Papers by Tathagatan Ravindran
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2024
Twenty-first century Bolivia witnessed indigenous resurgence and state
promotion of indigenous la... more Twenty-first century Bolivia witnessed indigenous resurgence and state
promotion of indigenous languages. This article ethnographically examines the impact of these processes on indigenous language revitalization and ethnolinguistic identities in urban spaces. It reveals that language attrition continues because indigenous resurgence occurred at a time when language shift from Aymara to Spanish had already occurred in most households and schools were considered the spaces for learning Aymara. Moreover, although indigenous identity continues to be
linked to language, linguistic proficiency no longer determines Aymara identity in a reductionist sense. Most contemporary Aymaras deploy a rhetoric that historically contextualizes the process of language attrition, thereby, asserting an antiessentialist ethnolinguistic identity. This enables learning Aymara to be an aspiration that is highly valued but can be endlessly postponed. The article points out the limitations of state-led language revitalization policies and calls for creating synergies between state planning from above and communitarian initiatives from below.
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2020
The port-city of Buenaventura (in the Colombian Pacific coast) is at the center of national and i... more The port-city of Buenaventura (in the Colombian Pacific coast) is at the center of national and international geopolitical interest as "the capital of the Pacific Alliance", a US$ 3 trillion trade bloc formed by Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Peru to advance regional integration and cross-pacific trade. At the same time, the city is also known for extraordinary levels of gruesome violence, dismembered dead bodies that now and then appear floating in the low-tide area of port-expansion being its most visible aspect. In this article, we ask: How is racial terror tied to such a promising future for capitalist development? How can we theorize the dynamics of capital's flow, economic expansion and global integration in this Fanonian zone of nonbeing? To answer these questions, we first analyze the colonial geography of this predominantly Black port-city as well as its place in the geographic imaginary of Colombia. Then, in dialogue with literature on multiple dimensions of racial capitalism and structural antiblackness such as racialized surplus populations and social death, we analyze some spatial dynamics that dialectically produce Buenaventura simultaneously as a dystopic and a value-producing spatiality that Racial Capitalism 188 repositions Colombia in the global economy. Finally, borrowing from Rhonda Williams' analysis of racialized dispossession as "accumulation-as-evisceration," we provide some reflection on the racially-driven eviscerating politics of capitalmaking in this port-city as it relates to current global geopolitics as well as to lasting antiblack injustices in Colombia and beyond.
Economic and Political Weekly, 2022
Against the backdrop of a long history of armed confl ict between the left guerrillas on the one ... more Against the backdrop of a long history of armed confl ict between the left guerrillas on the one hand and the state and right-wing paramilitary forces on the other, the repressive machinery of the Colombian state, the oligarchy and the fact of Colombia being the staunchest ally of the United States in the region, the electoral victory of the left represents a great shift in the Colombian political land scape and the political common sense of the Colombian people.
Successive Indian governments as well as the globalizing Indian elites continue to be enthralled ... more Successive Indian governments as well as the globalizing Indian elites continue to be enthralled by the hopes of high modernity and development which neoliberal policies generate. Nevertheless, neoliberalism has been opposed by Indian left parties as well as social movements. While the traditional left critique has been based on Marxism, some social movements have been inspired by alternative/postdevelopment currents of various hues, which has triggered conflicts between the former and the latter. However, this tension is not unique to India. Rather, frictions between these two alternative projects to neoliberalism have come to the fore in many parts of the globe. In this context, the chapter reads post-neoliberal possibilities in India in light of other experiences in the Global South, especially Latin America, and discusses the lessons the Latin American experience could offer to Indian scholars and activists engaged in imagining and constructing alternatives to hegemonic neoliber...
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 2021
Anti-Indigenous racism has predominantly been understood in Latin America through the lens of cul... more Anti-Indigenous racism has predominantly been understood in Latin America through the lens of culture, epistemology, and embodied nonphenotypical traits. Phenotypebased discrimination is an underemphasized aspect of race in the region, especially in spaces with a high Indigenous population. This article ethnographically captures the distinct forms in which Indigenous people are racialized for phenotypical traits in Andean Bolivia, with a special focus on three interrelated spheres: the labor market, everyday social interactions, and intimate relations/kinship. It reveals how phenotype-based racialization generates representations, structures access to resources, and influences processes of socioeconomic mobility. Moreover, the fluidity of systems of racial classification in Latin America leads to phenotype-based discrimination receding in some contexts but resurfacing in others, thereby making it more formidable. The article also highlights the intersection of race and gender in the pigmentocratic structuring of the social order. [Bolivia, racism, pigmentocracy, indigeneity, intersectionality]
Las nuevas derechas: un desafio para las democracias actuales, 2020
Economic and Political Weekly, 2020
After being ousted in a civic-military coup, the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party came back... more After being ousted in a civic-military coup, the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party came back to power in Bolivia in the elections held in October 2020. The coup had installed an extreme right wing regime that tried to restore the most rabid form of racial neoliberalism in an unabashedly dictatorial fashion. The article shows that the return of the Left to power in Bolivia is a product of the role played by social movement organizations of workers, peasants and indigenous people in organizing militant resistance to the usurpation of power by the extreme right wing forces in the country. It also outlines the major challenges the new President elect Luis Arce Catacora faces in a country whose economy is in dire straits and the implications of the frictions that have appeared between the MAS and the social movements that brought it to power.
