Bolivia is a nation energetically confronting stubborn legacies of second-class citizenship as pa... more Bolivia is a nation energetically confronting stubborn legacies of second-class citizenship as part of their historic process of political transformation, which began in early 2000 and culminated in the election to the presidency in late 2005 of Aymara-descended coca grower and opposition leader Evo Morales. The civil unrest seen in those intervening years was a spectacular expression of grassroots disenchantment and a sharp rebuke to the politics of Bolivia’s neoliberal democratization, which began in sweeping structural adjustment measures during 1985.
Set in the largely urban provincial capital of Quillacollo, this book is an ethnographic examination of municipal politics in the context of renewed elections of local-level officials beginning in 1987 after a hiatus of almost forty years. Understanding who these people are, how they think of themselves, and how they relate with each other politically tells us a great deal about the everyday neopopular political ground that has steadily been moving Bolivian national politics toward a greater rapprochement with its indigenous heritage.
As the military and intelligence communities re-tool for the 21st century, the long and contentio... more As the military and intelligence communities re-tool for the 21st century, the long and contentious debate about the role of social scientists in national security environments is dividing the disciplines with renewed passion. Yet, research shows that most scholars have a weak understanding of what today's security institutions actually are and what working in them entails. This book provides an essential new foundation for the debate, with fine-grained accounts of the complex and varied work of cultural, physical, and linguistic anthropologists and archaeologists doing security-related work in governmental and military organizations, the private sector, and NGOs. In candid and provocative dialogues, leading anthropologists interrogate the dilemmas of ethics in practice and professional identity. Anthropologists in the Securityscape is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand or influence the relationship between anthropology and security in the twenty-first century.
Militaries around the world are increasingly tasked with complex humanitarian missions that exten... more Militaries around the world are increasingly tasked with complex humanitarian missions that extend beyond their traditional role. Such missions include development, diplomacy, stability, and peacekeeping operations, and often entail long-term engagements with civilian populations in conflict or disaster zones. This edited volume offers a snapshot of both the successes and challenges of the U.S. military's ongoing efforts to enhance its cultural expertise, and provides short and accessible descriptions, with analysis, of the different ways in which this turn to culture has been recently expressed. It provides a landscape of these important but little-understood developments for military colleagues, civilian counterparts from other federal agencies, and non-governmental organizations with whom the U.S. military increasingly collaborates. The book is also intended to orient non-military humanitarian professionals and students to what is currently happening in this rapidly changing environment.
Though currently only partially understood, evolving interactions among Latin American communitie... more Though currently only partially understood, evolving interactions among Latin American communities of faith, governments, and civil societies are a key feature of the popular mobilizations and policy debates about environmental issues in the region. This edited collection describes and analyses multiple types of religious engagement with environmental concerns and conflicts seen in modern Latin American democracies.
This volume contributes to scholarship on the intersections of religion with environmental conflict in a number of ways. Firstly, it provides comparative analysis of the manner in which diverse religious actors are currently participating in transnational, national, and local advocacy in places such as, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Mexico. It also considers the diversity of an often plural religious engagement with advocacy, including Catholic, Evangelical and Pentecostal perspectives alongside the effects of indigenous cosmological ideas. Finally, this book explores the specific religious sources of seemingly unlikely new alliances and novel articulations of rights, social justice, and ethics for the environmental concerns of Latin America.
The relationship between religion and environmental issues is an increasingly important topic in the conversations around ecology and climate change. This book is, therefore, a pertinent and topical work for any academic working in Religious Studies, Environmental Studies, and Latin American Studies.
in removing its beleaguered president, Gonazalo Sánchez de Lozada, from power. The Coordinator in... more in removing its beleaguered president, Gonazalo Sánchez de Lozada, from power. The Coordinator in Defense of Gas —the steering committee for this popular movement — brought together street vendors, farmers, miners, students, teachers, neighborhood committees, as well as workers ’ unions through effective direct action protest primarily in the immigrant town of El Alto, dubbed the “Aymara capital of the world. ” It forced the government to abandon its plan to pipe newly discovered Bolivian natural gas through Chile to the United States. Following October’s victory, indigenous leader Evo Morales proclaimed, “What has happened in recent days in Bolivia is a great revolt, after being humiliated for more than 500 years. ” In the subsequent months, he has driven this point home: “After more than 500 years, we, the Quechuas and Aymaras, are still the rightful owners of this land. ” Another prominent indigenous leader, Felipe Quispe, hailed the ouster of the president as one step nearer the...
