua, Andean studies, Reparations, Mestizaje, Landscape and Land-use-history, and Racial capitalism
Like plantation slavery, Indigenous servitude on Bolivian haciendas raises crucial questions about the afterlives of colonial subjection. Engaging questions of colonialism, unfreedom, and emancipation across the Americas, this article... more
Like plantation slavery, Indigenous servitude on Bolivian haciendas raises crucial questions about the afterlives of colonial subjection. Engaging questions of colonialism, unfreedom, and emancipation across the Americas, this article examines how Quechua Bolivians remake landscapes defined by continued material traces of subjection and abiding racial inequalities. Rather than inhabiting this landscape as one of passive historical repetition, Quechua Bolivians use narratives and spatial practices to alter landscapes—including elderberry trees where kin were whipped, high mountain lakes constructed by forced laboring kin, and ravines and valley crevices that offered routes of escape from indentured labor and political violence. Such practices point to a politics of lo abigarrado (the motley), a term used to describe people whose labor itineraries and affective attachments have not been constrained by the frames of Mestizo citizenship and timeless Indigenous rootedness to place. Through this spatial poetics, Quechua families thwart nationalist paradigms of propertied redress to forge alternate plotlines of emancipation based on keeping time, and places, open to the demands of a violent past.
Research Interests: Anthropology, Ontology, Political Philosophy, Multiculturalism, Indigenous Studies, and 15 moreCritical Animal Studies, Kinship (Anthropology), Liberalism, Race and Ethnicity, Social Justice, Cultural Landscapes, Agriculture, Bolivia, Emancipation, Andes, Black Feminist Theory/Thought, Citizenship, Quechua, Decolonial Thought, and Temporality
Drawing from fieldwork and archival research carried out in Bolivia between 2010 and 2017, this article undertakes a rethinking of Indigenous ontologies in light of Bolivian interlocutors' efforts to navigate deeply precarious ties to... more
Drawing from fieldwork and archival research carried out in Bolivia between 2010 and 2017, this article undertakes a rethinking of Indigenous ontologies in light of Bolivian interlocutors' efforts to navigate deeply precarious ties to named places and saints. Attention to such instabilities challenges romantic accounts of ontology that presume a stable domain of materiality or religiosity outside of practice. During fieldwork in central Bolivia, I learned about the ways that Quechua farmers negotiated the relational and ecological e ects of a divisive history of indentured labour and sexual violence through acts of devotion including paraman purina ('walking for rain'), feasting, flute-play, dance, and chapel prayer each February for the Patron Saint La Virgen de la Candelaria, named places, and the Pachamama. These practices sought to rebuild ties to named places that were interrupted by the forbidding of offerings by the prior hacienda master and reshaped by state projects of Indigenous revivalism. These devotional practices, and participants' narrations of them, offer insight into the political workings of Indigenous ontologies in twenty-first-century Bolivia. I propose critical ontologies as a scholarly lens that insists upon placing relations with other-than-humans within broader fields of legal and political contestation over rights, nature, and Indigeneity.
Read here: https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-9655.13962
Read here: https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-9655.13962
Research Interests: Religion, Latin American Studies, Anthropology, Indigenous Studies, Climate Change, and 15 morePostcolonial Studies, Posthumanism, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Environmental History, Bolivia, Indigenous Peoples, Cosmopolitics, Latin America, Andean studies, Plantations, Indigenous Cultural Revitalization, Indigenous Ontologies, The Rights of Nature, Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, and Ontological Turn
In Bolivia after 2019, urban climate mitigation efforts frequently reproduce visions of racialized blame that then support conservative political calls to expel Indigenous migrants from their land and from protected parks. This narrative... more
In Bolivia after 2019, urban climate mitigation efforts frequently reproduce visions of racialized blame that then support conservative political calls to expel Indigenous migrants from their land and from protected parks. This narrative subtly revives older paradigms, producing a sort of environmental manifest destiny. But a question remains: is climate captured by this narrative, and if not, then what resources exist for addressing climate not only as environmental phenomena but also as a racialized paradigm for separating deserving from undeserving life? This article examines community-based organizing around megafires in San José de Chiquitos. I consider how such environmental efforts strive to supersede the human and ontological divisions of mainstream climate science, thereby refuting the separation of climate change from enduring experiences of Indigenous land dispossession and racial violence.
