Bolivia's troubled efforts to develop a commercial lithium industry.Bolivia's lithium accounts for a significant percentage of the world's known reserve. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Mark Goodale traces the development of Bolivia's closely guarded lithium project through the perspectives of a wide array of people and institutions, including workers at the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat; the state lithium company in La Paz; Latin Americ...

The years between 2006 and 2015, during which Evo Morales became Bolivia's first indigenous president, have been described as a time of democratic and cultural revolution, world renewal (Pachakuti), reconstituted neoliberalism, or simply “the process of change.” In A Revolution in Fragments Mark Goodale unpacks these various analytical and ideological frameworks to reveal the fragmentary and contested nature of Bolivia's radical experiments in pluralism, ethnic politics, and socio...

Dilemmas of Modernity provides an innovative approach to the study of contemporary Bolivia, moving telescopically between social, political, legal, and discursive analyses, and drawing from a range of disciplinary traditions. Based on a decade of research, it offers an account of local encounters with law and liberalism. Mark Goodale presents, through a series of finely grained readings, a window into the lives of people in rural areas of Latin America who are playing a crucial ro...

A radical vision for the future of human rights as a fundamentally reconfigured framework for global justice.Reinventing Human Rights offers a bold argument: that only a radically reformulated approach to human rights will prove adequate to confront and overcome the most consequential global problems. Charting a new path—away from either common critiques of the various incapacities of the international human rights system or advocacy for the status quo—Mar...

Surrendering to Utopia is a critical and wide-ranging study of anthropology's contributions to human rights. Providing a unique window into the underlying political and intellectual currents that have shaped human rights in the postwar period, this ambitious work opens up new opportunities for research, analysis, and political action. At the book's core, the author describes a "well-tempered human rights"—an orientation to human rights in the twenty-first century that is shaped by...

This remarkable collection of letters reveals the debate over universal human rights. Prominent mid-twentieth-century intellectuals and leaders—including Gandhi, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Arnold Schoenberg—engaged with the question of universal human rights. Letters to the Contrary presents the foundation of the intellectual struggles and ideological doubts still present in today's human rights debates.Since its adoption in 1948, historia...

An introduction to the anthropology of law that explores the connections between law, politics, and technologyFrom legal responsibility for genocide to rectifying past injuries to indigenous people, the anthropology of law addresses some of the crucial ethical issues of our day. Over the past twenty-five years, anthropologists have studied how new forms of law have reshaped important questions of citizenship, biotechnology, and rights movements, among many others. ...

Las fosas comunes de nuestra larga historia humana de genocidio, masacres y conflictos violentos, forman un mapa subterráneo de la atrocidad que se extiende a través de la superficie del planeta. En las últimas décadas, el estudio científico de esas fosas se ha transformado en una faceta estándar de la asistencia internacional posterior al conflicto. En busca de los desaparecidos les brinda a los lectores una ventana a esta forma creciente pero poco conocida de trabajo de derechos humanos,...

In the 1980s and 1990s, neoliberal forms of governance largely dominated Latin American political and social life. Neoliberalism, Interrupted examines the recent and diverse proliferation of responses to neoliberalism's hegemony. In so doing, this vanguard collection of case studies undermines the conventional dichotomies used to understand transformation in this region, such as neoliberalism vs. socialism, right vs. left, indigenous vs. mestizo, and national vs. transnational.

This is a fascinating overview of music's intriguing and enduring relationship with the dark side. Much of the music discussed in Gathering Of The Tribe deals with the special power of sound and tone. Frank Zappa may have said that ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture,’ but this book explains how music can - or for a moment believed it could - move mountains. It is a matter of record that over the centuries composers and musicians have been consistently inspired by the...

It is clear that landscapes have long inspired the consciousness of creative artists. By way of quick introduction to the links between music and territories, the 1977 KPM 1191 library music LP features a suite of pieces with titles such as ‘Country Lanes’, ‘Passing Meadows’ and ‘Memory Lane’ composed by Johnny Pearson to express the different aspects of (mostly rural) landscapes. The pieces are interesting as they try to capture an immersive experience of being in a land by using sound. T...

The writer, musician and curator Tot Taylor observed that the word ‘ritual’ is already present in the word ‘spiritual’. This combination of material practice and the transcendent can be found within the strange combination of records discussed in this volume. With music, one can transpose imagination, visions and dreams into ‘sacred rites’. ‘Heavy conscious creation’, the theme of this series, embodies the realisation of occult and esoteric ideas through artistic expression, in this case s...