This article reviews recent ethnographic approaches to indigeneity in Bolivia from the global nor... more This article reviews recent ethnographic approaches to indigeneity in Bolivia from the global north. It examines some consequences of ethnographic choices to treat indigeneity as primarily a political challenge of power and inclusion, where indigenous identity is understood to be most characteristically expressed in collective terms or through social mobilization. At the same time, it also assesses a complementary ethnographic focus upon legacies of neoliberalism, as a major context for situating contemporary indigenous projects in Bolivia, specifically, ethnographic contrasts drawn between political indigeneity and the liberal subject. Finally, this article offers an account of indigenous sense-making for the urban landscape of Quillacollo and explores the relevance of indigenous claims as integral to that small city’s “cholo politics,” and as an alternative means of understanding the construction of indigenous subjects.
This introduction offers a brief overview of the context for the US military’s efforts to build i... more This introduction offers a brief overview of the context for the US military’s efforts to build its cultural capacity over the previous decade. It goes on to highlight three modalities represented across the volume’s chapters for addressing the question of military cultural awareness: the institutionalization of military cultural education and training, and of cultural heritage management and protection, but also assessments of prevailing models and lessons learned in the pursuit of this capacity. The introduction also identifies different perspectives represented in this volume with respect to these developments. As discussed across the chapters, it gives particular attention to the challenges for expertise and the several conceptions of culture as a dimension of: military culture, culture training, counterinsurgency, humanitarian cooperation, and technology-driven problem-solving respectively.
Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, 2007
This article offers an analysis of the cultural construction of patronage-clientage relations in ... more This article offers an analysis of the cultural construction of patronage-clientage relations in Quillacollo, Bolivia, since the return of democracy and in a political climate of new social and indigenous movements dedicated to breaking with the vertical politics of the past, which equated indigenous political participation with clientage. I consider local accounts of the practices of notoriously bad clients called Hunk' us, a stigmatizing insult referring to self-serving, even corrupt, political conduct. This argument pursues the implications of stigma, as it operates in Quillacollo' s political theater. I consider how the stigmatization of dangerous clients is part of a cultural politics that connects expressions of social hierarchy to assertions of unitary indigenous identity, which promotes a patrolling of the borders of indigenous political projects by activists. The exclusivity of cultural belonging this promotes undermines the kinds of indigenous-popular coalition building crucial to the success of the political movement of Bolivia's current indigenous president, Evo Morales.
This article compares US and Chinese national soft power strategies, using the cases of the US Sh... more This article compares US and Chinese national soft power strategies, using the cases of the US Shared Values Initiative for the Middle East in the aftermath of 9–11 and the present operation of Chinese Confucius Institutes in the US. Comparing these two national programs, I describe a consistent disjunction between visual image and spoken word for each. Regardless of variations in national approaches to soft power, this disconnect between seeing and talking is a limitation of soft power as a cultural tool of diplomatic communication. First, public diplomats’ unexamined folk theories about culture’s instrumental role in messaging emphasize spectacle in ways inimical to reciprocal engagement. Second, as a cultural policy of display, soft power image projection discourages opportunities for inter-cultural dialogue. Third, government-sponsored national image management and branding are often controversial elsewhere, in the process touching off boundary-patrolling public debates instead of helping to build international relationships.