Link here: https://canopyforum.org/2023/06/06/climates-of-anti-blackness-religion-race-and-environmental-politics-in-bolivia/
Link here: https://canopyforum.org/2023/06/06/climates-of-anti-blackness-religion-race-and-environmental-politics-in-bolivia/
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What would it mean to take on reparation as more than a bureaucratic formality? What kind of historical accounting is thinkable when we suspend the premise that property formalization closes off debts incurred by earlier racial economies,... more
What would it mean to take on reparation as more than a bureaucratic formality? What kind of historical accounting is thinkable when we suspend the premise that property formalization closes off debts incurred by earlier racial economies, and injustices? To whom are we, and our contemporary textures of profit and pleasure, beholden?
Mareike Winchell présente ici une partie de ses travaux sur les enjeux relatifs au foncier en Bolivie, entre passé et présent. Un billet qui entre en écho avec la parution récente de l'ouvrage collectif Le foncier rural dans les pays du Sud.
https://blogterrain.hypotheses.org/20230
Mareike Winchell présente ici une partie de ses travaux sur les enjeux relatifs au foncier en Bolivie, entre passé et présent. Un billet qui entre en écho avec la parution récente de l'ouvrage collectif Le foncier rural dans les pays du Sud.
https://blogterrain.hypotheses.org/20230
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Latin American Studies, Economics, Anthropology, Ethics, and 15 moreIndigenous Studies, Marxism, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Property Law, Critical Race Theory, Race and Ethnicity, Bolivia, Mining, Intersectionality and Social Inequality, Andean studies, Land Rights, Reparations, Property Ownership and Land Acquisition, Post Extractivismo Y Derechos De La Naturaleza, and Obligations and Contracts
The boundaries of fieldwork not only define the scope of research but also circumscribe and delimit the bounds of responsibility. This essay proposes a return to the whereness of the field as an antidote to treating the powers of... more
The boundaries of fieldwork not only define the scope of research but also circumscribe and delimit the bounds of responsibility. This essay proposes a return to the whereness of the field as an antidote to treating the powers of description and historical dispersal as absolute and uncontested. By approaching fields not as empty retainers but as comprised of and defined by research interlocuters and their politics, scholars can better account for global slippages and dispersals without subtly reviving the figure of an inert nature under duress, in/organic or otherwise.
Research Interests: Anthropology, Indigenous Studies, Climate Change, Research Methodology, Ethnography, and 15 moreQualitative methodology, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Environmental Anthropology, Collaboration, History of Anthropology, Colonialism, Ethnographic Fieldwork (Anthropology), Ethnology, Ethnographic fieldwork, Intimacy, Structural Functionalism, Fieldwork, Decolonial Thought, Decolonization, and Field Study
Read here: https://www.ucpress.edu/blog/60742/racial-violence-land-and-indigenous-reparation-in-bolivia After Servitude: Elusive Property and the... more
Read here: https://www.ucpress.edu/blog/60742/racial-violence-land-and-indigenous-reparation-in-bolivia
After Servitude: Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia enters the country’s political moment from the underbelly: from the position of rural subjects who have not experienced the self-evident benefits of “modern citizenship.” How to sit with the pessimism of those people who, rather than finding liberation or a new ground of citizenship, instead find themselves re-marginalized, even animalized, by a narrative of national anti-colonial struggle for whom they act as scapegoats? To find the answer, I spent much time sitting on the ground in pastures, outside sheep sheds, in earthen patios with corn husks drying, and learning about the nation’s labor past and contemporary political landscape. I opened myself up to pondering the significance of practices that, from my own ethical and political background, appeared deeply troubling, offensive, and even grotesque.
