Spectacular City

Goldstein Daniel M. Goldstein

Description

Since the Bolivian revolution in 1952, migrants have come to the city of Cochabamba, seeking opportunity and relief from rural poverty. They have settled in barrios on the city's outskirts only to find that the rights of citizens-basic rights of property and security, especially protection from crime-are not available to them. In this ethnography, Daniel M. Goldstein considers the significance of and similarities between two kinds of spectacles-street festivals and the vigilante lynching of criminals-as they are performed in the Cochabamba barrio of Villa Pagador. By examining folkloric festivals and vigilante violence within the same analytical framework, Goldstein shows how marginalized urban migrants, shut out of the city and neglected by the state, use performance to assert their national belonging and to express their grievances against the inadequacies of the state's official legal order.During the period of Goldstein's fieldwork in Villa Pagador in the mid-1990s, residents attempted to lynch several thieves and attacked the police who tried to intervene. Since that time, there have been hundreds of lynchings in the poor barrios surrounding Cochabamba. Goldstein presents the lynchings of thieves as a form of horrific performance, with elements of critique and political action that echo those of local festivals. He explores the consequences and implications of extralegal violence for human rights and the rule of law in the contemporary Andes. In rich detail, he provides an in-depth look at the development of Villa Pagador and of the larger metropolitan area of Cochabamba, illuminating a contemporary Andean city from both microethnographic and macrohistorical perspectives. Focusing on indigenous peoples' experiences of urban life and their attempts to manage their sociopolitical status within the broader context of neoliberal capitalism and political decentralization, The Spectacular City highlights the deep connections between performance, law, violence, and the state.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Cultural studies
• Bolivia

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 18 août 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822386018
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

V I O L E N C E A N D

P E R F O R M A N C E I N

U R B A N B O L I V I A

Daniel M. Goldstein

TheSpectacularCity

the spectacular city

฀    ฀ ฀ ฀  

Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations

Series editors: Walter D. Mignolo, Duke University;

Irene Silverblatt, Duke University; Sonia Saldívar-Hull,

University of California, Los Angeles

The Spectacular City

Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia

d a n i e l m . g o l d s t e i n

Duke University Press

Durham and London 2004

∫2004 Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$ Designed by Rebecca Gimenez. Typeset in Minion by Keystone Typesetting. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data appear on the last printed page of this book.

for claire

∞

≤

≥

∂

∑

Contents

About the Series, ix

Acknowledgments, xi

Introduction: Becoming Visible in Neoliberal Bolivia, 1

Ethnography, Governmentality, and Urban Life, 29

Urbanism, Modernity, and Migration in Cochabamba, 53

Villa Sebastián Pagador and the Politics of Community, 90

Performing National Culture in the Fiesta de San Miguel, 134

Spectacular Violence and Citizen Security, 179

Conclusion: Theaters of Memory and the Violence of Citizenship, 215

Notes, 225

References, 239

Index, 265

About the Series

Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nationsis a critical series. It aims to explore the emergence and consequences of concepts used to define ‘‘Latin America’’ while at the same time exploring the broad interplay of political, economic, and cultural practices that have shaped Latin American worlds. Latin America, at the crossroads of competing imperial designs and local responses, has been construed as a geocul- tural and geopolitical entity since the nineteenth century. This series provides a starting point to redefine Latin America as a configuration of political, linguistic, cultural, and economic intersections that demands a continuous reappraisal of the role of the Americas in history, and of the ongoing process of globalization and the relocation of people and cul- tures that have characterized Latin America’s experience.Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nationsis a forum that confronts estab- lished geocultural constructions, that rethinks area studies and disci- plinary boundaries, that assesses convictions of the academy and of public policy, and that, correspondingly, demands that the practices through which we produce knowledge and understanding about and from Latin America be subject to rigorous and critical scrutiny. Daniel Goldstein’sThe Spectacular City bears witness to the social decay provoked by neoliberal reforms and the public response of Bo- livia’s poor, rural immigrants to the city of Cochabamba. Through fig- ures of performance and spectacle, Goldstein takes us to the profoundly creative—and often profoundly disturbing—rejoinders of these urban