The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, 2013
The Movement Toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialism, hereafter MAS) is the political instrumen... more The Movement Toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialism, hereafter MAS) is the political instrument of Bolivia's president Evo Morales. The story of Morales is well known. He grew up poor in a rural Aymara-speaking community of miners, and migrated to the lowland coca-growing Chapare region upon conclusion of his military service. In the early 1980s Morales became active in his local union of coca growers, and since 1988 he has been primary leader of the Six Federations of the Chapare, the region's coca grower movement. He has continued as the titular head of the coca growers since 2006 while serving as Bolivia's president. Keywords: political science; political sociology; class; decolonization; indigenous rights; rights; state
/11 security-driven efforts and programs. As Paul Nuti reported last month, this Commission on th... more /11 security-driven efforts and programs. As Paul Nuti reported last month, this Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security & Intelligence Communities is expected to offer its conclusions in late 2007. As part of this climate, several panels at November's annual meeting in San José addressed how anthropology should situate itself vis-à-vis the US security establishment. These included a double panel organized by Laura Graham and Kathryn Libal, "Debating Anthropological Practice and National Security," which featured 13 academic anthropologists, including discussants. This was followed by a special event panel, "Practicing Anthropology in the National Security and Intelligence Communities," featuring four anthropologists working within or in conjunction with these communities. Secrecy and Public Anthropology As part one of the double panel, David Price addressed the implications of ethnographic data collection as secret research, making a clear case that the costs of secrecy outweigh benefits and undermine academic freedom, amounting to a betrayal of the trust that is essential to the reciprocal obligations of ethnographic relationships with research counterparts. Anthropology can, and should, inform government practice, argued Price, but only in ways both transparent and public. To do otherwise, Price noted in a follow-up article about these AAA events in CounterPunch, would be to lose "democratic control" over the discipline's knowledge production in ways that might lead to the "weaponizing" of anthropology to the ends of social control. Kimberly Theidon offered an object lesson of how this works when social scientists are called to interpret contested history as part of state practice. She explored the legacies of Peru's antiterror law as a limiting condition upon the public debate of its 2003 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, concerned as it was with "perpetrators" and "victims" while failing to come to terms with the political agency and popularity of the Shining Path itself, however deplorable. If one accepts that anthropology should include public engagement and that anthropologists are both professionals and citizens, Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban posed the question of whether secret research is anthropological since it is not publicly disseminated. On a different but parallel note, Fadwa El Guindi emphasized how anthropology, intentionally or unintentionally, has participated in the imperial designs on the Arab and Muslim world through a complicity based in part on silences and poses of neutrality. This, in turn, suggests deep connections between silence and secrecy.
This argument situates the "image" of the popular woman in the emerging electoral conte... more This argument situates the "image" of the popular woman in the emerging electoral context of Quillacollo, a Bolivian provincial capital. Even as "cholas" remain largely shut out from regional political power, their ubiquitous image culturally mediates political access to the popular sector for men. Hence authorities initiate token economic exchanges with cholas. both to participate intimately in the popular cultural milieu, and to solidify their claims to personal roots in this world. This argument examines the interrelated contexts of national structural adjustment, regional development, the domestic economy, agricultural fiestas, and sexual conduct, as these are "performed" within a regional folkloric calendar, that turn on the currency of the chola as a political "root metaphor." In turn, the role of the chola's image suggests limitations upon her status as historical actor.
The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 2005
... The legal framework of the right to take part in cultural life. Background paper for UNESCO D... more ... The legal framework of the right to take part in cultural life. Background paper for UNESCO Division of Human Rigths, Barcelona, August 2327. http://www.culturalrights.org/attachments/Yvonne% 20Donders.pdf. ... Fall 2005 253 UNESCO's Newest Cultural Policy Instrument
Bolivia is a nation energetically confronting stubborn legacies of second-class citizenship as pa... more Bolivia is a nation energetically confronting stubborn legacies of second-class citizenship as part of their historic process of political transformation, which began in early 2000 and culminated in the election to the presidency in late 2005 of Aymara-descended coca grower and opposition leader Evo Morales. The civil unrest seen in those intervening years was a spectacular expression of grassroots disenchantment and a sharp rebuke to the politics of Bolivia's neoliberal democratization, which began in sweeping structural adjustment measures during 1985. Set in the largely urban provincial capital of Quillacollo, this book is an ethnographic examination of municipal politics in the context of renewed elections of local-level officials beginning in 1987 after a hiatus of almost forty years. Understanding who these people are, how they think of themselves, and how they relate with each other politically tells us a great deal about the everyday neopopular political ground that has steadily been moving Bolivian national politics toward a greater rapprochement with its indigenous heritage.
Bolivia is a nation energetically confronting stubborn legacies of second-class citizenship as pa... more Bolivia is a nation energetically confronting stubborn legacies of second-class citizenship as part of their historic process of political transformation, which began in early 2000 and culminated in the election to the presidency in late 2005 of Aymara-descended coca grower and opposition leader Evo Morales. The civil unrest seen in those intervening years was a spectacular expression of grassroots disenchantment and a sharp rebuke to the politics of Bolivia’s neoliberal democratization, which began in sweeping structural adjustment measures during 1985.
