Daniel Goldstein has written an elaborate and rich ethnography of the ‘present absence’ of the Bolivian state in a marginal barrio in the city of Cochabamba. His primary focus is on the impoverished indigenous residents' experiences and perceptions of security and, more often than not, the lack thereof. Crime and violence grip their communities, they lack legal titles to their homes, and people feel abandoned by a state that is supposed to uphold law and order and protect all citizens irrespective of race, gender and class, but that instead tends to cause more anxiety and insecurity among marginalised citizens. People are outlawed in a double sense: ‘negatively included and perilously excluded’, as Goldstein puts it. They can feel at once burdened and abandoned by the state and its law-enforcing agents. As a result, people sometimes take matters into their own hands. Accordingly, lynchings of suspected delinquents have been a hotly debated phenomenon in Bolivian media for the last few years; this is especially true since 2009, when the new Bolivian Constitution recognised justicia comunitaria (community justice), which the right-wing opposition considers to be a legitimisation of lynchings and ‘savagery’. By discussing lynching and community justice as heterogeneous phenomena embedded within complex racial ideologies and power structures, Goldstein's book provides a nuanced contribution to this debate.

It would have been easy to stop there, and to write an ethnographic account of urban indigenous people's vulnerability and ways of coping with a harsh everyday existence. Goldstein, however, pursues his ethnographic undertaking further into the ambiguities, contradictions, transformations and continuities that characterise the so-called ‘post-neoliberal’ Bolivia. The result is a compelling ethnography of ‘the phantom state’. Besides providing the reader with a well-informed ethnographic account of the social and political dynamics of a marginal barrio, Goldstein manages to write one of the most interesting pieces of anthropological work published in recent years on Bolivian society and state transformation.

In many ways, Goldstein's book is a testimony to ethnography at its best: it elucidates large critical issues by way of meticulous attention to local contexts and dynamics. While reading it I came to think of a book I read during my undergraduate studies in social anthropology in the late 1990s: Small Places, Large Issues, by Thomas Hylland Eriksen. As an undergraduate student I was taught that anthropologists are people who immerse themselves in ‘small places’ for long periods of time, which subsequently allows them to speak of ‘the large issues of human existence’ in light of the thorough knowledge gained in and of these small places. Bolivia has experienced an unprecedented scholarly interest in the last decade, but the spectacular proceso de cambio and the charismatic Evo Morales caused quite a number of anthropologists to lose sight of ‘the small places’, and in all our exhilaration we suddenly found ourselves discussing state affairs and national politics (the large issues) without ethnographically anchoring our analyses in people's everyday experiences and practices. It was as though we had forgotten that large processes are often best understood from small places. Goldstein's book is a reminder. It shows us that the anthropology of the state may be written from the fringes of the state, and in this specific case, that the anthropology of the state may be brilliantly written in the ‘present absence’ of the state. Clearly, Outlawed is not ‘anthropology of the state’ in any conventional sense – this is not a book about ‘el proceso de cambio’ or ‘the politics of decolonization’ – but still, any reader will learn more about the ambiguities and contradictions in Bolivian society and state politics from this book than they will from many of those texts that subject the Morales administration to direct anthropological analysis. Goldstein does not achieve this at the cost of attention to local concerns and everyday life; rather, he achieves this because of a sensitive appreciation of local life-worlds. He does not dwell on the fancy discourses and the ‘multicultural spectacle’; rather, he explores how wide-ranging political, social and judicial processes are lived through, contested, interpreted and vernacularised in, as it were, ‘small places’.

A core success of the book is the way in which Goldstein gains access to people's lives. For ethnography to be anything at all but a distanced, colonial description of ‘the Others’, bonds of trust are essential, and Goldstein shows that a shared middle ground of social and political commitment creates such bonds. If our research is driven by a commitment to transforming conditions of social injustice in cooperation and dialogue with people who themselves are subject to these conditions, not only do we expose ourselves to other experiences and forms of knowledge and allow ourselves to make a potential difference outside of academia, but, as Goldstein's book confirms, this kind of engagement also has the potential to lead to better research – to deeper understandings of specific problems as well as theoretical insights that otherwise would be difficult to attain.

This eloquently written book is clearly a major contribution to our understanding of contemporary Bolivia, the state, issues of (in-)security and rights, marginalisation, urbanisation and indigeneity. It will therefore be of broad interest to scholars and students in anthropology, political science, sociology and beyond. Still, I was left wanting more. Goldstein argues convincingly for the urgent need for a different state, not less state. However, the potential role of the marginalised urban poor in transforming the Bolivian state could have been more thoroughly discussed. Though Goldstein emphasises the creativity with which the residents of the marginalised barrios vernacularise international discourses of ‘security’ and human rights, he tends to portray them primarily as victims and victimisers in a suffocating climate of individualised suspicion, dread and fear. Bolivian history shows, however, that cartographies of political power have been redrawn from marginalised spaces before, and research carried out among urban indigenous people in the cities of El Alto and La Paz demonstrates that subaltern citizens may emerge as contestants of asymmetrical power relations and as creative innovators of alternative worlds. I would have appreciated an ethnographically informed discussion of this in Goldstein's work. I am probably asking for too much from one single book, but I raise this issue because I believe Goldstein's keen analytical eye and ethnographic sensitivity would be well suited to discussing also these potentialities of the marginalised Bolivian barrio.