Explore the vast range of titles available.

Throughout the Americas, a boom in oil, gas, and mining development has pushed the extractive frontier deeper into Indigenous territories. Centering on a long-term study of Enron and Shell's Cuiabá pipeline,From Enron to Evotraces the struggles of Bolivia's Indigenous peoples for self-determination over their lives and territories. In his analysis of their response to this encroaching development, author Derrick Hindery also sheds light on surprising similarities between neoliberal reform and the policies of the nation's first Indigenous president, Evo Morales.Drawing upon extensive interviews and document analysis, Hindery argues that many of the structural conditions created by neoliberal policies-including partial privatization of the oil and gas sector-still persist under Morales. Tactics employed by both Morales and his neoliberal predecessors utilize the rhetoric of environmental protection and Indigenous rights to justify oil, gas, mining, and road development in Indigenous territories and sensitive ecoregions.Indigenous peoples, while mindful of gains made during Morales's tenure, are increasingly dissatisfied with the administration's development model, particularly when it infringes upon their right to self-determination.From Enron to Evodemonstrates their dynamic and pragmatic strategies to cope with development and adversity, while also advancing their own aims.Offering a critique of both free-market piracy and the dilemmas of resource nationalism, this is a groundbreaking book for scholars, policy-makers, and advocates concerned with Indigenous politics, social movements, environmental justice, and resistance in an era of expanding resource development.

A unique analysis of the stories, conversations, gossip, public speeches, and other narratives that shape community and identity among peasant women of the Bolivian highlands.

An important question for the health and longevity of democratic governance is how institutions may be fashioned to prevent electoral victors from drawing on the resources of the state to perpetuate themselves in power. This book addresses the issue by examining how the structure of electoral institutions - the rules of democratic contestation that determine the manner in which citizens choose their representatives - affects political corruption, defined as the abuse of state power or resources for campaign finance or party-building purposes. To this end, the book develops a novel theoretical framework that examines electoral institutions as a potential vehicle for political parties to exploit the state as a source of political finance. Hypotheses derived from this framework are assessed using an unprecedented public employees' survey conducted by the author in Bolivia, Brazil and Chile.

Local Histories/Global Designsis an extended argument about the \"coloniality\" of power by one of the most innovative Latin American and Latino scholars. In a shrinking world where sharp dichotomies, such as East/West and developing/developed, blur and shift, Walter Mignolo points to the inadequacy of current practices in the social sciences and area studies. He explores the crucial notion of \"colonial difference\" in the study of the modern colonial world and traces the emergence of an epistemic shift, which he calls \"border thinking.\" Further, he expands the horizons of those debates already under way in postcolonial studies of Asia and Africa by dwelling in the genealogy of thoughts of South/Central America, the Caribbean, and Latino/as in the United States. His concept of \"border gnosis,\" or sensing and knowing by dwelling in imperial/colonial borderlands, counters the tendency of occidentalist perspectives to manage, and thus limit, understanding. In a new preface that discussesLocal Histories/Global Designsas a dialogue with Hegel's Philosophy of History, Mignolo connects his argument with the unfolding of history in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Anthropologists have made important contributions to the study of policy and can play a critical role as participants in policy processes, as well. This article focuses on national health reform policies in Israel and Bolivia. Through our fieldwork focused on these policies, we consider anthropological approaches to studying health policies through the lenses of history, sociality, production, and power, and through attending to the inequities that emerge in policy implementation. Policy, as we emphasize in this article, is something both historically contingent as well as continuously ‘in the works.’ We attend to the multiple modalities through which policy emerges and the sometimes overlapping and often conflicting ways policies are implemented and unfold in practice. Furthermore, we suggest that policies are designed, implemented, and practiced at many different scales and locations, all of which hold the possibility for anthropological inquiry and involvement.

Indigenous peoples' right to prior consultation and to informed consent represents the basis of the new global model shaping state-indigenous relations. Consultation processes promise to enable indigenous people to determine their own development and are especially promoted when extraction projects with significant socio-environmental impacts are planned on indigenous lands. In this article we draw on debates on participatory development in order to analyse the first state-led consultations in Bolivia's and Peru's hydrocarbon sectors (2007-14). The analysis shows that effective participation has been limited by (1) an absence of indigenous ownership of the processes; (2) indigenous groups' difficulties defending or even articulating their own visions and demands; and (3) limited or very general outcomes. The study identifies real-life challenges, such as power asymmetries, a 'communication hurdle' and appropriate timing - as well as simplistic assumptions underlying the consultation approach - that account for the unfulfilled promises of this new model.