Set in the largely urban provincial capital of Quillacollo, this book is an ethnographic examination of municipal politics in the context of renewed elections of local-level officials beginning in 1987 after a hiatus of almost forty years. Understanding who these people are, how they think of themselves, and how they relate with each other politically tells us a great deal about the everyday neopopular political ground that has steadily been moving Bolivian national politics toward a greater rapprochement with its indigenous heritage.
As the military and intelligence communities re-tool for the 21st century, the long and contentio... more As the military and intelligence communities re-tool for the 21st century, the long and contentious debate about the role of social scientists in national security environments is dividing the disciplines with renewed passion. Yet, research shows that most scholars have a weak understanding of what today's security institutions actually are and what working in them entails. This book provides an essential new foundation for the debate, with fine-grained accounts of the complex and varied work of cultural, physical, and linguistic anthropologists and archaeologists doing security-related work in governmental and military organizations, the private sector, and NGOs. In candid and provocative dialogues, leading anthropologists interrogate the dilemmas of ethics in practice and professional identity. Anthropologists in the Securityscape is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand or influence the relationship between anthropology and security in the twenty-first century.
Militaries around the world are increasingly tasked with complex humanitarian missions that exten... more Militaries around the world are increasingly tasked with complex humanitarian missions that extend beyond their traditional role. Such missions include development, diplomacy, stability, and peacekeeping operations, and often entail long-term engagements with civilian populations in conflict or disaster zones. This edited volume offers a snapshot of both the successes and challenges of the U.S. military's ongoing efforts to enhance its cultural expertise, and provides short and accessible descriptions, with analysis, of the different ways in which this turn to culture has been recently expressed. It provides a landscape of these important but little-understood developments for military colleagues, civilian counterparts from other federal agencies, and non-governmental organizations with whom the U.S. military increasingly collaborates. The book is also intended to orient non-military humanitarian professionals and students to what is currently happening in this rapidly changing environment.
Though currently only partially understood, evolving interactions among Latin American communitie... more Though currently only partially understood, evolving interactions among Latin American communities of faith, governments, and civil societies are a key feature of the popular mobilizations and policy debates about environmental issues in the region. This edited collection describes and analyses multiple types of religious engagement with environmental concerns and conflicts seen in modern Latin American democracies.
This volume contributes to scholarship on the intersections of religion with environmental conflict in a number of ways. Firstly, it provides comparative analysis of the manner in which diverse religious actors are currently participating in transnational, national, and local advocacy in places such as, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Mexico. It also considers the diversity of an often plural religious engagement with advocacy, including Catholic, Evangelical and Pentecostal perspectives alongside the effects of indigenous cosmological ideas. Finally, this book explores the specific religious sources of seemingly unlikely new alliances and novel articulations of rights, social justice, and ethics for the environmental concerns of Latin America.
The relationship between religion and environmental issues is an increasingly important topic in the conversations around ecology and climate change. This book is, therefore, a pertinent and topical work for any academic working in Religious Studies, Environmental Studies, and Latin American Studies.
in removing its beleaguered president, Gonazalo Sánchez de Lozada, from power. The Coordinator in... more in removing its beleaguered president, Gonazalo Sánchez de Lozada, from power. The Coordinator in Defense of Gas —the steering committee for this popular movement — brought together street vendors, farmers, miners, students, teachers, neighborhood committees, as well as workers ’ unions through effective direct action protest primarily in the immigrant town of El Alto, dubbed the “Aymara capital of the world. ” It forced the government to abandon its plan to pipe newly discovered Bolivian natural gas through Chile to the United States. Following October’s victory, indigenous leader Evo Morales proclaimed, “What has happened in recent days in Bolivia is a great revolt, after being humiliated for more than 500 years. ” In the subsequent months, he has driven this point home: “After more than 500 years, we, the Quechuas and Aymaras, are still the rightful owners of this land. ” Another prominent indigenous leader, Felipe Quispe, hailed the ouster of the president as one step nearer the...
This article reviews recent ethnographic approaches to indigeneity in Bolivia from the global nor... more This article reviews recent ethnographic approaches to indigeneity in Bolivia from the global north. It examines some consequences of ethnographic choices to treat indigeneity as primarily a political challenge of power and inclusion, where indigenous identity is understood to be most characteristically expressed in collective terms or through social mobilization. At the same time, it also assesses a complementary ethnographic focus upon legacies of neoliberalism, as a major context for situating contemporary indigenous projects in Bolivia, specifically, ethnographic contrasts drawn between political indigeneity and the liberal subject. Finally, this article offers an account of indigenous sense-making for the urban landscape of Quillacollo and explores the relevance of indigenous claims as integral to that small city’s “cholo politics,” and as an alternative means of understanding the construction of indigenous subjects.