I did this not to simply enact the classic relativistic move—”We” here in ‘the West’ think this, but “They” there instead do this”—but rather to elevate that grounded experience and insight as a basis from which to make, and remake, existing theories of the political. What happens to our understanding of the machinations of rights-based repair when we take as foundational, not exceptional, experiences like those of aging Quechua servants? Doing so allows new kinds of injuries to come into view. More precisely, the book shows how institutional programs of land-based reparation can act as catalysts for guilty parties to escape or refute their own culpability for violence. These programs can also reinstall gender and racial hierarchies that reproduce the forms of blameworthiness that organized earlier labor servitude.
* * *
After Servitude: Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia enters the country’s political moment from the underbelly: from the position of rural subjects who have not experienced the self-evident benefits of “modern citizenship.” How to sit with the pessimism of those people who, rather than finding liberation or a new ground of citizenship, instead find themselves re-marginalized, even animalized, by a narrative of national anti-colonial struggle for whom they act as scapegoats? To find the answer, I spent much time sitting on the ground in pastures, outside sheep sheds, in earthen patios with corn husks drying, and learning about the nation’s labor past and contemporary political landscape. I opened myself up to pondering the significance of practices that, from my own ethical and political background, appeared deeply troubling, offensive, and even grotesque.
I did this not to simply enact the classic relativistic move—”We” here in ‘the West’ think this, but “They” there instead do this”—but rather to elevate that grounded experience and insight as a basis from which to make, and remake, existing theories of the political. What happens to our understanding of the machinations of rights-based repair when we take as foundational, not exceptional, experiences like those of aging Quechua servants? Doing so allows new kinds of injuries to come into view. More precisely, the book shows how institutional programs of land-based reparation can act as catalysts for guilty parties to escape or refute their own culpability for violence. These programs can also reinstall gender and racial hierarchies that reproduce the forms of blameworthiness that organized earlier labor servitude.
* * *
Research Interests: Latin American Studies, Anthropology, Political Economy, Indigenous Studies, Political Theory, and 15 moreEthnography, Land and Property Development, Postcolonial Studies, Political Ecology, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Property Law, Race and Ethnicity, Bolivia, Anthropology of Kinship, 'Decolonization' and the politics of settler state/Indigenous relations, Relationality, Settler Colonial Studies, Quechua, Andean studies, and Reparations
This article examines revolutionary discourses of national historical transformation in Bolivia and tracks the ways those discourses are appropriated, contested, and recast by farmers in the rural agricultural province of Ayopaya. During... more
This article examines revolutionary discourses of national historical transformation in Bolivia and tracks the ways those discourses are appropriated, contested, and recast by farmers in the rural agricultural province of Ayopaya. During fieldwork carried out with Quechua-speaking farmers in Ayopaya between 2011 and 2012, I learned about people’s enduring concerns with a recent hacienda past. Against governmental declarations that Bolivia’s colonial past was dead or had passed, farmers meditated on the duration of earlier histories of colonial land dispossession and violations of indigenous sovereignty. Talk about the region’s oppressive history here allowed people to assess deficient state aid and resources but also to oppose unwelcome state interventions pushing a legal model of bounded collectivity. I trace the ways that farmers and villagers mobilized the hacienda past to address inequitable land tenure, violated sovereignty, and women’s marginalization from political life, and thereby raise new questions about the critical possibilities opened up by the re-politicization of this colonial history. Rural support for Bolivia’s Movement Toward Socialism party government eroded nearly a decade ago, and this complicates both triumphalist and defeatist accounts of President Evo Morales’ 2019 resignation, which tend to paint Morales’ rural indigenous supporters as innocent and naïve.