City, 2020
Bolivian urban spaces witnessed dramatic racialized power struggles in the context of the ouster ... more Bolivian urban spaces witnessed dramatic racialized power struggles in the context of the ouster of the indigenous President Evo Morales in a coup in November 2019 and the current lockdown of the country due to the coronavirus pandemic. Repression of indigenous protests against the usurpation of power by racist extreme right-wing forces led to massacres, forced disappearances and severe human rights violations. Furthermore, the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic intensified the process of racist stigmatization as urban indigenous sectors were vilified as a threat to the lives of white-mestizo middle class citizens. Besides examining the impacts of anti-indigenous structural racism on the vulnerabilities of Bolivian indigenous people in the context of the pandemic outbreak, this article also highlights the forms in which the pandemic is turned into an opportunity by racist political forces to intensify racial stigmatization of indigenous people. By showing the striking continuities between the racial terror inflicted on indigenous people after the usurpation of power by extreme right wing forces in 2019 and the stigmatization of the same social sectors in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, this article underlines how the abandonment and stigmatization of indigenous people during the pandemic, rather than being an aberration, is yet another manifestation of long term historical processes underlying colonialism, indigenous dispossession, and deracination. In response, indigenous activists produced alternative narratives and policy proposals to counter those of the state and the dominant society, (re)imagining the city in the process. This article examines the implications of these urban spatial struggles in dialog with an interdisciplinary body of literature on racialized urban geographies and the relationship between the biopolitical and the necropolitical.
Economic and Political Weekly, 2020
Some characteristics of the
contemporary phase of global
neo-liberalism in light of the
recent co... more Some characteristics of the
contemporary phase of global
neo-liberalism in light of the
recent coup organised by the
extreme right-wing forces
in Bolivia against the leftist
President Evo Morales in 2019
are examined. Despite having
minuscule popular support, the
backing of the armed forces
and United States imperialism
emboldened the post-coup
government to aggressively
restore neo-liberal policies in an
unabashedly dictatorial fashion.
The coup in Bolivia becomes a
paradigmatic case that highlights
how neo-liberalism as a
political–economic doctrine
continues to articulate
with racism and religious
fundamentalism to establish and
maintain its dominance.
Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 2020
While Bolivia grabbed global attention at the turn of the new
millennium for militant indigenous ... more While Bolivia grabbed global attention at the turn of the new
millennium for militant indigenous mobilizations, the second decade of the 21st century witnessed the deepening of conflicts
between different indigenous sectors. In addition to provoking
heated debates on what it means to be indigenous, this has raised
questions on the utility of the concept of indigeneity as it has been
understood thus far to analyze the new political dynamics. In
response to these processes and the analytical challenges they
present, this article maps out the existing currents in Bolivian
indigenous politics, their mutual disagreements, the meanings
they give to indigeneity, and their impact on the politics of the
Morales government and its critics. It argues that there are two
distinct indigenous visions with different political agendas and
priorities: a ‘revivalist’ current that focuses on the restoration of
ancestral cosmovisions and represents the dominant canon, and
an ‘expansionist’ current that prioritizes the struggle against structural racism and gives expression to a new tendency in Latin
American indigenous politics. The article is based on nearly two
years of ethnographic research in the city of El Alto.
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2019
This article deals with the continuities and changes in the racial dynamics of Andean Bolivia in ... more This article deals with the continuities and changes in the racial dynamics of Andean Bolivia in the context of dramatic transformations the country has witnessed since the beginning of this century. It departs from the idea that Andean racial formations are characterized by a constant alternation between multiple classificatory logics, which introduces ambiguity and undecidability in racial discourses. It argues that it is this undecidability of the racial that maintains racial hegemony. The article then goes on to analyze the implications of the process of indigenous resurgence Andean Bolivia witnessed in the twenty first century for durable structures of racial privilege and racialized everyday social relations. It reveals that though this process posed a frontal challenge to white-mestizo racial hegemony, the undecidable character of the racial contributes to a perpetuation of subtle forms of
internalized racism and enduring structural racism.
