Black hole indigeneity: the explosion and implosion of radical difference as resistance and power in Andean Bolivia

Burman, Anders

doi:10.1080/2158379x.2020.1764802

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…environmentalism or 'indigenous rights') become co-opted and/or institutionalized (cf. Burman 2020;. Likewise, it generates insight into how class and caste systems (with concomitant rights to consume objects) are enacted and altered.…”

Section: Concluding Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The whale watched and whaled: exploring the orderings of a complex environmental issue through the lens of rubbish theory

Singleton

2021

Journal of Political Ecology

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The political ecological study of environmental issues is often concerned with the interactions of diverse actors, leading to accounts of different, conflicting worldviews. While different epistemological and ontological standpoints are covered, there is consensus that environmental issues are simultaneously social and material, and that worldviews differ. In this article, I argue Michael Thompson's rubbish theory can be usefully employed to compare and contrast environmental perspectives ultimately rooted in conflicting epistemological and ontological understandings of a situation. Rubbish theory describes the categorization of objects into durables, transients and rubbish, and movements between these categories.Rubbish theory focuses on how objects are restricted in their movement and how this reflects the distribution of power and status in society. Two aspects of a society may then be assessed: 1) its value system, and 2) the extent to which different groups may alter that value system. Dynamic changes in these two aspects are then traceable. As an example of extant environmental conflicts rooted in different worldviews, this article focuses on historic and contemporary issues around the consumption of whale meat. Focusing upon whaling and whale-watching, I argue that historic and contemporary conflicts manifest different orderings and that these comprise different epistemological standpoints, which as value systems are comparable within rubbish theory.

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Section: Concluding Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The whale watched and whaled: exploring the orderings of a complex environmental issue through the lens of rubbish theory

Singleton

2021

Journal of Political Ecology

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“…Escobar (2018: x, 20) refers to this contact zone as a ‘civilizational juncture’ based on the clash of minoritarian life projects and Western modernity, in which Black and Indigenous movements provide an opportunity to reorient design from its dependence on capital and the marketplace. Conversely, Burman (2020: 182) argues that Indigeneity is so thoroughly absorbed into Bolivian governance that it has become a ‘black hole’ that subsumes everything it touches. Here, Indigeneity tends to be aligned either with resilient anti‐extractivist plurality or, where that politics falls short, with a manipulated instrument evacuated of true difference 12…”

Section: New Materialisms and Indigenous Ontologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Critical ontologies: rethinking relations to other‐than‐humans from the Bolivian Andes

Winchell

2023

Royal Anthropological Inst

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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 effects 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.

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“…The mobilizations peaked in 2000-2005, when broad coalitions of social movements mobilized against the intensified neoliberalization of the country, making one president flee to the U.S. and another resign, redrawing the cartography of power, and setting the stage for the changes that were on the horizon. Interestingly, explicit indigenous identities became increasingly important in these mobilizations (Burman 2014(Burman , 2020Canessa 2007). The indianista-katarista activism of the 1970s and onwards had born fruit: social injustice was increasingly analyzed at the intersections of class and ethnicity/race, and indigeneity emerged as a legitimizing factor in political life.…”

Section: Social Movements In Boliviamentioning

confidence: 99%

A taste for ecology: class, coloniality, and the rise of a Bolivian urban environmental movement

Burman

2021

Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies

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Since at least the mid-20th century, social movements have been key actors in Bolivian society, causing governments to fall and redrawing the cartographies of power. Recently, a new movement emerged, a middle-class movement that articulated its demands in harsh opposition to the government of former President Evo Morales: an urban environmental movement. In its rhetoric, Morales was un burro (a donkey) and un ignorante (an ignorant man) steering the country towards ecological collapse. Subsequently, the movement played a key role in the social protests that led to Morales's fall in November 2019. In this paper, I aim to understand why this movement emerged and mobilized during the Morales administration and how colonially conditioned relations of power and contradictory images of the indigenous Other are articulated in this process. I argue that the emergence and mobilization of the movement ought to be understood in relation to: (1) the politically conditioned forms for legitimate political opposition; and (2) the challenge to coloniality implied by the coming to power of subalternized subjects. When the borders of seemingly fixed categories and spaces are blurred, the privileged develop novel ways of making social distinctions. One such way, I argue, is to display a 'taste for ecology.'

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Black hole indigeneity: the explosion and implosion of radical difference as resistance and power in Andean Bolivia

Cited by 9 publications

References 21 publications

The whale watched and whaled: exploring the orderings of a complex environmental issue through the lens of rubbish theory

The whale watched and whaled: exploring the orderings of a complex environmental issue through the lens of rubbish theory

Critical ontologies: rethinking relations to other‐than‐humans from the Bolivian Andes

A taste for ecology: class, coloniality, and the rise of a Bolivian urban environmental movement

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