Research Interests: History, Gender Studies, Political Economy, Indigenous Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and 15 moreAgrarian Studies, Indigenous Politics, Race and Ethnicity, Postcolonial Feminism, Materiality (Anthropology), Labor History and Studies, Anthropology of Time, Ethnicity, 'Decolonization' and the politics of settler state/Indigenous relations, Quechua, Colonial Latin American History, Decolonial Thought, Andean studies, Decolonialidad, and Political Economy and History
Recent scholarship in anthropology offers critical attention to inequality as a constitutive feature of social life to which specific legal, cultural, and religious traditions supply diverging answers. Drawing upon these debates, this... more
Recent scholarship in anthropology offers critical attention to inequality as a constitutive feature of social life to which specific legal, cultural, and religious traditions supply diverging answers. Drawing upon these debates, this article explores the ways that Quechua- and Spanish-speaking subjects in the Bolivian province of Ayopaya imagine, inhabit, and strive to address inequalities stemming from the region’s history of labor violence. While Ayopaya’s history of hacienda servitude lives on in contemporary structures of racialized disparity, I argue that it also conditions particular traditions of exchange that rural groups draw from in order to contest a new gold mining economy. Against more pessimistic accounts of late capitalism as a moment of inexorable abandonment, particularly for indigenous groups, I query the tenacity of obligation and probe its political possibilities as a practice of claim making (and a scholarly heuristic) by which to expose the ethical refusals on which “free” exchange relies.
Keywords: inequality, labor, indigeneity, ethics, extractivism, value, circulation
Keywords: inequality, labor, indigeneity, ethics, extractivism, value, circulation
Research Interests: Social Theory, Latin American Studies, Gender Studies, Indigenous Studies, Marxism, and 11 morePersonhood, Capitalism, Bolivia, Neoliberalism, Extractive industries (Economic Anthropology), Mining, Labor History and Studies, Patronage (History), Temporality, Poverty and Inequality, and Obligations and Contracts
Since 2006, Bolivia has undertaken a dramatic program of state reform aimed at overcoming the injustices of the nation’s colonial and neoliberal past. In the process, rural practices and sensibilities originating in the former hacienda... more
Since 2006, Bolivia has undertaken a dramatic program of state reform aimed at overcoming the injustices of the nation’s colonial and neoliberal past. In the process, rural practices and sensibilities originating in the former hacienda system have assumed new importance, arising as volatile sites of state intervention and political critique. Like eighteenth-century Bourbon administrators, state reformers today express concern with agrarian patronage, which, they argue, facilitates continued land dispossession and reproduces a particularly servile Quechua-speaking peasantry. Yet, despite reform efforts, hacienda-based ties remain crucial to rural life, structuring acts of redistributive exchange and providing a relational medium by which former landlords attempt to make amends for past violence. By taking seriously the moral and political dimensions of post-hacienda patronage, this contribution challenges dominant frameworks of indigenous justice to foreground the reconciliatory possibilities of exchange relations rooted in a bonded past.
Keywords: servitude, indigeneity, exchange, Bolivia, hacienda, patronage, moral economy
Keywords: servitude, indigeneity, exchange, Bolivia, hacienda, patronage, moral economy
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The essay belongs to an edited volume, titled Pensando com Saba Mahmood (edited by Bruno Reinhardt and Michael Allan). My contribution outlines Mahmood’s ethnographic method of treating concepts as ongoing, unstable materializations. It... more
The essay belongs to an edited volume, titled Pensando com Saba Mahmood (edited by Bruno Reinhardt and Michael Allan). My contribution outlines Mahmood’s ethnographic method of treating concepts as ongoing, unstable materializations. It follows that engagements with injustice might be productively decoupled from the capacity for or aim of social transformation. By taking up this line of Mahmood's work in the Bolivian context, the piece maps out some new lines of inquiry across the anthropology of religion, Latin American Studies, and critical studies of inequality.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Comparative Politics, Ethics, Legitimacy and Authority, Indigenous Studies, and 15 morePoverty, Race and Ethnicity, Gender, Feminism, Bolivia, Patronage (History), Social Inequality (Anthropology), Saba Mahmood, Social Inequality, Latin America, Andean History, Secularism, Hierarchy, Classical and Contemporary Social Theory, and Anthropology of Religion
In this interview with Sarah Fister Gale of UChicago's Social Science Dialogo Series, I discuss the benefits and risks of digitization. I raise questions about the relationship between an ethos of open access and specific indigenous land... more
In this interview with Sarah Fister Gale of UChicago's Social Science Dialogo Series, I discuss the benefits and risks of digitization. I raise questions about the relationship between an ethos of open access and specific indigenous land rights projects, warning that digitization can go hand in hand with new regimes of governance in which bureaucratic transparency merges with state discipline. Additionally, I ask about the unexpected benefits of constraining archival access, particularly for indigenous groups who have long been targets of social scientific and policy research. Such measures push back against presumptions of non-indigenous researchers' rights to open knowledge and unmitigated access, which have long served as staples of humanistic social inquiry.