Antipode, 2019
: This article examines racial power struggles in Bolivia through a spatial lens. It analyses the... more : This article examines racial power struggles in Bolivia through a spatial lens. It analyses the process of resistance to the oligarchic elites mounted by indigenous-popular sectors in Bolivia in the first decade of the 21st century as well as the subsequent eruption of conflicts between different indigenous sectors, and argues that political conflicts in Bolivia in the 21st century are, among other things, also conflicts over spatial
imaginaries and the different territorialising and (re)territorialising projects corresponding to them. Social movements against racial neoliberalism challenged the colonial spatial imaginary. The partial success of those struggles brought into relief two distinct
indigenous spatial imaginaries, one rooted in the defence of ancestral territory and indigenous autonomy, and the other based on a redefinition of territoriality as centrality within the state and society at large. The article reads contemporary inter-indigenous conflicts as manifestations of the differences between these two spatial imaginaries.
This article explores the various forms in which indigenous practices and worldviews articulate w... more This article explores the various forms in which indigenous practices and worldviews articulate with the modern, leading to the formation of a distinct indigenous modernity. It reveals that the construction of indigeneity in terms of purity and distance from the modern is being challenged by urban Aymaras (indigenous people of the Andean region of South America) who affi rm their Aymara identity without enacting purity. This explains why modernizing and developmentalist assumptions are part of their discourse of indigenous liberation. This new indigenous political discourse stands in tension with a postdevelopmentalist indigenous politics, which is the product of a different engagement with modernity. Different encounters with colonialism and modernity have created multiple indigenous modernities with contradictory perspectives on indigenous political liberation and well-being. The article is a product of 22 months of ethnographic research in the city of El Alto between 2010 and 2014 that included participant observation in multiple neighborhoods of El Alto, 85 semistructured interviews and 5 focus groups.
The port-city of Buenaventura (in the Colombian Pacific coast) is at the center of national and i... more The port-city of Buenaventura (in the Colombian Pacific coast) is at the center of national and international geopolitical interest as “the capital of the Pacific Alliance”, a US$ 3 trillion trade bloc formed by Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Peru to advance regional integration and cross-pacific trade. At the same time, the city is also known for extraordinary levels of gruesome violence, dismembered dead bodies floating in the low-tide area of port-expansion being its most visible aspect. In this article, we ask: How is racial terror tied to such a promising future for capitalist development? How can we theorize the dynamics of capital’s flow, economic expansion and global integration in this Fanonian zone of nonbeing? To answer these questions, we first analyze the colonial geography of this predominantly Black port-city as well as its place in the geographic imaginary of Colombia. Then, in dialogue with literature on multiple dimensions of racial capitalism and structural antiblack...
Social movements and acts of protest have played significant roles in charting the path of Bolivi... more Social movements and acts of protest have played significant roles in charting the path of Bolivian history. Massive waves of protest against neoliberalism led to the overthrow of two presidents from office and culminated in the victory of Evo Morales. The stability of the Morales government stands in stark contrast to the chronic political instability of the neoliberal era. This paper deals with the paradox of the persistence of acts of protest all over Bolivia and the stability of the political regime of Evo Morales. The paradox is explained through the use of the distinction between populist and institutionalist politics made by Ernesto Laclau. Politics in the neoliberal era was populist, where society was divided into two opposed camps through the construction of a 'people' against the regime. The era after the election of Evo Morales is characterized by institutionalist politics where each political demand is separately and unevenly absorbed into the system. The potential of acts of protest to cause political transformations at various levels depends on their ability to construct a hegemonic chain of equivalence against the system, and the failure to construct it has frustrated efforts to create a more radical alternative to the current government.
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Papers by Tathagatan Ravindran
promotion of indigenous languages. This article ethnographically examines the impact of these processes on indigenous language revitalization and ethnolinguistic identities in urban spaces. It reveals that language attrition continues because indigenous resurgence occurred at a time when language shift from Aymara to Spanish had already occurred in most households and schools were considered the spaces for learning Aymara. Moreover, although indigenous identity continues to be
linked to language, linguistic proficiency no longer determines Aymara identity in a reductionist sense. Most contemporary Aymaras deploy a rhetoric that historically contextualizes the process of language attrition, thereby, asserting an antiessentialist ethnolinguistic identity. This enables learning Aymara to be an aspiration that is highly valued but can be endlessly postponed. The article points out the limitations of state-led language revitalization policies and calls for creating synergies between state planning from above and communitarian initiatives from below.
contemporary phase of global
neo-liberalism in light of the
recent coup organised by the
extreme right-wing forces
in Bolivia against the leftist
President Evo Morales in 2019
are examined. Despite having
minuscule popular support, the
backing of the armed forces
and United States imperialism
emboldened the post-coup
government to aggressively
restore neo-liberal policies in an
unabashedly dictatorial fashion.
