Reflections on Collaborative Ethnography and Decolonization in Latin America, Aotearoa, and Beyond

As the ongoing legacies of colonialism are challenged, scholars and activists are increasingly carrying out collaborative research to respond to the asymmetrical privileges built into Western science by partnering with communities and explicitly orienting their research towards communities’ political aims. In this article, we trace the ways this shift intersects with other important trends in ethnographic research, especially attention to the politics of knowledge and decolonization. We discuss how collaborative research in Latin America is shaped by the context and political agendas of those involved to show what is produced. While in some circumstances collaboration can serve to level the colonial playing field by making Indigenous knowledge and practices visible, in other situations it can reinforce constructed dichotomies between Indigenous and Western knowledge and practices. As it increasingly the norm for government agencies, academic institutions, and non-governmental organizations to promote participatory methods to further their own agendas, we suggest that collaboration can be the site of governance as well as liberation. By bringing the dilemmas in our different research projects on Indigenous politics in Bolivia into dialogue with critical engagements from Indigenous scholars in Aotearoa and decolonial thinkers globally, we urge careful analysis of the multiple and changing standpoints of our collaborators in order not to re-construct essentialized notions of Indigeneity. Ultimately, we see the need to acknowledge the tight spaces of negotiation that we all find ourselves drawn into when we undertake collaborative endeavours. &nbsp

Métodos etnográficos colaborativos

Investigadores y activistas están desarrollando cada vez más investigaciones colaborativas, en respuesta a los privilegios asimétricos que conforman la ciencia occidental, asociándose con comunidades locales y orientando sus investigaciones explícitamente hacia sus objetivos políticos. En este artículo, examinamos este importante cambio, identificando las maneras en que éste mismo se entrecruza con otras tendencias similares e importantes, especialmente la política del conocimiento y la descolonización. A la vez, analizamos dichas tendencias de la investigación colaborativa en Latinoamérica para comprender el contexto y los programas políticos de aquellos involucrados y para mostrar lo que se produce. Sugerimos que la colaboración, como otros discursos aparentemente progresistas, pueden ser espacios tanto de gobernanza como de liberación dado que, cada vez con mayor frecuencia, la norma en agencias gubernamentales, instituciones de investigación y ONGs consiste en el fomento de los métodos participativos para la promoción de sus propios planes. Teniendo en cuenta los dilemas particulares en nuestros propios (y distintos) proyectos de investigación sobre las políticas indígenas en Bolivia, recomendamos un análisis cuidadoso de los puntos de vista (standpoints) múltiples y cambiantes de nuestros colaboradores, así evitando reconstruir nociones esencialistas de la indigeneidad. En última instancia, resaltamos la necesidad de reconocer los estrechos márgenes de negociación en los que todos nos vemos inmersos cuando emprendemos proyectos colaborativos.  Scholars and activists are increasingly carrying out collaborative research to respond to the asymmetrical privileges built into Western science by partnering with local communities and explicitly orienting their research towards their political aims. In this article, we examine this important shift, tracing the ways it intersects with other important trends in the field, especially the politics of knowledge and decolonization. We discuss the tendencies of collaborative research in Latin America to examine the context and political agendas of those involved and to show what is produced. We suggest that collaboration, like other seemingly progressive discourses like decolonization, can be the site of governance as well as liberation, as it is increasingly the norm for government agencies, research institutions, and non-governmental organizations to promote participatory methods to further their own agendas. Considering the dilemmas in our different research projects on indigenous politics in Bolivia, we urge careful analysis of the multiple and changing standpoints of our collaborators in order not to reconstruct essentialized notions of indigeneity. Ultimately, we see the need to acknowledge the tight spaces of negotiation that we all find ourselves drawn into when we undertake collaborative endeavors.Investigadores y activistas están desarrollando cada vez más investigaciones colaborativas, en respuesta a los privilegios asimétricos que conforman la ciencia occidental, asociándose con comunidades locales y orientando sus investigaciones explícitamente hacia sus objetivos políticos. En este artículo, examinamos este importante cambio, identificando las maneras en que éste mismo se entrecruza con otras tendencias similares e importantes, especialmente la política del conocimiento y la descolonización. A la vez, analizamos dichas tendencias de la investigación colaborativa en Latinoamérica para comprender el contexto y los programas políticos de aquellos involucrados y para mostrar lo que se produce. Sugerimos que la colaboración, como otros discursos aparentemente progresistas, pueden ser espacios tanto de gobernanza como de liberación dado que, cada vez con mayor frecuencia, la norma en agencias gubernamentales, instituciones de investigación y ONGs consiste en el fomento de los métodos participativos para la promoción de sus propios planes. Teniendo en cuenta los dilemas particulares en nuestros propios (y distintos) proyectos de investigación sobre las políticas indígenas en Bolivia, recomendamos un análisis cuidadoso de los puntos de vista (standpoints) múltiples y cambiantes de nuestros colaboradores, así evitando reconstruir nociones esencialistas de la indigeneidad. En última instancia, resaltamos la necesidad de reconocer los estrechos márgenes de negociación en los que todos nos vemos inmersos cuando emprendemos proyectos colaborativos.

