The 2005 election of Evo Morales to the presidency of Bolivia marked a critical moment of transformation--a coca farmer and peasant union leader became the first indigenous president in the history of the Americas. Gathering work from a new generation of anthropologists and scholars in related disciplines who have been doing fieldwork in the "post-Evo" era, Remapping Bolivia reflects shifting paradigms in Latin Americanist and indigenous-related research.
An accessible account of Evo Morales's first six years in office, offering analysis of major issues as well as interviews with a wide variety of people, resulting in a valuable primer on Bolivia and Morales's "process of change".
Based on author's thesis (doctoral - YaleUniversity, 2018) issued under title: We, the mediated people: revolution, inclusion, and unconventional adaptation in post-Cold War South America.
Janine Romero Valenzuela analyses the Bolivian lithium program in the largest empirical study to date with a focus on local perspectives and governance, identifying grievances and conflict dimensions. The case study shows that it is particularly an altered governance approach, the local trust in government and the high expectations that the Morales administration could create around lithium that influence local viewpoints. By applying the meaningful grievance concept on the local level, the book supports a further refinement of theories on a resource-governance-conflict-link.
This volume traces the socioeconomic and environmental changes taking place in the Gran Chaco, a vast and richly biodiverse ecoregion at the intersection of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay. Representing a wide range of contemporary anthropological scholarship that has not been available in English until now, Reimagining the Gran Chaco illuminates how the region’s many Indigenous groups are negotiating these transformations in their own terms. The essays in this volume explore how the region has become a complex arena of political, cultural, and economic contestation between actors that include the state, environmental groups and NGOs, and private businesses and how local actors are reconfiguring their subjectivities and political agency in response. With its multinational perspective, and its examination of major themes including missionization, millenarian movements, the Chaco war, industrial enclaves, extractivism, political mobilization, and the struggle for rights, this volume brings greater visibility to an underrepresented, complex region. Contributors: Nancy Postero | César Ceriani Cernadas | Hannes Kalisch | Rodrigo Villagra | Federico Bossert | Paola Canova | Joel Correia | Bret Gustafson | Mercedes Biocca | Silvia Hirsch | Denise Bebbington | Gastón Gordillo | Guido Cortez
Veronika Groke interrogates the concept of the comunidad indígena (indigenous community) in the context of the history and social life of a Guaraní community in eastern Bolivia. While this institution is today firmly embedded in Bolivian politics and society, different people and interest groups have varying understandings of its meaning and purpose. By showing the comunidad to be a multifaceted complex of diverging and sometimes competing ideas, desires, and agendas, Groke provides new insight into contemporary political tensions related to culture, identity, and development
Many of Bolivia's poorest and most vulnerable citizens work as vendors in the Cancha mega-market in the city of Cochabamba, where they must navigate systems of informality and illegality in order to survive. In Owners of the Sidewalk Daniel M. Goldstein examines the ways these systems correlate in the marginal spaces of the Latin American city. Collaborating with the Cancha's legal and permanent stall vendors (fijos) and its illegal and itinerant street and sidewalk vendors (ambulantes), Goldstein shows how the state's deliberate neglect and criminalization of the Cancha's poor—a practice common to neoliberal modern cities—makes the poor exploitable, governable, and consigns them to an insecure existence. Goldstein's collaborative and engaged approach to ethnographic field research also opens up critical questions about what ethical scholarship entails.
Over the past decade, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Chile have been buffeted by intensive transformations. Political scientist Pascal Lupien here reveals how Indigenous political activists responded to these changes as part of their long, ongoing struggles for equal citizenship rights and economic and political power. Such activists are often thought to rely solely on disruptive, large-scale forms of collective action, but Lupien argues that twenty-first-century Indigenous activists have turned toward new modes of fostering Indigenous civil society. Drawing on four years of immersive, community-engaged fieldwork with more than ninety Indigenous organizations and groups within and across three countries, Lupien shows how Indigenous organizations today are newly pursuing, adapting, and sustaining local activism in a globalized, technology-centered world. He reveals that Indigenous groups have effectively built on older twentieth-century technologies—for example, radio, TV, and print media—by adapting social media technologies in ways that are unique to their political identities and day-to-day needs. In the context of increasing recognition of global Indigeneity, Lupien's capacious, descriptive work contributes to understanding Indigenous peoples' contemporary struggles, the evolving and unique nature of Indigenous civil society, and the return to large-scale resistance in 2019 that resulted in the largest uprisings in a generation.
This book addresses the political ecology of the Ecuadorian petro-state since the turn of the century and contextualizes state-civil society relations in contemporary Ecuador to produce an analysis of oil and Revolution in twenty-first century Latin America. Ecuador’s recent history is marked by changes in state-citizen relations: the election of political firebrand, Rafael Correa; a new constitution recognizing the value of pluriculturality and nature’s rights; and new rules for distributing state oil revenues. One of the most emblematic projects at this time is the Correa administration’s Revolución Ciudadana, an oil-funded project of social investment and infrastructural development that claims to blaze a responsible and responsive path towards wellbeing for all Ecuadorians. The contributors to this book examine the key interventions of the recent political revolution—the investment of oil revenues into public works in Amazonia and across Ecuador; an initiative to keep oil underground; and the protection of the country’s most marginalized peoples—to illustrate how new forms of citizenship are required and forged. Through a focus on Amazonia and the Waorani, this book analyzes the burdens and opportunities created by oil-financed social and environmental change, and how these alter life in Amazonian extraction sites and across Ecuador.