The coup in Bolivia becomes a
paradigmatic case that highlights
how neo-liberalism as a
political–economic doctrine
continues to articulate
with racism and religious
fundamentalism to establish and
maintain its dominance.
millennium for militant indigenous mobilizations, the second decade of the 21st century witnessed the deepening of conflicts
between different indigenous sectors. In addition to provoking
heated debates on what it means to be indigenous, this has raised
questions on the utility of the concept of indigeneity as it has been
understood thus far to analyze the new political dynamics. In
response to these processes and the analytical challenges they
present, this article maps out the existing currents in Bolivian
indigenous politics, their mutual disagreements, the meanings
they give to indigeneity, and their impact on the politics of the
Morales government and its critics. It argues that there are two
distinct indigenous visions with different political agendas and
priorities: a ‘revivalist’ current that focuses on the restoration of
ancestral cosmovisions and represents the dominant canon, and
an ‘expansionist’ current that prioritizes the struggle against structural racism and gives expression to a new tendency in Latin
American indigenous politics. The article is based on nearly two
years of ethnographic research in the city of El Alto.
internalized racism and enduring structural racism.
imaginaries and the different territorialising and (re)territorialising projects corresponding to them. Social movements against racial neoliberalism challenged the colonial spatial imaginary. The partial success of those struggles brought into relief two distinct
indigenous spatial imaginaries, one rooted in the defence of ancestral territory and indigenous autonomy, and the other based on a redefinition of territoriality as centrality within the state and society at large. The article reads contemporary inter-indigenous conflicts as manifestations of the differences between these two spatial imaginaries.
promotion of indigenous languages. This article ethnographically examines the impact of these processes on indigenous language revitalization and ethnolinguistic identities in urban spaces. It reveals that language attrition continues because indigenous resurgence occurred at a time when language shift from Aymara to Spanish had already occurred in most households and schools were considered the spaces for learning Aymara. Moreover, although indigenous identity continues to be
linked to language, linguistic proficiency no longer determines Aymara identity in a reductionist sense. Most contemporary Aymaras deploy a rhetoric that historically contextualizes the process of language attrition, thereby, asserting an antiessentialist ethnolinguistic identity. This enables learning Aymara to be an aspiration that is highly valued but can be endlessly postponed. The article points out the limitations of state-led language revitalization policies and calls for creating synergies between state planning from above and communitarian initiatives from below.
contemporary phase of global
neo-liberalism in light of the
recent coup organised by the
extreme right-wing forces
in Bolivia against the leftist
President Evo Morales in 2019
are examined. Despite having
minuscule popular support, the
backing of the armed forces
and United States imperialism
emboldened the post-coup
government to aggressively
restore neo-liberal policies in an
unabashedly dictatorial fashion.
The coup in Bolivia becomes a
paradigmatic case that highlights
how neo-liberalism as a
political–economic doctrine
continues to articulate
with racism and religious
fundamentalism to establish and
maintain its dominance.
millennium for militant indigenous mobilizations, the second decade of the 21st century witnessed the deepening of conflicts
between different indigenous sectors. In addition to provoking
heated debates on what it means to be indigenous, this has raised
questions on the utility of the concept of indigeneity as it has been
understood thus far to analyze the new political dynamics. In
response to these processes and the analytical challenges they
present, this article maps out the existing currents in Bolivian
indigenous politics, their mutual disagreements, the meanings
they give to indigeneity, and their impact on the politics of the
Morales government and its critics. It argues that there are two
distinct indigenous visions with different political agendas and
priorities: a ‘revivalist’ current that focuses on the restoration of
ancestral cosmovisions and represents the dominant canon, and
an ‘expansionist’ current that prioritizes the struggle against structural racism and gives expression to a new tendency in Latin
American indigenous politics. The article is based on nearly two
years of ethnographic research in the city of El Alto.
internalized racism and enduring structural racism.
imaginaries and the different territorialising and (re)territorialising projects corresponding to them. Social movements against racial neoliberalism challenged the colonial spatial imaginary. The partial success of those struggles brought into relief two distinct
indigenous spatial imaginaries, one rooted in the defence of ancestral territory and indigenous autonomy, and the other based on a redefinition of territoriality as centrality within the state and society at large. The article reads contemporary inter-indigenous conflicts as manifestations of the differences between these two spatial imaginaries.