This introduction offers a brief overview of the context for the US military’s efforts to build i... more This introduction offers a brief overview of the context for the US military’s efforts to build its cultural capacity over the previous decade. It goes on to highlight three modalities represented across the volume’s chapters for addressing the question of military cultural awareness: the institutionalization of military cultural education and training, and of cultural heritage management and protection, but also assessments of prevailing models and lessons learned in the pursuit of this capacity. The introduction also identifies different perspectives represented in this volume with respect to these developments. As discussed across the chapters, it gives particular attention to the challenges for expertise and the several conceptions of culture as a dimension of: military culture, culture training, counterinsurgency, humanitarian cooperation, and technology-driven problem-solving respectively.
Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, 2007
This article offers an analysis of the cultural construction of patronage-clientage relations in ... more This article offers an analysis of the cultural construction of patronage-clientage relations in Quillacollo, Bolivia, since the return of democracy and in a political climate of new social and indigenous movements dedicated to breaking with the vertical politics of the past, which equated indigenous political participation with clientage. I consider local accounts of the practices of notoriously bad clients called Hunk' us, a stigmatizing insult referring to self-serving, even corrupt, political conduct. This argument pursues the implications of stigma, as it operates in Quillacollo' s political theater. I consider how the stigmatization of dangerous clients is part of a cultural politics that connects expressions of social hierarchy to assertions of unitary indigenous identity, which promotes a patrolling of the borders of indigenous political projects by activists. The exclusivity of cultural belonging this promotes undermines the kinds of indigenous-popular coalition building crucial to the success of the political movement of Bolivia's current indigenous president, Evo Morales.
This article compares US and Chinese national soft power strategies, using the cases of the US Sh... more This article compares US and Chinese national soft power strategies, using the cases of the US Shared Values Initiative for the Middle East in the aftermath of 9–11 and the present operation of Chinese Confucius Institutes in the US. Comparing these two national programs, I describe a consistent disjunction between visual image and spoken word for each. Regardless of variations in national approaches to soft power, this disconnect between seeing and talking is a limitation of soft power as a cultural tool of diplomatic communication. First, public diplomats’ unexamined folk theories about culture’s instrumental role in messaging emphasize spectacle in ways inimical to reciprocal engagement. Second, as a cultural policy of display, soft power image projection discourages opportunities for inter-cultural dialogue. Third, government-sponsored national image management and branding are often controversial elsewhere, in the process touching off boundary-patrolling public debates instead of helping to build international relationships.
The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, 2013
The Movement Toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialism, hereafter MAS) is the political instrumen... more The Movement Toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialism, hereafter MAS) is the political instrument of Bolivia's president Evo Morales. The story of Morales is well known. He grew up poor in a rural Aymara-speaking community of miners, and migrated to the lowland coca-growing Chapare region upon conclusion of his military service. In the early 1980s Morales became active in his local union of coca growers, and since 1988 he has been primary leader of the Six Federations of the Chapare, the region's coca grower movement. He has continued as the titular head of the coca growers since 2006 while serving as Bolivia's president. Keywords: political science; political sociology; class; decolonization; indigenous rights; rights; state
/11 security-driven efforts and programs. As Paul Nuti reported last month, this Commission on th... more /11 security-driven efforts and programs. As Paul Nuti reported last month, this Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security & Intelligence Communities is expected to offer its conclusions in late 2007. As part of this climate, several panels at November's annual meeting in San José addressed how anthropology should situate itself vis-à-vis the US security establishment. These included a double panel organized by Laura Graham and Kathryn Libal, "Debating Anthropological Practice and National Security," which featured 13 academic anthropologists, including discussants. This was followed by a special event panel, "Practicing Anthropology in the National Security and Intelligence Communities," featuring four anthropologists working within or in conjunction with these communities. Secrecy and Public Anthropology As part one of the double panel, David Price addressed the implications of ethnographic data collection as secret research, making a clear case that the costs of secrecy outweigh benefits and undermine academic freedom, amounting to a betrayal of the trust that is essential to the reciprocal obligations of ethnographic relationships with research counterparts. Anthropology can, and should, inform government practice, argued Price, but only in ways both transparent and public. To do otherwise, Price noted in a follow-up article about these AAA events in CounterPunch, would be to lose "democratic control" over the discipline's knowledge production in ways that might lead to the "weaponizing" of anthropology to the ends of social control. Kimberly Theidon offered an object lesson of how this works when social scientists are called to interpret contested history as part of state practice. She explored the legacies of Peru's antiterror law as a limiting condition upon the public debate of its 2003 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, concerned as it was with "perpetrators" and "victims" while failing to come to terms with the political agency and popularity of the Shining Path itself, however deplorable. If one accepts that anthropology should include public engagement and that anthropologists are both professionals and citizens, Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban posed the question of whether secret research is anthropological since it is not publicly disseminated. On a different but parallel note, Fadwa El Guindi emphasized how anthropology, intentionally or unintentionally, has participated in the imperial designs on the Arab and Muslim world through a complicity based in part on silences and poses of neutrality. This, in turn, suggests deep connections between silence and secrecy.