Research Interests: Latin American Studies, Archival Studies, Indigenous Studies, Indigenous Research Methodologies, Property Law, and 11 moreBolivian studies, Digitization, Digital Media & Learning, Bolivia, Digital Archives, Quechua, Land Rights, Bureaucracy, Reparations, Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, and Activist Anthropology
Tracking the tensions between existing forms of proximate living and state cartographies of post-hacienda household offers new insights concerning the centrality of intimacy to twenty-first-century projects of governance and... more
Tracking the tensions between existing forms of proximate living and state cartographies of post-hacienda household offers new insights concerning the centrality of intimacy to twenty-first-century projects of governance and citizenship.
Read at: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1165-remapping
Read at: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1165-remapping
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Co-published with Hannah Appel and Emily Yates-Doerr, this piece discusses Omri Elisha's article, "Moral Ambitions of Grace: The Paradox of Compassion and Accountability in Evangelical Faith-Based Activism." The authors belonged to a... more
Co-published with Hannah Appel and Emily Yates-Doerr, this piece discusses Omri Elisha's article, "Moral Ambitions of Grace: The Paradox of Compassion and Accountability in Evangelical Faith-Based Activism." The authors belonged to a student jury who selected the 2009 winner of the Cultural Horizon's Prize, awarded by Cultural Anthropology.
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Research Interests: Latin American Studies, Anthropology, Violence, Kinship (Anthropology), Agrarian Studies, and 15 moreSovereignty, Property Law, Gender and Sexuality, Race and Ethnicity, Bolivia, Indigenous Peoples, Ethnicity, Intimacy, Intersectionality and Social Inequality, Quechua, Andean studies, Reparations, Mestizaje, Landscape and Land-use-history, and Racial capitalism
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This graduate course draws from interdisciplinary debates to position intimate forms in relation to broader textures of emotion and ethics, desire and race, labor and liberation. Heuristically, intimacy allows us to attend to practices... more
This graduate course draws from interdisciplinary debates to position intimate forms in relation to broader textures of emotion and ethics, desire and race, labor and liberation. Heuristically, intimacy allows us to attend to practices that spill beyond more dyadic understandings of ostensibly-private domains of sexuality or kinship as opposed to public forms of economic production and labor. Course readings, taken primarily but not exclusively from the Latin American region, will consider specific instances when the gathering together of bodies in close quarters (e.g. in arrangements of domestic servitude, colonial-era monasteries and convents, indigenous slave-holding in the Americas, settler households and adoptive parentage configurations) became problematic and subject to governmental intervention. We will further ask how, in moments of colonial reform, post-colonial change, and de-colonial mobilization, intimate forms became newly offensive but also grounded (and continue to ground) emergent claims to life and rights. The course ends by meditating on the entailments of intimacy for ethnography, namely, as a model of research rooted in attachments and vulnerabilities rather than spectatorship and distance.
Research Interests: Latin American Studies, Gender Studies, Contract Law, Ethnography, Postcolonial Studies, and 15 moreQueer Theory, Anthropology of the Body, Liberalism, Gender and Sexuality, Embodiment, Critical Race Theory, History of Slavery, Colonialism, Ethnographic Fieldwork (Anthropology), Anthropology of Kinship, Labor History and Studies, Intimacy, Crip theory, Secularism, and Sex Trafficking
This graduate course (co-taught with Alan Kolata) examines the reciprocal production of non/humanity and the environment, focusing primarily on the Andean and Amazonian regions of South America. In recent years, a flurry of new... more
This graduate course (co-taught with Alan Kolata) examines the reciprocal production of non/humanity and the environment, focusing primarily on the Andean and Amazonian regions of South America. In recent years, a flurry of new scholarship in and about this part of the world interrogates the ways that cosmo-politics (more-than-humans in political life), new ontologies (emergent ways of being or forms of existence), and broader collaborative zones of social and environmental worlding interrupt familiar paradigms of human exceptionalism. This course takes up these provocations and links them to an older cannon of ethnographic and ethnological research concerning pre-colonial religiosities, land settlement, property regimes, and exchange networks in South America. By drawing together classic texts on the co-production of people and place and recent ethnographies of human/environmental co-articulation, the course aims to develop a more historically-attuned heuristic with which to approach contemporary phenomena including eco-politics, oil and natural gas conflicts, expanding soy and meat production frontiers, water rights and “green” agri-business, and huaca deities and deceased kin as tenacious diviners of the sacred.
