Daniel M. Goldstein's Outlawed is a work by a Latin Americanist whose research trajectory has extended with great care over two decades and whose scope of analysis and cultural understanding has deepened by virtue of his long-term and incomparable ethnographic fieldwork in the peri-urban barrios of Cochabamba, Bolivia. His intimate knowledge of the lives, politics, and cultural practices of a wide range of people living on the margins of one of Bolivia's most important cities infuses his broader analyses of the role of the state, the paradoxes of law, and the challenges of living “between security and rights” with authority, empathy, and a thoroughgoing, if all-too-uncommon, sense of methodological humility.
Outlawed picks up where Goldstein's first ethnography of peri-urban Cochabamba, The Spectacular City, left off. That book introduced us to the manifold complexities and uncertainties of life between various dominant social categories and spaces of contemporary Bolivia: indigenous and mestizo, legal and illegal, urban and rural, law and social resistance, security and insecurity, violence and cultural drama. Through The Spectacular City, Goldstein marked out a key spot for himself as a critical anthropologist of Latin America's interstices—those spaces that mark the gaps between on the one hand the ideologies and pretensions of national reform projects, international aid programs, and the transnational “will to improve,” and on the other hand the local realities of cultural and political marginality, pervasive multigenerational poverty, and the banality of everyday violence.
Between The Spectacular City and Outlawed, two critical historical and methodological shifts occurred, and these are reflected in the latter and more recent book. The first study tracked the use of violence in peri-urban Cochabamba as a form of cultural performance amid the ravages of neoliberal economic reorganization. The second, Outlawed, is based on research undertaken during the rise of Evo Morales, the surge into national power of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), and the first years of the new government's ambitious vision to “re-found” the nation-state itself, a fraught process that perhaps reached its high point with the passage of a radical new constitution in 2009.
This historical point is important to underscore, because as Goldstein argues in Outlawed, the new government based much of its rhetoric about a re-founded Bolivia on idealized visions of indigeneity (often derived from the swirl of transnational indigenous rights discourses). The residents of Uspha Uspha, the peri-urban district on which Goldstein's research has centered, do not fit neatly into the auto-orientalist governmental categories of indigenous economy (vivir bien), justice-making (justicia comunitaria), and moral practice (ama hilla, ama llulla, ama sua), and thus they are doubly marginalized—first, from the indigenous cosmovisión that supposedly grounds what is commonly described in post-2006 Bolivia as simply “el proceso de cambio,” or the process of change, and second, from the benefits of economic development and social investment that have had a positive impact in other sectors of Bolivian society.
Methodologically, Goldstein's long-term professional and personal relationships with his interlocutors in Uspha Uspha has led him over the years to move between ethnographic research and community activism, a transition he examines at length in Chapter 2 of Outlawed. From leading study abroad programs from his university in the United States to the community, to securing funding to establish an unprecedented series of local justice centers in Uspha Uspha as the director of an NGO, Goldstein has engaged with the community across several different ethical, epistemological, and political boundaries. In his critical reflections on this methodological pluralism, Goldstein argues that direct community engagement “opens doors to the researcher that otherwise would have remained closed, allowing for a deeper, richer understanding of the [local] social worlds.”
The heart of Goldstein's broader contribution to the study of contemporary Latin America in Outlawed is to be found in his ethnographic analysis of the concept of “community justice” and his critique of the hegemony of human rights as the dominant language of social change and moral improvement in contemporary Bolivia. In regard to the first, Outlawed reflects his evolving understanding of the different forms that violence takes in peri-urban Cochabamba as a response to chronic insecurity and the wavering presence of what he calls the “phantom state.” Here, his subtle unpacking of the multiple discursive frameworks through which practices like lynching have been constructed in Bolivia make foundational and wide-ranging theoretical contributions that have implications for the understanding of justice-making throughout Latin America and beyond.
In regard to the second, the hegemony of human rights discourse, Goldstein takes up the question of human rights in Bolivia in light of his research and community engagement and comes to some provocative and far-reaching conclusions. He argues that the practitioners of community violence in Uspha Uspha absorb and respond to the dominance of human rights discourse by reinterpreting human rights and associating it with powerful outside agents (like the hated IMF and World Bank), while at the same time continuing to demand that the state be more effective in protecting rights, above all, the right to security. What results is an opposition between rights as a language of social change and improvement—a language that community members reject or even blame for pervasive violence—and the right to be safe and secure in one's family and community, which emerges from a vernacular process of what Goldstein calls the “creative imagination.” And this fracturing of rights discourse in Bolivia has broader implications. As Goldstein puts it, “[t]he consequences of this process for human rights as a language of liberation bear watching, in Bolivia and elsewhere, as the global security crisis continues to unfold.”
