Dr Mareike Winchell (LSE)
Ghostly Invasions: Political Theologies of Fire in Post-Coup Bolivia
Massive wildfires erupted across Bolivia only months before the violent ousting of the country's first Indigenous president, Evo Morales Ayma, in 2019. Media critics depicted his mainly-Indigenous followers as ghostly "invaders" who, having received property through his government, were using fires to clear land for agriculture. This talk approaches these events as points of insight into the racialization of climate politics. Along with examining how environmental values were seized by the far-Right to eject Morales, I also trace a set of grounded collaborations among Indigenous migrants and lowland Indigenous organizers who are elaborating a conservation compatible both with anti-colonial land redistribution and climate justice. Renewed attention to what I term political theologies of fire—both as longstanding liberal anxieties with evaporating political and geographic boundary lines in late capitalism and as vernacular paradigms of virtue, redemption, and more-than-human care—at play in these scenes of destruction complicate narratives of climate change as an exceptional or emergent phenomenon to which science alone can respond. If fire frequently arises as a symptom of the end-times (waning democracy, global environmental crisis, and self-devouring capitalism) among Chiquitos activists and environmental organizers it also acts as a redemptive force by which to contest settler fantasies of empty environments and of a future that requires the erasure—the expelling—of Indigenous migrants as living ghosts.
https://lse.academia.edu/MareikeWinchell
Recent publications:
2023. "Alterable geographies: In/humanity, emancipation, and the spatial poetics of Lo Abigarrado in Bolivia." Critical Times 6(2): 271-288. https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-10437057
2023. "Critical ontologies: Rethinking relations to other-than-humans from the Bolivian Andes." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 29(3). https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.13962
2023. “Climates of anti-blackness: Religion, race, and environmental politics in Bolivia.” Canopy Forum: On the Interactions of Law and Religion. https://canopyforum.org/2023/06/06/climates-of-anti-blackness-religion-race-and-environmental-politics-in-bolivia/ June 6th, 2023.
2023. “Racial property: From colonial theft to Indigenous reparation in Bolivia.” Terrain: Anthropologie & Sciences Humaines. https://blogterrain.hypotheses.org/20230
2022. "Fields of Commitment: Research entanglements beyond predation." Postmodern Culture 33(1). https://muse.jhu.edu/article/915391
2022. After Servitude: Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia. Oakland: University of California Press. https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520386440/after-servitude