Autonomías y autogobierno en la América diversa

Los activismos globales de los pueblos indígenas y afrodescendientes han puesto en la arena de los debates el reclamo de autodeterminación, autonomía y autogobierno, logrando avances relevantes en las normas internacionales. Sin embargo, estos logros se enfrentan a políticas y realidades de los gobiernos nacionales y los intereses económicos de todo tipo en sus países, que los amenazan y pretenden profundizar el despojo. En este libro concebimos a la autonomía como una variedad de prácticas, procesos y mecanismos de auto-gobernanza a través de los cuales se expresan y se dotan de sentido los derechos inherentes y aspiraciones soberanas de los pueblos indígenas y afrodescendientes alrededor del mundo. El derecho a la libre determinación es una parte consustancial de la vida sociopolítica contemporánea y, su ejercicio en sus territorios es hoy, probablemente, uno de los únicos caminos para la persistencia de la vida en el planeta. Las contribuciones que integran este volumen, muchas de ellas de autoría indígena, colocan debates que abordan esos desafíos y enlazan las voces ancestrales con las luchas de hoy y la defensa del futuro

The Search for Indigenous Justice in Plurinational Bolivia: Contested Sovereignties, Entanglement, and the Politics of Harm

This dissertation examines the effects of state-led decolonization in Bolivia among historically marginalized rural indigenous communities the Andean highlands. As part of its efforts to decolonize society, Bolivia’s revolutionary 2009 constitution declared the country a “communitarian, plurinational state” and granted indigenous people the right to exercise their own forms of justice. My analysis shows significant disagreement over the meaning of justice as indigenous leaders develop grassroots legal strategies to implement this right in a variety of contexts. At the national level, indigenous legal activists seek to redirect institution building processes back toward their own longstanding project of self-determination, revealing significant disagreement over who decides the proper role of the state in plurinational Bolivia. At the local level, I show how winning legal recognition of jurisdiction over (often decades-long) land disputes in rural highland communities carried with it the onerous task of untangling the extremely complicated and historically constructed problems that were often entangled into the disputed land itself, including competing claims to land rights and government corruption. Unable to address communities’ practical concerns, local organizations lost legitimacy, often leading to more even uncertainty or conflict.Ultimately, this research shows how liberal law operates to maintain hierarchies of race, even in context like Bolivia, where new forms of legal pluralism have been advanced as a tool to dismantle them. I approach indigenous justice, not as an object with distinct values and practices to be studied, but rather as a diagnostic tool that leaders take up to analyze overlapping structural harms masked by state recognition and discourses of indigeneity. Writing from the uncertainties that indigenous legal activists face as they come up against the constraints of their own legal strategies, my research shows how the search for indigenous justice nonetheless opens critical space for imagining alternatives from the perspective of entangled and always-contested social projects on the ground

The Search for Indigenous Justice in Plurinational Bolivia: Contested Sovereignties, Entanglement, and the Politics of Harm