Over its 12 years in power, Bolivia’s MAS government has made significant advances in expanding inclusion and reducing poverty. In the process, it has steadily been transformed into a hegemonic force that is increasingly dependent on expedient and pragmatically based compromises with economic elites. Concurrently, social movement influence and participation in the government have steadily declined. After 2009, when an uprising by Eastern elites had been quashed and MAS gained a congressional majority, the MAS missed an opening to advance its original project of structural change, opting instead for a more expedient strategy that has kept it in power at the cost of accommodating elites and debilitating social movements. Durante sus 12 años en el poder, el gobierno MAS de Bolivia ha logrado avances significativos en expandir la inclusión y reducir la pobreza. En el proceso, se ha transformado continuamente en una fuerza hegemónica que depende cada vez más de compromisos oportunos y basados en pragmatismo con las élites económicas. Al mismo tiempo, la influencia y la participación en el gobierno de los movimientos sociales ha disminuido continuamente. Después de 2009, cuando un levantamiento de las élites del Este se suprimió y el MAS ganó una mayoría en el Congreso, el MAS perdió una oportunidad para avanzar en su proyecto original de cambio estructural, optando por una estrategia más conveniente que lo mantuvo en el poder a costa de acomodar a las élites y debilitar los movimientos sociales.

Intimate partner violence against women is of particular concern in Bolivia, a country ranked second among ten Latin American countries in the prevalence of physical and sexual violence toward women (Hindin, Kishor, and Ansara, 2008). This study examines the correlation between intimate partner violence and the type of domestic decision making. Using factor analysis and structural equation modeling on a sample of 2,759 Bolivian heterosexual couples, this study finds that intimate partner violence is less likely to occur in families in which the decision making is egalitarian (female and male partners make decisions together) but more likely to occur when either the male partner or the female partner makes decisions alone. These findings support the hypotheses that the gender distribution of power may cause conflict between intimate heterosexual partners (Anderson, 1997; Dobash, Dobash, Wilson, and Daly, 1992; Jewkes, 2002). It also goes further in demonstrating that such distribution could lead to egalitarian, matriarchal, or patriarchal domestic decision making and that there are differential consequences for both intimate partner offending and victimization. In rural areas, Bolivian women are more vulnerable; men more often make decisions alone; and women are less educated and poorer than in urban areas. In the patriarchal-type family, men make decisions and may abuse their female partners physically and psychologically. This type of family is poorer and less educated, and it is inversely correlated with women’s and men’s education. Indeed, education seems to play a key role in heterosexual relationships; men's education is inversely correlated with females' physical victimization. However, these findings also support a) the status inconsistency theory: in wealthier, more educated households, the female partner made decisions alone but was still physically and psychologically abused by her intimate partner, and b) intimate partner violence is influenced by structural factors, such as patriarchal beliefs, social power structure, poverty, and social inequalities (Barak, 2003, 2006).

Focusing on contemporary Bolivia, this article examines promises and pitfalls of political and legal initiatives that have turned Pachamama into a subject of rights. The conferral of rights on the indigenous earth being had the potential to unsettle the Western ontological distinction between active human subjects who engage in politics and passive natural resources. This essay, however, highlights some paradoxical effects of the rights of nature in Bolivia, where Evo Morales’ model of development relies on the intensification of the export-oriented extractive economy. Through the analysis of a range of texts, including paintings, legal documents, political speeches and activist interventions, I consider the equivocation between the normatively gendered Mother Earth that the state recognises as the subject of rights, and the figure of Pachamama evoked by feminist and indigenous activists. Pachamama, I suggest, has been incorporated into the Bolivian state as a being whose generative capacities have been translated into a rigid gender binary. As a gendered subject of rights, Pachamama/Mother Earth is exposed to governmental strategies that ultimately increase its subordination to state power. The concluding remarks foreground the import of feminist perspectives in yielding insights concerning political ontological conflicts.

In recent times a growing number of Latin American rural groups have achieved extended ethno-territorial rights, and large territories have been protected by progressive constitutions. These were the outcomes of extended cycles of national and transnational contentious politics and of social movement struggle, including collective South-South cooperation. However, the continent has simultaneously experienced a resource extraction boom. Frequently the extractivism takes place in protected areas and/or Indigenous territories. Consequently economic interests collide with the protection and recognition of constitutional rights. Through a review of selected demonstrative cases across Latin America, this article analyses the (de jure) rights on paper versus the (de facto) rights in practice.