Research Interests: Political Geography and Geopolitics, Latin American Studies, Anthropology, Ontology, Postcolonial Studies, and 14 moreEnvironmental Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Environmental Anthropology, Critical Race Theory, Colonialism, Ethnology, Indigenous Peoples, Memory and materiality, Cosmopolitics, Decolonial Thought, Amerindian Perspectivism, Andean studies, Anthropocene, and Environmental and Resource Politics
This course constitutes the third section of the Civilizations sequence (CRES 24003), Colonizations. It examines de-coloniality as a political project that introduces possibilities and confronts limits as a framework of emancipatory... more
This course constitutes the third section of the Civilizations sequence (CRES 24003), Colonizations. It examines de-coloniality as a political project that introduces possibilities and confronts limits as a framework of emancipatory desire. We begin with classic texts in postcolonial studies that elaborate colonialism as a system of governance and as a practice of knowledge collection about colonized peoples. We then ask how elements of colonial governance persist under political liberalism not only in formerly-colonized states but also for historical centers of colonial power in Europe and the United States. The second half of the course shifts to an examination of how these colonial ruins shape contemporary political horizons. Along with introducing students to debates about post-coloniality and de-coloniality, the course will touch on broader social-scientific conversations about historical production and erasure, legal recognition, ideas of emancipation and progress, race and violence, secular governance and the body, indigenous politics, economic marginality, environmental politics, and projects of cultural revival and resurgence. We conclude by considering what a de-colonial future might look like and what categories and structures arise as obstructions to its realization. By the end of the course, students are expected to be able to critically write about and discuss social scientific debates concerning colonialism and its legal, material, and affective debris and to bring these debates to bear on understanding aspects of our contemporary political world/s.
Research Interests: Political Geography and Geopolitics, Political Anthropology, Environmental Anthropology, Legal Anthropology, Gender and Sexuality, and 13 moreCritical Race Theory, Race and Ethnicity, History of Slavery, Colonialism, Feminism, Critical Indigenous Methodologies, Relationality, Settler Colonial Studies, Settler Colonialism & Its Legacies, Ruins, Slavery in the Americas, Decolonization, and Postcolonialism
A Revolution in Fragments offers a rich and detailed political and legal history of revolution by constitution, and the juridification of a pro-indigenous reform agenda through creative practices of legal reasoning and bureaucratic... more
A Revolution in Fragments offers a rich and detailed political and legal history of revolution by constitution, and the juridification of a pro-indigenous reform agenda through creative practices of legal reasoning and bureaucratic refashioning. In illuminating growing disaffection with Morales by some of his earliest and strongest supporters, the book also supplies a retrospective account of the drawn-out fall from grace of Morales’ nationalist decolonial project. Beyond this institutional history, however, the book also offers a touching portrait of the ethical uncertainties of juridification as a technology for political change. Recalling Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s (2012) discussion of decolonial sensibilities that are irreducible to revivalist terms, the book raises the crucial question of the continued vitality of decolonial projects that are, and never were, contained fully within Morales’ program. This question bears restating given President Luis Arce’s election in 2020. It suggests an alternative to the idea that in its hegemonic refashioning, indigeneity gets subsumed into coloniality (Burman 2020). In Bolivia as elsewhere, revolution—as an orientation to history and as a set of multi-faceted political projects—never belongs to the state alone. For, as Edgar Ramirez, a crucial figure in Bolivia’s miners’ movement that Goodale had the opportunity to interview, once sternly reminded then-President Morales, “Look, this is our revolution, please never forget that” (165).