Research Interests

My research focuses on the the state, the politics of territory and knowledge, and state and non-state practices of sovereignty and redistribution.  My regional expertise is Latin America. I have worked primarily with indigenous movements in Bolivia and Guatemala and am currently in preliminary phases of fieldwork on territory and natural gas in Bolivia and southern Brazil. 

I am currently studying Bolivia's natural gas boom and the cultural politics of energy resources in Bolivia and neighboring Brazil (which consumes most of Bolivia's gas).  Engaging work from geography, political science, and economics, I ask what anthropology and ethnography might contribute to debates on inequality, indigenous rights, and extractive nationalism; the reconstitution of the state in a post-neoliberal era; and the ways that resource flows like natural gas articulate with the rise of the global south in Latin America and beyond.

I came to these interests through my study and work with indigenous language and education activists, first in Guatemala, and later in Bolivia, where I have worked with the Guarani since late 1992.  The Guarani pursuit of linguistic, epistemic and territorial rights and their engagement with state sponsored bilingual and intercultural education reform is the subject of a book based on my earlier work, New Languages of the State: Indigenous Resurgence and the Politics of Knowledge in Bolivia (Duke, 2009). I have extended my interests in education through an experimental teaching-research project to create a public ethnography of race, democracy, and school reform in St. Louis.

For more on this work, please see my website.

Selected Publications

(in press, expected 2010) "Flashpoints of Sovereignty: Natural Gas and Spatial Politics in Eastern Bolivia." In The Anthropology of Oil.

2010 Remapping Bolivia: Resources, Territory and Indigeneity in a Plurinational State. Santa Fe: SAR Press (co-edited with Nicole Fabricant).

2010 Rethinking Intellectuals in Latin America. Frankfurt and Madrid: Vervuert  (co-edited with Mabel Moraña).

2009 New Languages of the State: Indigenous Resurgence and the Politics of Knowledge in Bolivia. Durham: Duke University Press.

2008 "La educación y el resurgimiento indígena en Bolivia: desafíos al proyecto de ‘descolonización’" In Cultura y Cambio Social, Mabel Moraña, ed.

2002 "Paradoxes of Liberal Indigenism: Indigenous Movements, State Process, and Intercultural Reform in Bolivia." In Identities in Conflict: Indigenous Peoples in Latin American States. David Maybury-Lewis, ed., pp. 267-306. Cambridge: Harvard Univeristy Press.

Courses

In the Amazon: Indigenous Peoples and the Politics of Nature (L48 111)
Indigenous Peoples and Movements in Latin America (L48 3092)
American Indians and American Empire (L98 395)
Anthropology of Latin America (L48 3093)
Oil Wars: America and the Cultural Politics of Global Energy (L48 4244)
Anthropology of Development (L48 4517)
Culture, Power, and the State (L48 4361)
Social Movements (L48 4242)
In the Field: Ethnographic Research Methods (L48 4452)