How are injurious pasts redeployed by the dispossessed? After Servitude explores how agrarian engineers, Indigenous farmers, Mestizo mining bosses, and rural workers navigate racial hierarchies rooted in histories of forced agrarian labor. In the rural Bolivian province of Ayopaya, where the liberatory promises of property remain elusive, Quechua people address such hierarchies by demanding aid from Mestizo elites and, when that fails, through acts of labor militancy. Against institutional faith in property ownership as a means to detach land from people and present from past, the kin of former masters and servants alike have insisted that ethical debts from earlier racial violence stretch across epochs and formal land sales. What emerges is a vision of justice grounded in popular demands that wealth remain beholden to the region’s agrarian past. By tracing Ayopayans’ active efforts to contend with servitude’s long shadow, Mareike Winchell illuminates the challenges that property confronts as both an extractive paradigm and a means of historical redress.
Mareike Winchell is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.
"This is a brilliant and timely book that brings together careful ethnography with ethical philosophy. In the context of land reform in Bolivia, Mareike Winchell shows how a rights discourse has been put into place to represent the claims of indigenous peoples who have lost ownership of land and water rights as well public access. As much as these legal projects seek to recognize and repair very serious forms of dispossession, they nevertheless tend to misdescribe the injury through the language of property rights. Winchell seeks to bring to the fore the practices of ethical relationality that existed prior to the illegal seizure of lands and that continue throughout contemporary practices of resistance. This book presents a strong challenge to received epistemological frameworks with a kind of engaged writing whose conceptual reach, compassion, and precision are brilliant and necessary."—Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory, University of California, Berkeley
"The conflictive histories of the hacienda era are not even past—descendants of tenant farmers today confront both the sequelae of servitude and the enduring presence of inequality. Winchell’s careful, clear-eyed attention to the layered significance of post-colonial property leads to unexpected revelations about kinship and race, land and labor, justice and accountability."—Jessaca B. Leinaweaver, author of The Circulation of Children: Kinship, Adoption, and Morality in Andean Peru
"After Servitude offers what the best ethnography provides: a richly contextualized case study of global phenomena. It rewards with careful reevaluations of property rights, political reform, and indigenous/colonial relations, revealing the surprising ways in which they interweave in the living histories of contemporary Bolivia. An exemplary piece of scholarship."––Justin Richland, author of Cooperation without Submission: Indigenous Jurisdictions in Native Nation-US Engagements
"In this rich ethnography, Winchell compellingly argues that relational legacies of servitude deeply impact the search for indigenous justice. Even in Bolivia, where decolonization is a central goal of the state, liberal tools like rights and property are insufficient to untangle enduring patterns of kinship, mutual dependencies, land ownership, and authority."—Nancy Postero, author of The Indigenous State: Race, Politics, and Performance in Plurinational Bolivia
352 pp.6 x 9Illus: 26 b/w illustrations
9780520386440$29.95|£25.00Paper
Jun 2022