This argument situates the "image" of the popular woman in the emerging electoral conte... more This argument situates the "image" of the popular woman in the emerging electoral context of Quillacollo, a Bolivian provincial capital. Even as "cholas" remain largely shut out from regional political power, their ubiquitous image culturally mediates political access to the popular sector for men. Hence authorities initiate token economic exchanges with cholas. both to participate intimately in the popular cultural milieu, and to solidify their claims to personal roots in this world. This argument examines the interrelated contexts of national structural adjustment, regional development, the domestic economy, agricultural fiestas, and sexual conduct, as these are "performed" within a regional folkloric calendar, that turn on the currency of the chola as a political "root metaphor." In turn, the role of the chola's image suggests limitations upon her status as historical actor.
The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 2005
... The legal framework of the right to take part in cultural life. Background paper for UNESCO D... more ... The legal framework of the right to take part in cultural life. Background paper for UNESCO Division of Human Rigths, Barcelona, August 2327. http://www.culturalrights.org/attachments/Yvonne% 20Donders.pdf. ... Fall 2005 253 UNESCO's Newest Cultural Policy Instrument
Bolivia is a nation energetically confronting stubborn legacies of second-class citizenship as pa... more Bolivia is a nation energetically confronting stubborn legacies of second-class citizenship as part of their historic process of political transformation, which began in early 2000 and culminated in the election to the presidency in late 2005 of Aymara-descended coca grower and opposition leader Evo Morales. The civil unrest seen in those intervening years was a spectacular expression of grassroots disenchantment and a sharp rebuke to the politics of Bolivia's neoliberal democratization, which began in sweeping structural adjustment measures during 1985. Set in the largely urban provincial capital of Quillacollo, this book is an ethnographic examination of municipal politics in the context of renewed elections of local-level officials beginning in 1987 after a hiatus of almost forty years. Understanding who these people are, how they think of themselves, and how they relate with each other politically tells us a great deal about the everyday neopopular political ground that has steadily been moving Bolivian national politics toward a greater rapprochement with its indigenous heritage.
... February. Mannheim, Bruce, and Dennis Tedlock. 1995. Intro-duction. In The Dialogic Emergen... more ... February. Mannheim, Bruce, and Dennis Tedlock. 1995. Intro-duction. In The Dialogic Emergence of Culture, ed. D. Tedlock and B. Mannheim. Urbana, IL: Univer-sity of Illinois Press. McFate, Montgomery. 2005. Anthropology ...
The Bolivian constitution ratified in January 2009 has been hailed as a watershed in the effort t... more The Bolivian constitution ratified in January 2009 has been hailed as a watershed in the effort to empower the indigenous majority. However, in addition to an entrenched political opposition in the lowland half of the country, some observers have pointed to the constitution’s “Aymara-centric” character, suggesting that it has left some people unrecognized and unrepresented. Examination of associational life in the urban provincial capital of Quillacollo, where what it means to be indigenous is quite different from that which the constitution valorizes and confirms, helps of clarify the challenges of multicultural or plurinational legal reforms based upon cultural citizenship. A central challenge is that of transcending a conception of legal rights and claims inhering in citizenship as mutually exclusively either individual or collective.
