Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian City by Daniel M. Goldstein (review)

The Latin Americanist, December 2013 registered in Quito’s Sanidad who were no longer working as prostitutes or others or who claimed were mistakenly entered on the registry chose to challenge their immoral and illegitimate status. To do so, these women relied on networks of men who could vouch for their respectability and honor. These men represented a form of social capital for these women. Like former prostitutes, women who entered Quito’s midwifery or nursing program needed to prove their good conduct and often provided letters from respectable men, former or current employers, neighbors, relatives, etc. These fascinating instances show that women in Ecuador actively engaged with existing power structures and manipulated them for their own benefit. Clark relies on institutional records from the Servicio de Sanidad, the Junta de Beneficencia, the Hospital San Juan de Dios, the Escuela Nacional de Enfermeras, and oral sources from women who received training and employment from state institutions. These records give Clark insight into how state projects tried to modernize women, turning them into objects of state intervention through child welfare and anti-venereal disease campaigns while opening spaces for them to participate in the making of the state, through their professional training as scientific midwives (obstetrices ) and nurses. The women in Clark’s narrative negotiated their positions and pressed the limits of the Ecuadorian state. It was precisely in these spaces between experience, agency, and structure where Clark argues the state was formed. Clark’s narrative allows us to see the formation of the Ecuadorian state as a process, through everyday practices that included various social groups and embodied different perspectives. The use of institutional records and oral sources allows Clark to show fissures between state policies, and lived experience. Gender, State, and Medicine in Highland Ecuador is an important book. It is clearly written, and rigorously researched. Clark’s focus on Quito opens up new lines of research for scholars interested in examining similarities or differences with the experience of women in cities like Guayaquil, or Ecuador’s rural areas. Finally, the development of studies on gender, medicine, and the state in the Andes, particularly in countries like Ecuador, Bolivia, and Colombia provides fruitful points of comparisons with Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina for which a larger body of Anglophone literature exists. Hanni Jalil Department of History University of California, Santa Barbara OUTLAWED: BETWEEN SECURITY AND RIGHTS IN A BOLIVIAN CITY. By Daniel M. Goldstein. Durham: Duke UP, 2012, p. 327, $24.95. In Outlawed, Daniel Goldstein presents us with a complex anthropological study centered on life in the poor, marginal barrios of Cochabamba, 144 Book Reviews Bolivia. It is his second book on this topic, following The Spectacular City (2004). Although Outlawed is an ethnography based on fieldwork with participant observation, traditional ethnographic description occupies only about forty percent of the text. The remainder is roughly forty percent theory and engagement with other literature, and twenty percent discussion of the personal role of the anthropologist. Each of the three elements contributes something to make Outlawed a valuable, if somewhat disjointed, work. Reference to the people of the barrios is the one thread that unifies an otherwise disparate series of chapters organized primarily around the theoretical themes of security, engaged or activist anthropology, community justice, and human rights. In the first chapter, Goldstein puts the lives of barrio residents into the context of security, a common international concern since 9/11, and explains how their lives are made insecure by the lack of legal title to the land, by the lack of police protection and other city services, by the threat of robbery, and by the overall shrinkage of state aid to the populace in the Neoliberal era. In their lack of legal protection, then, barrio residents are “outlawed.” The actual description of barrio life drawn from fieldwork does not begin until the second chapter, which is the most personal and in some ways, the most useful. Goldstein explains how he tried to give something back to the subjects of his research, first by helping found an NGO to serve the poor barrios, and then by leading students on service learning trips to help construct a community center. He frankly discusses...