A Revolution in Fragments: Traversing Scales of Justice, Ideology, and Practice in Bolivia

Kamari Clarke (UCLA) and I are organizing a joint book launch and party on Friday November 22, 2019 at the American Anthropological Association meetings in Vancouver, Canada. Please see the attached invitation.

“This is a major piece of scholarship on contemporary Bolivia that offers profound theoretical insights and contributions. I have no doubt that this fabulous book will become an authoritative text.”

(Andrew Canessa, author of Intimate Indigeneities: Race, Sex, and History in the Small Spaces of Andean Life)

“Revolutionary change has proven profoundly difficult for anthropologists to handle, and this both in theoretical and descriptive terms. Against this background, A Revolution in Fragments is a triumph. Both a compelling theoretical account of the nature of ‘revolution by constitution’ and a gripping ethnography of the revolutionary process as it unfolded over more than a decade in Bolivia, this is a book no one interested in the nature and potential of radical social transformation should miss.”

(Joel Robbins, University of Cambridge)

Duke UP has designed the cover.

After some reorganization and reframing, here is the final table of contents for the book.

Here is the book's abstract:

Based on ethnographic and critical research over nine years, this volume examines the contours of the extraordinary period of Bolivian history that began with the inauguration of Evo Morales as president in January 2009. The period 2006-2015 has variously been described as a time of democratic and cultural revolution, world renewal (Pachakuti), reconstituted neoliberalism, or, simply, “the process of change.” This book unpacks these different analytical and ideological approaches by privileging the voices and perspectives of a wide range of political and legal actors, social movement leaders, students, indigenous intellectuals, women’s rights activists, and many others. The result is a singular ethnographic account of contemporary Bolivia that reveals the fragmentary and contested nature of the country’s radical experiments in pluralism, ethnic politics, and “postneoliberal” socioeconomic planning. The volume features a substantial body of ethnographic research and analysis that has never before been published, including interviews and observations with Bolivia’s different rightwing opposition groups, whose resistance to the MAS government and its revolutionary ambitions brought the country to the brink of civil war during the volatile years of 2007-2009. Yet by following the course of these conflicts into 2015, the volume shows how the Morales government deployed a variety of legal, political, and ideological tools as part of its long-term strategy to consolidate power at the service of decolonizing transformation. The volume concludes by arguing that the process of change in Bolivia offers one of the best contemporary case studies for considering the role that political agency, identity, and economic equality play within broader movements for justice and structural change.

The book has a new title--A Revolution in Fragments: Traversing Scales of Justice, Ideology, and Practice in Bolivia

I am very happy to say that I recently signed a contract with Duke University Press to bring "Revolution in the Brackets" out in fall 2019, in time for the American Anthropological Association meetings and, more importantly, the late-October elections in Bolivia. I will be working on revisions in July to be able to submit the final manuscript in August.

Have finished the Postscript to Revolution in the Brackets. Entitled "Chasing Evo," it is an ethnographic reflection on the meaning behind efforts--finally abandoned--over nine years to interview Evo Morales as part of the project.

Have just finished the conclusion to Revolution in the Brackets, which is entitled "From Relations of Production to Relations of Personhood."

Working on the book's final chapter, "And the Pututu Shall Sound," which takes up questions of indigeneity, historical injustice, and cultural practice within Bolivia's "democratic and cultural revolution." In the chapter, I develop the idea of a "prismatic" conception of collective identity in order to understand the multilayered ways in which forms of collective belonging were mobilized, resisted, and rendered during the period 2006-2015.

Have begun Chapter Five, "Living Well Through Law," which returns to the question of the role of law within Bolivia's process of change since 2006. Sections in the chapter analyze the implications of decolonizing the law; the paradoxes of bureaucratizing revolution through the instrumentalities and logics of law; the use of what I call "strategic juridification" by the Morales government; and the tragic misalignment of human rights discourse with the ethic-moral principles that ground what Nancy Postero (in her wonderful recent book!) has called the "indigenous state."

Recently finished Chapter 4, a study of the ambivalent place of Bolivia's traditional Trotskyist left within the constitutional revolution of the period 2006-2015.

Have recently finished Chapter Three of book. Will hopefully have a first draft finished by late-October. Will attach current working TOC for those who are interested.

Public lecture on this project, Monday January 2, 2017, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Department of Sociology and Anthropology