Despite recent constitutional reforms, Bolivian democracy struggles to reconcile the inclusive rh... more Despite recent constitutional reforms, Bolivian democracy struggles to reconcile the inclusive rhetoric of state reform, the expansion of rights, and special attention to previously ignored groups, on the one hand, with continued poverty, inequality, and a history of state abandonment of the majority, on the other. This “disjunctive democracy” produced a series of standoffs, often violent, between the state and popular-indigenous coalitions between 2000 and 2005. Throughout, popular memory was one vehicle for protest in which distinct democratic commitments—one constitutional or representative, the other participatory and direct—collided. The response of one exceptional labor union to the era’s neoliberal democratization, that of the Manaco Shoe Factory in Quillacollo, highlights this disjunctive democracy. The centrality in workers’ accounts of the political struggle of the k’araku (union assembly), with its remembered ideals of reciprocity, trust, accountability, and collective un...
Page 1. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2000 As Witness to Literary Sp... more Page 1. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2000 As Witness to Literary Spectacle: the Personality of Folklore in Provincial Bolivian Politics ROBERT ALBRO If we are justified in speaking of he growth of ...
Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 2012
In recent years the discipline of anthropology has given considerable attention to making sense o... more In recent years the discipline of anthropology has given considerable attention to making sense of outreach by the U.S. military to assist with the ''softer'' side of its current global missions, which includes many humanitarian features. Significant disciplinary ambivalence and subsequent discussion about this invitation have focused attention on the ethical implications of working in or for secretive security agencies. 1 These agencies have been taken to represent values antithetical to the anthropological project. However, for this essay we point to the irreducibility of both secrecy and transparency in ethnographic work with counterparts ''in the field.'' 2 We focus, in particular, on the social embeddedness of the work of anthropology as a characteristic shared with humanitarian intervention. We also develop an account of disciplinary practice and sources of knowledge as fundamentally collaborative with counterparts. In fact, these collaborative relations are constitutive of anthropological projects. For these reasons, we highlight a disciplinary ethics not as representing any ''core values'' but as necessarily in close proximity to disciplinary practice, and as regularly provoking new dilemmas. As such, emergent military humanitarian work should not be placed between ethical brackets as a special case of ''state secrecy'' but instead be understood as posing constructive dilemmas about new tensions between transparency and secrecy as these relate to emerging horizons and future applications of disciplinary practice.
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Books by Robert Albro
Set in the largely urban provincial capital of Quillacollo, this book is an ethnographic examination of municipal politics in the context of renewed elections of local-level officials beginning in 1987 after a hiatus of almost forty years. Understanding who these people are, how they think of themselves, and how they relate with each other politically tells us a great deal about the everyday neopopular political ground that has steadily been moving Bolivian national politics toward a greater rapprochement with its indigenous heritage.
This volume contributes to scholarship on the intersections of religion with environmental conflict in a number of ways. Firstly, it provides comparative analysis of the manner in which diverse religious actors are currently participating in transnational, national, and local advocacy in places such as, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Mexico. It also considers the diversity of an often plural religious engagement with advocacy, including Catholic, Evangelical and Pentecostal perspectives alongside the effects of indigenous cosmological ideas. Finally, this book explores the specific religious sources of seemingly unlikely new alliances and novel articulations of rights, social justice, and ethics for the environmental concerns of Latin America.
The relationship between religion and environmental issues is an increasingly important topic in the conversations around ecology and climate change. This book is, therefore, a pertinent and topical work for any academic working in Religious Studies, Environmental Studies, and Latin American Studies.
Papers by Robert Albro
Set in the largely urban provincial capital of Quillacollo, this book is an ethnographic examination of municipal politics in the context of renewed elections of local-level officials beginning in 1987 after a hiatus of almost forty years. Understanding who these people are, how they think of themselves, and how they relate with each other politically tells us a great deal about the everyday neopopular political ground that has steadily been moving Bolivian national politics toward a greater rapprochement with its indigenous heritage.
This volume contributes to scholarship on the intersections of religion with environmental conflict in a number of ways. Firstly, it provides comparative analysis of the manner in which diverse religious actors are currently participating in transnational, national, and local advocacy in places such as, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Mexico. It also considers the diversity of an often plural religious engagement with advocacy, including Catholic, Evangelical and Pentecostal perspectives alongside the effects of indigenous cosmological ideas. Finally, this book explores the specific religious sources of seemingly unlikely new alliances and novel articulations of rights, social justice, and ethics for the environmental concerns of Latin America.
The relationship between religion and environmental issues is an increasingly important topic in the conversations around ecology and climate change. This book is, therefore, a pertinent and topical work for any academic working in Religious Studies, Environmental Studies, and Latin American Studies.