Twenty Hanging Dolls and a Lynching: Defacing Dangerousness and Enacting Citizenship in El Alto, Bolivia

Risør, Helene

doi:10.1215/08992363-2010-005

Cited by 42 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 9 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Friends and neighbors scrutinize the properties of building materials and render judgments about those displays (Colloredo‐Mansfeld , 40; Pauli ). In the Villa Adela neighborhood where I lived during fieldwork, my own compadres (coparents of my goddaughter) grew anxious that our neighbors—who they distrusted and disparagingly characterized as thugs and drunkards—might read the decorative tile they had affixed to their compound walls as a sign of wealth within and collude with thieves to rob the home (Risør ). They were enormously proud of their efforts to make their home beautiful, yet afraid of the kinds of attention it might also draw.…”

Section: Making and Breaking Homes In El Altomentioning

confidence: 99%

Painted by Default: Public Shaming and Graffiti on the Homefront

Ellison

2019

American Anthropologist

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Across El Alto, Bolivia, a particular kind of graffiti stands out on the walls of household compounds: startling letters proclaiming deudor moroso (defaulting debtor). These public accusations of insolvency join other expressions of households in crisis, disrupting any imagined public/private boundary between city streets and homes that are charged moral, material, and social configurations. As I show, defaulting debtor graffiti spatializes loan recovery efforts by implicating a broader constellation of relationships connected through the physical structure of the home and, in that implication, often fractures bonds of relatedness in the process. Yet the graffiti's ambiguous authorship enables those branded to challenge any singular reading of its scrawl. As deudor moroso graffiti enters into the struggle over urban space's inscriptions, it illuminates the ways home space is entangled with public space as a battleground over economic ruin and its meanings. [urban anthropology, graffiti, kinship, debt, microfinance, Bolivia] RESUMEN A través de El Alto, Bolivia, una clase particular de grafiti resalta en las paredes de los complejos residenciales: letras sorprendentes proclamando deudor moroso (deudor incumplido). Estas acusaciones públicas de insolvencia se unen a otras expresiones de hogares en crisis, interrumpiendo cualquier límite público/privado imaginado entre las calles y los hogares de la ciudad que están cargados de configuraciones morales, materiales y sociales. Como muestro, el grafiti de deudor moroso espacializa los esfuerzos para recuperar los préstamos al implicar una constelación más amplia de relaciones conectadas a través de la estructura física del hogar, y en esa implicación, a menudo se fracturan los lazos de relacionalidad en el proceso. Sin embargo, la autoría ambigua del grafiti posibilita que aquellos marcados reten cualquier lectura singular de su escritura irregular. En la medida que el grafiti de deudor moroso entra en la lucha sobre las inscripciones en el espacio urbano, ilumina las formas como el espacio del hogar se entrelaza con el espacio público como un campo de batalla sobre la ruina económica y sus significados.

show abstract

Section: Making and Breaking Homes In El Altomentioning

confidence: 99%

Painted by Default: Public Shaming and Graffiti on the Homefront

Ellison

2019

American Anthropologist

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In Brazil, Bolivia, and El Sal-vador (cf. Caldeira 2001;Goldstein et al 2007;Moodie 2010;Risør 2010), recent work demonstrates that political-economic elites and marginalized urbanites, if anything, share one ideological element in common: an unflappable belief in the state's inability to successfully police its own corruption or to protect its own citizens from crime and physical assault. Latin American urbanites' consensus that crime is now the primary threat to state sovereignty has indeed, in recent years, given rise to a discourse of security as the proper domain of citizens' interests qua the guarantees and protections of state citizenship (Goldstein 2010).…”

Section: What Is a "Black Site"?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecuador's “black site”

Garces

2014

Focaal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

When a state of emergency in Ecuador's prison system was declared in 2007, municipal leaders in Guayaquil built the country's first "supermax" prison, La Roca, for the administrative segregation of inmates considered a security threat. I suggest that administrative curtailment of access to these so-called "worst of the worst" prisoners merits legal comparisons with the juridical status of detainees in US "black site" facilities, the inter-American drug wars now paralleling the global war on terror insofar as prisoners' rights are concerned. Contrasting my brief visit to La Roca with political-economic and media analysis, my article draws two conclusions: (1) that limited physical access to prisoners, stimulated by administrative "zones of legal silence", demands an ethnographic focus on daily conditions of prison life using inconsistencies in administrative rhetoric; and (2) that measures to securitize the prison system have augmented prison directors' powers to coerce inmates and to confound understandings of their living conditions.

show abstract

“…9. It is interesting to note there has recently emerged a burgeoning literature that merges a concern with urban indigenous politics and violence (see Goldstein, 2004;Lazar, 2008;Risør, 2010). 10.…”

Section: Acknowledgementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Latin American Urban Development into the Twenty-first Century: Towards a Renewed Perspective on the City

2011

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article argues for a more systemic engagement with Latin American cities, contending that it is necessary to reconsider their unity in order to nuance the 'fractured cities' perspective that has widely come to epitomize the contemporary urban moment in the region. It begins by offering an overview of regional urban development trends, before exploring how the underlying imaginary of the city has critically shifted over the past half century. Focusing in particular on the way that slums and shantytowns have been conceived, it traces how the predominant conception of the Latin American city moved from a notion of unity to a perception of fragmentation, highlighting how this had critically negative ramifications for urban development agendas, and concludes with a call for a renewed vision of Latin American urban life.

show abstract

Twenty Hanging Dolls and a Lynching: Defacing Dangerousness and Enacting Citizenship in El Alto, Bolivia

Cited by 42 publications

References 9 publications

Painted by Default: Public Shaming and Graffiti on the Homefront

Painted by Default: Public Shaming and Graffiti on the Homefront

Ecuador's “black site”

Latin American Urban Development into the Twenty-first Century: Towards a Renewed Perspective on the City

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About