Susan Helen Ellison opens her fascinating study of foreign-funded alternative dispute resolution (ADR) programs in El Alto, Bolivia, with the anthropologist-author in the midst of an early morning stakeout. Writing in the ethnographic present, Ellison captures the tense and unlikely moment in which she found herself in a car with a client of an El Alto “integrated justice center” (IJC) waiting to present an invitation to participate in mediation to the client's estranged husband. As part of her 15 months of ethnographic research in Bolivia in 2010-11, Ellison employed classic participant-observation by working for a local IJC as an intern, which required her to conduct intake interviews with clients, give advice about legal and non-legal approaches to conflicts, and participate in mediation sessions with parties to conflicts, among various other tasks.
On the morning in question, Ellison and the client were parked in the frigid altiplano dawn in front of a yogurt factory. Ellison and the client had been tipped off that the estranged husband would finish his shift at a particular hour by a mysterious figure who was also in the car, someone who was either the client's “friend, a relative, a lover, or merely a coworker [of the estranged husband] … sympathetic to [the client's] plight.” Because the client was afraid of her estranged husband, she asked Ellison to give him the letter from the IJC.
After a long wait, the estranged husband finally emerged from the yogurt factory, after which Ellison jumped from the car and confronted him, a shock that, as Ellison writes, “alarmed” him. Ellison then proceeded to explain to the startled man what he was being invited to by giving a short and canned description of the process of mediation at the IJC. After Ellison slipped a subtle threat into the speech about avoiding the courts, the estranged husband agreed to come to the IJC for mediation with Ellison's client. Sometime later, the mediation took place and an agreement between Ellison's client and her estranged husband was reached. However, as Ellison tells us at the end of this dramatic opening vignette, the estranged husband used a false signature on the document, rendering it invalid.
In many ways, Ellison uses the rest of the book to unpack the meaning and implications of this first incident and the many others like it that shine a light on an important cultural and political economic ecosystem in El Alto, one in which community-level, socio-legal institutions shape notions of citizenship and ethical belonging against a background of national political change and enduring economic dislocation. The volume provides an intimate ethnographic perspective on the complex networks in which justice-seeking, gender-based violence, and debt relations intersect; the result is an important study in the micro-practices of exchange and conflict in a vital if often misunderstood Latin American city. The chapter in the book that follows the “conflictual social life” of a sewing machine as it is transformed from microfinanced commodity to collateral for multiple debts is particularly innovative and, in a sense, encapsulates all the ethnographic, conceptual, and even literary strengths of the volume.
My one frustration with this study is that Ellison does not really locate her most important research finding in relation to the legal and political changes that have taken place since the inauguration of Evo Morales in 2006. If the foreign-funded ADR programs in El Alto (and other cities in Bolivia) are mechanisms through which certain forms of neoliberal governmentality are institutionalized, what does this tell us about the MAS government's long-term plans to build what Nancy Postero has described as an “indigenous state?” Moreover, the arguably revolutionary 2009 constitution declares that the “refounded” plurinational state is formally post-neoliberal in its legal structure, distribution of political power (through devolutionary autonomy), and state economic planning, which harnesses state control over resources at the service of what a key government policy describes as “productive sovereignty.”
By correctly locating the emergence of the ADR centers of El Alto in a pre-Morales era of “neoliberal multiculturalism,” Ellison seems to be arguing implicitly that these signal institutions from the high-water mark of 1990s neoliberalism in Bolivia (I studied similar centers in Bolivia, the Servicios Legales Integrales, in 1998-99) represent a foil to the MAS government's post-neoliberal pretensions. In other words, even as the preamble to the 2009 constitution claims that the process of change has left Bolivia's colonial, republican, and neoliberal epochs in the past, Ellison's study seems to suggest that the insidious era of neoliberalism lives on, among other ways, in the form of community-level ADR centers, which inculcate a particular type of responsibilized citizenship with tragic consequences for household economic stability, gender relations, and community belonging.
