Daniel Goldstein, "Indigenous Justice and the Migrant Community in Bolivia"

Daniel Goldstein is a professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Dr. Goldstein is the author of The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia (Duke, 2004) and co-editor (with Desmond Arias) of Violent Democracies in Latin America (Duke, 2010). A political and legal anthropologist, he studies the effects of political democratization, economic globalization, and the law on poor, indigenous residents of a Bolivian city, exploring the often unintended consequences of global processes for the daily lives of these people. He is concerned with questions of security, human rights, and social justice for marginalized urban people in Latin America. He is currently working on two research projects in Cochabamba. One focuses on problems of insecurity for urban residents, and the conflicts that arise when the quest to make "security" clashes with transnational discourses of "human rights." The second project involves legal and illegal market vendors in the Cancha, Cochabamba’s huge outdoor market; it compares the security concerns of these two groups of vendors, to explore the consequences for people deemed "illegal" as they try to make a living in the city’s enormous informal economy.This paper interrogates the basic concepts encountered in the public discourse about community justice in Bolivia, namely the meanings of "indigenous," "original peasant community," and "community justice" itself - concepts which take on complex and unexpected meanings in the context of rural-to-urban migration.Co-sponsored by Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshops