After Servitude: Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia by Mareike Winchell (review)

Abstract

A global Land Back movements and Indigenous assertions of sovereignty in the face of settler colonialism, Mareike Winchell’s After Servitude examines the ongoing struggle to achieve justice in the wake of colonial violence and Indigenous dispossession in Bolivia. Following the election of Evo Morales in 2005, Bolivia’s Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party re-centered land reform as a means to redress the legacies of racialized servitude epitomized by the country’s former hacienda system. Those efforts built on revolutionary and reformist projects dating back to the early 20th century, which sought to end the unpaid, obligatory servitude known as pongueaje that pervaded large rural estates, alongside other racial and often sexual exploitations that accompanied hierarchical labor relations between Indigenous, white, and mestizo Bolivians (Anthias 2021, Fabricant 2012, Soliz 2021). The Morales Administration framed its iteration of land reform as part of a broader decolonizing platform bent on responding to Indigenous demands and breaking with both a colonial past and neoliberal present. Yet, as Winchell shows in After Servitude, Morales-era land titling projects shared foundational assumptions with Liberal (Lockean) framings of emancipation as something best achieved through property ownership and as a means to secure mastery over oneself as a modern, autonomous citizen, threatening to eclipse other ways of being in relation with the land and each other. Given the centrality of land to so many movements for reparation, Winchell was surprised to find that many of the presumed beneficiaries of these Morales-era policy agendas frequently expressed skepticism about state-led individual and collective land titling in the rural Cochabamba