This dissertation examines the effects of state-led decolonization in Bolivia among historically marginalized rural indigenous communities the Andean highlands. As part of its efforts to decolonize society, Bolivia’s revolutionary 2009 constitution declared the country a “communitarian, plurinational state” and granted indigenous people the right to exercise their own forms of justice. My analysis shows significant disagreement over the meaning of justice as indigenous leaders develop grassroots legal strategies to implement this right in a variety of contexts. At the national level, indigenous legal activists seek to redirect institution building processes back toward their own longstanding project of self-determination, revealing significant disagreement over who decides the proper role of the state in plurinational Bolivia. At the local level, I show how winning legal recognition of jurisdiction over (often decades-long) land disputes in rural highland communities carried with it the onerous task of untangling the extremely complicated and historically constructed problems that were often entangled into the disputed land itself, including competing claims to land rights and government corruption. Unable to address communities’ practical concerns, local organizations lost legitimacy, often leading to more even uncertainty or conflict.Ultimately, this research shows how liberal law operates to maintain hierarchies of race, even in context like Bolivia, where new forms of legal pluralism have been advanced as a tool to dismantle them. I approach indigenous justice, not as an object with distinct values and practices to be studied, but rather as a diagnostic tool that leaders take up to analyze overlapping structural harms masked by state recognition and discourses of indigeneity. Writing from the uncertainties that indigenous legal activists face as they come up against the constraints of their own legal strategies, my research shows how the search for indigenous justice nonetheless opens critical space for imagining alternatives from the perspective of entangled and always-contested social projects on the ground

Storytelling Coloniality : Indigeneity, Decolonization, and the Politics of Radical Alterity in the Andes

Borrowing from recent work on political ontology, this thesis explores three different versions of "storytelling coloniality": an autobiography by fourteen Mapuche scholars that enacts a politics of knowledge through the production of their own book; an experimental ethnography that approaches knowledge through the notions of colonialism and decolonization that emerge from the ritual practices of Aymara Shamans and Apprentices in the Bolivian highlands; and a science fiction novel, set roughly in the year 2070, which enacts an "oral history of the future" organized around the logic of Andean thought. Produced and circulated within local and international academic audiences, these stories make visible contemporary legacies of colonialism, explore spaces in which alternative social worlds emerge and thrive, and problematize how alterity is envisaged, enacted, articulated, and aggregated within the context of contemporary global processes and power relations. As a state-led project of change, decolonization in Bolivia can be seen as the most recent process of liberal governance that seeks to manage forms of radical alterity. Yet, as these stories reveal, there are fundamental disagreements over the meaning and scope of the transformative projects unfolding in the Andean region, which underling the salient, yet difficult task of engaging with struggles for social justice--at once ontological, epistemological, subjective, economic, and juridical--in the context of liberal frameworks and modernist assumptions. By making visible other ways of imagining and enacting decolonization, these stories provide a different reading, or diagnosis of the present moment that I suggest is worth taking seriously in order to fully grapple with the meaning and scope of decolonization emerging in the Andean region toda

