Suchergebnisse

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter 1. SECURITY, RIGHTS, AND THE LAW IN EVO'S BOLIVIA -- Chapter 2. GETTING ENGAGED: Reflections on an Activist Anthropology -- Chapter 3. THE PHANTOM STATE: Law and Ordering on the Urban Margins -- Chapter 4. EXORCISING GHOSTS: Managing Insecurity in Uspha Uspha -- Chapter 5. COMMUNITY JUSTICE AND THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION -- Chapter 6. INHUMAN RIGHTS? Violence at the Nexus of Rights and Security -- Chapter 7. AN UNCERTAIN ANTHROPOLOGY -- Notes -- References -- Index

An ethnography examining how indigenous residents of crime-ridden, marginalized neighborhoods in Cochabamba, Bolivia, struggle to balance human rights with their need for safety and security.

The appearance of effective security making—demonstrated through surveillance, visibility, and ongoing performance—is significant to contemporary sovereign authority in urban spaces characterized by quotidian violence and crime. This article examines La Cancha, Cochabamba, Bolivia's enormous outdoor market, which is policed not by the state but by private security firms that operate as nonstate sovereign actors in the space of the market. The article provides an ethnographic account of one of these firms (the Men in Black), and documents the work of both municipal and national police—all of them distinguished by differently colored uniforms—in the management of crime, administration of justice, and establishment of public order in the market. Sovereignty here is derived through public performance, both violent and nonviolent, through which the Men in Black demonstrate and maintain their sovereign power.

What does it mean for anthropology to be relevant in the context of an ongoing global war on terror? This article examines the meanings of "security," concentrating on the discipline's engagement with the military and the ways in which the anthropological concept of culture has been deployed in post‐9/11 security campaigns. It argues that while there are many potential pitfalls awaiting the so‐called culture expert in military collaborations, security nevertheless remains an important field to which anthropologists can bring critical scholarly attention and ethical engagement.

Anthropologists writing about "indigenous media" have identified ways in which ethnographic research involving visual technology can affect the cultural identity and political power of ethnographic subjects, providing them with tools to enhance their own identity-building projects. In this essay I contend that ethnographic writing can also be a form of indigenous media, an implement of self-representation for people otherwise marginalized from the national political mainstream. But the efforts of native informants to establish control over the ways in which they will be represented in print can also create desconfianza , a feeling of mistrust and suspicion of the ethnographer among the people being studied. I reflect on the relationship between desconfianza and the politics of ethnographic practice, and the extent to which questions of performance and representation, far from being mere matters of ethical or philosophical interest to anthropologists alone, are in fact deeply implicated in the political and economic survival of the peoples being represented.