After Servitude: Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia

Injurious pasts are redeployed by the dispossessed by demanding aid from Mestizo elites and through acts of labor militancy. This vision of justice is grounded in popular demands that wealth remain beholden to the regions agrarian past.

Format: Hardback
Length: 352 pages
Publication date: 28 June 2022
Publisher: University of California Press

After Servitude delves into the intricate dynamics of racial hierarchies within the context of agrarian engineering, Indigenous farmers, Mestizo mining bosses, and rural workers. In the rural Bolivian province of Ayopaya, where the promises of liberation from forced agrarian labor remain elusive, the Quechua people confront these hierarchies by seeking assistance from Mestizo elites, resorting to labor militancy when necessary. Challenging the institutional belief in property ownership as a means to detach land from people and erase the past, the kin of former masters and servants assert that ethical debts stemming from historical racial violence transcend epochs and formal land sales. What emerges is a vision of justice that is firmly rooted in the demands of the region's agrarian past, emphasizing the need for wealth to remain accountable to the legacy of its agricultural heritage. Through her meticulous exploration of Ayopayans' active efforts to confront the long-lasting effects of servitude, Mareike Winchell sheds light on the complexities that property encounters as both an extractive paradigm and a tool for historical redress.

Weight: 544g
Dimension: 229 x 152 x 25 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780520386433