Métodos etnográficos colaborativos

Investigadores y activistas están desarrollando cada vez más investigaciones colaborativas, en respuesta a los privilegios asimétricos que conforman la ciencia occidental, asociándose con comunidades locales y orientando sus investigaciones explícitamente hacia sus objetivos políticos. En este artículo, examinamos este importante cambio, identificando las maneras en que éste mismo se entrecruza con otras tendencias similares e importantes, especialmente la política del conocimiento y la descolonización. A la vez, analizamos dichas tendencias de la investigación colaborativa en Latinoamérica para comprender el contexto y los programas políticos de aquellos involucrados y para mostrar lo que se produce. Sugerimos que la colaboración, como otros discursos aparentemente progresistas, pueden ser espacios tanto de gobernanza como de liberación dado que, cada vez con mayor frecuencia, la norma en agencias gubernamentales, instituciones de investigación y ONGs consiste en el fomento de los métodos participativos para la promoción de sus propios planes. Teniendo en cuenta los dilemas particulares en nuestros propios (y distintos) proyectos de investigación sobre las políticas indígenas en Bolivia, recomendamos un análisis cuidadoso de los puntos de vista (standpoints) múltiples y cambiantes de nuestros colaboradores, así evitando reconstruir nociones esencialistas de la indigeneidad. En última instancia, resaltamos la necesidad de reconocer los estrechos márgenes de negociación en los que todos nos vemos inmersos cuando emprendemos proyectos colaborativos.  Scholars and activists are increasingly carrying out collaborative research to respond to the asymmetrical privileges built into Western science by partnering with local communities and explicitly orienting their research towards their political aims. In this article, we examine this important shift, tracing the ways it intersects with other important trends in the field, especially the politics of knowledge and decolonization. We discuss the tendencies of collaborative research in Latin America to examine the context and political agendas of those involved and to show what is produced. We suggest that collaboration, like other seemingly progressive discourses like decolonization, can be the site of governance as well as liberation, as it is increasingly the norm for government agencies, research institutions, and non-governmental organizations to promote participatory methods to further their own agendas. Considering the dilemmas in our different research projects on indigenous politics in Bolivia, we urge careful analysis of the multiple and changing standpoints of our collaborators in order not to reconstruct essentialized notions of indigeneity. Ultimately, we see the need to acknowledge the tight spaces of negotiation that we all find ourselves drawn into when we undertake collaborative endeavors.Investigadores y activistas están desarrollando cada vez más investigaciones colaborativas, en respuesta a los privilegios asimétricos que conforman la ciencia occidental, asociándose con comunidades locales y orientando sus investigaciones explícitamente hacia sus objetivos políticos. En este artículo, examinamos este importante cambio, identificando las maneras en que éste mismo se entrecruza con otras tendencias similares e importantes, especialmente la política del conocimiento y la descolonización. A la vez, analizamos dichas tendencias de la investigación colaborativa en Latinoamérica para comprender el contexto y los programas políticos de aquellos involucrados y para mostrar lo que se produce. Sugerimos que la colaboración, como otros discursos aparentemente progresistas, pueden ser espacios tanto de gobernanza como de liberación dado que, cada vez con mayor frecuencia, la norma en agencias gubernamentales, instituciones de investigación y ONGs consiste en el fomento de los métodos participativos para la promoción de sus propios planes. Teniendo en cuenta los dilemas particulares en nuestros propios (y distintos) proyectos de investigación sobre las políticas indígenas en Bolivia, recomendamos un análisis cuidadoso de los puntos de vista (standpoints) múltiples y cambiantes de nuestros colaboradores, así evitando reconstruir nociones esencialistas de la indigeneidad. En última instancia, resaltamos la necesidad de reconocer los estrechos márgenes de negociación en los que todos nos vemos inmersos cuando emprendemos proyectos colaborativos.

Review of Coca Yes; Cocaine No: How Bolivia’s Coca Growers Reinvented Democracy

Coca Yes; Cocaine No: How Bolivia’s Coca Growers Reinvented Democracy, by Thomas Grisaffi, Duke University Press, 201

Rights of Pachamama: The emergence of an earth jurisprudence in the Americas

Earth jurisprudence represents an alternative approach to the law based on the belief that nature has rights. In this view, a river has the right to flow, species have the right to continue to exist in the wild, and ecosystems have the right to adapt and evolve over time. Proponents of Earth jurisprudence argue that, by treating nature as exploitable resources, contemporary legal systems actively promote environmental harms. Recognising rights of nature, they argue, will transform core values and inspire social changes that promote economic development which respects nature’s limits. Since 2006, rights of nature have been recognised by some sub-federal public bodies in the United States and by the governments of Ecuador and Bolivia. This paper sets out to answer two questions. First, what explains the legal recognition of rights of nature in Ecuador and Bolivia? Second, what factors impede a wider adoption and implementation of Earth jurisprudence? Amongst the constraints, it will be argued, is that Ecuador and Bolivia continue to pursue an extractivist economic development model, with assertions of national sovereignty over natural resources tending to prevail over Earth jurisprudence and environmental conservation