Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology最新文献

How is alienability produced as a mode of relation? Is capital a (racialized) affect? This article examines clashing expectations about minerals, specifically sodalite, at the Cerro Sapo mine in Ayopaya Bolivia. It describes how Cerro Sapo's current owner, a white Kenyan, engaged in narrative and bodily practices that sought to detach him from earlier labor histories and Indigenous demands for redistributive aid. Through a life history approach, the analysis centers one figure to provide insight into what capitalism looks like on the ground. This case sharpens scholarly understanding of the affective workings of extraction, highlighting the need to historicize feelings of trust and accountability by dis-aggregating the figure of “the mine” and “the firm.” By illuminating Cerro Sapo's continuities with, and revisions to, colonial structures of racial violence and exchange, the article aims to advance studies of racial capitalism and add a new layer to public debates about colonial debts and reparations for slavery.

This article examines in depth the nuances of the Toba (Qom) people's territorial claims over the Argentinean Chaco. Ethnographic fieldwork carried out from 1997 to the present in Qom communities in the center of the Argentinean Chaco allows me to analyze the relationships that these communities have maintained and continue maintaining with their territory since their insertion into the regional economy after the Chaco's colonization. The analysis of the alternation of destructive and protective practices shows us the Qom cosmological understandings of human-forest relations and the ambiguities of their coexistence in which Indigenous people, the nation-state, nongovernmental organizations (NGO), settlers, and nonhuman beings participate. I propose that the forest, rather than being seen by the Qom people as a common good to be protected amid a planetary crisis, is a relation within relations intersected by ambiguity. This article aims to contribute to studies on the particularities of Indigenous people standing against the destruction that the Anthropocene has brought, avoiding unitary ideas about the Anthropocene.

In June 2020 anti-racist activists in the Dominican Republic holding a vigil for George Floyd, who was brutally murdered by the police in the United States, were assaulted by right-wing ultranationalists and detained by the national police. An event that was meant to express transnational solidarity was seen as a threat by ultranationalists who over the past decades supported anti-Haitian and anti-Black state policies that have contested the rights of Dominicans of Haitian descent to Dominican nationality and citizenship. This article explores how through the Dominican state's refashioning of the legal and juridical apparatus, as well as the support of self-proclaimed Dominican nationalists, interpretations of Dominican national belonging are being contested and reimagined through the use of words such as traidor (traitor) and haitiano (Haitian). These terms code proper nationalism and Dominicanness as mixed-race, Hispanic, and anti-Haitian, as well as pro-Dominican sovereignty, therefore against international human rights organizations.

En junio de 2020, activistas antirracistas en la República Dominicana que celebraban una vigilia para George Floyd, quien fue brutalmente asesinado por la policía en los Estados Unidos, fueron agredidos por ultranacionalistas de derecha y detenidos por la policía nacional. Un evento que pretendía expresar solidaridad transnacional fue visto como una amenaza por los ultranacionalistas que durante las últimas décadas apoyaron políticas estatales antihaitianas y antinegras que han cuestionado los derechos de los dominicanos de ascendencia haitiana a la nacionalidad y ciudadanía dominicana. Este artículo explora cómo a través de la modificacion del aparato legal y jurídico por parte del Estado dominicano, así como el apoyo de los autoproclamados nacionalistas dominicanos, las interpretaciones de la pertenencia nacional dominicana están siendo cuestionadas y reimaginadas mediante el uso de palabras como traidor y haitiano. Estos términos codifican el nacionalismo y la dominicanidad como mestiza, hispana y antihaitiana, así como pro soberanía dominicana, por lo tanto en contra de las organizaciones internacionales de derechos humanos.

Drawing inspiration from new work across the fields of political ecology, plantation and abolition studies, critical Indigenous studies, and racial capitalism, this Introduction to a special issue of The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology locates extraction within an account of property as a system of racialized exploitation. Aware of the risks of a cosmopolitics that romanticizes non-Western value systems as largely untouched by extractivism, in this Introduction and in the articles themselves, we center the question of how Indigenous communities and others navigate extractivism in places and landscapes that have been deeply impacted and partly transformed by resource mining, agrarian monoculture, and deforestation. In voicing demands not subordinated by a materialist and secular language of resource exploitation, these accounts invite a less deterministic account of “our” late capitalist present. We contend that just as extraction is not monolithic, neither are its refusals, resistances, and alternatives.

In this multiauthored conversation on the limits of extractivism, Ryan Cecil Jobson, Macarena Gómez Barris, Cymene Howe, and Mareike Winchell collectively reflect on the erasures and displacements of extractivism, and how it works to produce affective and material outcomes. They take time to imagine the possible, or the aspirational, futures in a postextractive world or worlds, while recognizing that “extractivism” itself has become a way of marking multiplied effects (and affects) that unfold differently in time and place, for humans and for nonhumans.

Presented in this article is a search for folk, popular, and professional health care labels through patient narratives. Fieldwork was done in the Ecuadorian communities of Santa Rosa and Pano during the first wave of COVID-19. The results emphasize the utility of studying labels to better understand what communities experience in health crises, the opportunities to improve allopathic health care delivery and engagement with the folk and popular sectors. Both communities had adapted labels that were familiar to them from prior health experiences and served to inform their personal medical care during the pandemic. Meanwhile, in Pano, an Indigenous predominant community, people had inherited labels for plants and pandemics in both the Kichwa and Spanish language, and those provided a vocabulary of hope to the people. In Santa Rosa the labels demonstrated the grief and difficult times the community had experienced with the limited health resources available.

Global energy companies have regularly depended on state and private security for sustaining their operations, often with deadly consequences for union leaders, environmental defenders, and local communities. This article examines how these security arrangements are mutating amid the rapid expansion of renewable energy in Latin America. It uncovers how wind energy companies in Colombia rely on Indigenous knowledge, social networks, and legal norms to safeguard themselves in La Guajira, a border region reputed by outsiders as haunted by criminality and (il)legal practices. Through long-term ethnographic research of corporate spaces, I argue that Wayúu lifeways are mobilized by green energy capital to craft a hybrid security apparatus that, though failure-prone, is crucial for Colombia's low-carbon future. This case reveals how corporate and Indigenous configurations of protection and risk prevention work in tandem across sites that are being demarcated for the energy transition and climate change mitigation in Latin America.