Raising the roof in the transnational Andes: building houses, forging kinship

Leinaweaver, Jessaca B.

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9655.2009.01584.x

Cited by 48 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…In the Andean context, one way that relatedness is produced and reaffirmed is through the material construction of homes and codwelling, as well as accompanying events like roof‐raising and ch'alla libation celebrations of homes recently completed. As Jessaca Leinaweaver notes (, 789), in the Andes, “key life events are marked in the inhabitants’ relationship to the house . .…”

Section: Making and Breaking Homes In El Altomentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, homes are fraught sites of inequality, particularly as their inhabitants pursue the powerful notion of “social betterment” ( superación ). Through the transformation of the house, “ethnic and class hierarchies implied in the distinction between rustic adobe and ‘noble’ cement are echoed in other architectural forms and domestic practices” (Leinaweaver , 785; Colloredo‐Mansfeld ).…”

Section: Making and Breaking Homes In El Altomentioning

confidence: 99%

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Painted by Default: Public Shaming and Graffiti on the Homefront

Ellison

2019

American Anthropologist

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Across El Alto, Bolivia, a particular kind of graffiti stands out on the walls of household compounds: startling letters proclaiming deudor moroso (defaulting debtor). These public accusations of insolvency join other expressions of households in crisis, disrupting any imagined public/private boundary between city streets and homes that are charged moral, material, and social configurations. As I show, defaulting debtor graffiti spatializes loan recovery efforts by implicating a broader constellation of relationships connected through the physical structure of the home and, in that implication, often fractures bonds of relatedness in the process. Yet the graffiti's ambiguous authorship enables those branded to challenge any singular reading of its scrawl. As deudor moroso graffiti enters into the struggle over urban space's inscriptions, it illuminates the ways home space is entangled with public space as a battleground over economic ruin and its meanings. [urban anthropology, graffiti, kinship, debt, microfinance, Bolivia] RESUMEN A través de El Alto, Bolivia, una clase particular de grafiti resalta en las paredes de los complejos residenciales: letras sorprendentes proclamando deudor moroso (deudor incumplido). Estas acusaciones públicas de insolvencia se unen a otras expresiones de hogares en crisis, interrumpiendo cualquier límite público/privado imaginado entre las calles y los hogares de la ciudad que están cargados de configuraciones morales, materiales y sociales. Como muestro, el grafiti de deudor moroso espacializa los esfuerzos para recuperar los préstamos al implicar una constelación más amplia de relaciones conectadas a través de la estructura física del hogar, y en esa implicación, a menudo se fracturan los lazos de relacionalidad en el proceso. Sin embargo, la autoría ambigua del grafiti posibilita que aquellos marcados reten cualquier lectura singular de su escritura irregular. En la medida que el grafiti de deudor moroso entra en la lucha sobre las inscripciones en el espacio urbano, ilumina las formas como el espacio del hogar se entrelaza con el espacio público como un campo de batalla sobre la ruina económica y sus significados.

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Section: Making and Breaking Homes In El Altomentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Making and Breaking Homes In El Altomentioning

confidence: 99%

Painted by Default: Public Shaming and Graffiti on the Homefront

Ellison

2019

American Anthropologist

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“…In Andean contexts, relatedness is not strictly biological but rather is made through processes of co-residence, reciprocity, nurturance, and temporally elongated acts of "growing accustomed" to different households (Lobo 1982;Weismantel 1988;Leinaweaver 2008). Likewise, scholars have shown that contributing to household construction, through physical labor or migrant remittances, reinforces kinship ties and relational identities (Leinaweaver 2009;Pribilsky 2007).…”

Section: Housing the Contingent Life Coursementioning

confidence: 99%

Housing the Contingent Life Course: Domestic Aspiration and Extreme Poverty in Peruvian Shantytowns

Skrabut

2018

City & Society

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Peru's urban peripheries have long been shaped by the intertwining of urban development policies with Peruvians' domestic aspirations. Since the 1960s, different formulations of progressive and self‐help housing policies have relied on and reproduced a domestic life course model in which Peruvians' inexorable progress through the “domestic cycle” is mirrored in the steady transformation of their precarious, unconsolidated shantytown homes into “noble” (modern; concrete) constructions in fully urbanized neighborhoods. While shantytowns partially reflect this predictable life course temporality, they are also shaped by future imaginings and contingent time. People use shantytowns to fulfill ideals of adulthood, autonomy, and success, but also to hedge their bets, retreating from some relations while striving to forge new ones. Drawing on twenty‐one months of fieldwork in Peruvian shantytowns, this article examines informal urban development from a contingent life course perspective to demonstrate how Peru's urban peripheries are embedded in and shaped by Peruvians' efforts to pursue domestic life projects while managing fluctuating kin relations and preparing for uncertain futures.

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“…Sian Lazar () has argued that organizations such as El Alto's FEJUVE are able to effectively mobilize Alteños in large part due to their ability to “construct collective and relational senses of self among their members, against the pull of individual interests and factional conflicts” (4). Lazar and other Andean anthropologists emphasize the ritualized and embodied practices of dance, godparenting, rumor, gossip, libation dedications, and the circulation of concepts such as ayni (reciprocal collective labor relations) and obligation in producing and reproducing these “collective” understandings of the self (Abercrombie ; Leinaweaver ; Van Vleet ). Yet, as Andrew Orta () insists, such “solidarity” cannot be presupposed but rather “requires explicit effort” (484).…”

Section: La Multamentioning

confidence: 99%

Replicate, Facilitate, Disseminate: The Micropolitics of U.S. Democracy Promotion in Bolivia

Ellison

2015

PoLAR

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Replicate, Facilitate, Disseminate: The Micropolitics of U.S. Democracy Promotion in Bolivia In the wake of a massive 2003 uprising in El Alto, Bolivia, U.S. democracy assistance programs targeted the city, promising to address Alteños' frustration with democratic institutions and to teach deliberative democratic skills. In this article I examine the position of civic education "replicators." I use this term to describe people from the city of El Alto-many of them young adults-who were trained by U.S. democracy assistance programs to promote renewed and rehabilitated democratic practices among Alteños. I consider what the position of replicators reveals about the governance technologies, aid ideologies, and objectives of U.S. democracypromotion programs. I argue that despite these programs' emphasis on producing subjects who are "governable," replicators are engaged in complex negotiations regarding the form and content of democracy assistance programs, and many continue to enact political practices that donor representatives frequently characterize as outmoded, illiberal, and antidemocratic. Through the experiences of replicators, we learn that liberal democratic concepts, practices, and subjectivities are already mediated and refracted through lived histories and sociopolitical affiliations of the very people tasked with their duplication and spread. Attending to the microdynamics of replication exposes how that repetition itself helps create the conditions under which replicators come to question their endeavors and to articulate understandings of democracy that incorporate practices donors would likely reject. [democracy, foreign aid, political subjectivity, NGOs, Bolivia]In October 2003, thousands of residents of the city of El Alto laid siege to Bolivia's adjacent seat of government, La Paz. Although the flashpoint of the uprising was the export of Bolivia's natural gas supplies, the popular protests expressed a deeper dissatisfaction with neoliberal economic development policies and the state of democratic institutions in the country (Arbona and Kohl 2004;Kohl and Farthing 2006;Lazar 2008). Within days, La Paz was effectively cut off from the rest of the country. 1 Airlines stopped running. Food shortages stripped the markets bare. The conjoined cities ran out of cooking gas and gasoline, and even the wounded and dead had to be wheel-barrowed to makeshift hospitals or morgues. Alteños did not lift the siege until Bolivian President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada fled the country for Miami, Florida, and his vice president, Carlos Mesa, assumed power.

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Raising the roof in the transnational Andes: building houses, forging kinship

Cited by 48 publications

References 32 publications

Painted by Default: Public Shaming and Graffiti on the Homefront

Painted by Default: Public Shaming and Graffiti on the Homefront

Housing the Contingent Life Course: Domestic Aspiration and Extreme Poverty in Peruvian Shantytowns

Replicate, Facilitate, Disseminate: The Micropolitics of U.S. Democracy Promotion in Bolivia

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