After Servitude: Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia by Mareike Winchell (review)

A mid global Land Back movements and Indigenous assertions of sovereignty in the face of settler colonialism, Mareike Winchell’s After Servitude examines the ongoing struggle to achieve justice in the wake of colonial violence and Indigenous dispossession in Bolivia. Following the election of Evo Morales in 2005, Bolivia’s Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party re-centered land reform as a means to redress the legacies of racialized servitude epitomized by the country’s former hacienda system. Those efforts built on revolutionary and reformist projects dating back to the early 20^th century, which sought to end the unpaid, obligatory servitude known as pongueaje that pervaded large rural estates, alongside other racial and often sexual exploitations that accompanied hierarchical labor relations between Indigenous, white, and mestizo Bolivians (Anthias 2021, Fabricant 2012, Soliz 2021). The Morales Administration framed its iteration of land reform as part of a broader decolonizing platform bent on responding to Indigenous demands and breaking with both a colonial past and neoliberal present. Yet, as Winchell shows in After Servitude, Morales-era land titling projects shared foundational assumptions with Liberal (Lockean) framings of emancipation as something best achieved through property ownership and as a means to secure mastery over oneself as a modern, autonomous citizen, threatening to eclipse other ways of being in relation with the land and each other.

Given the centrality of land to so many movements for reparation, Winchell was surprised to find that many of the presumed beneficiaries of these Morales-era policy agendas frequently expressed skepticism about state-led individual and collective land titling in the rural Cochabamba valleys where she conducted fieldwork. Much like Audra Simpson (2014) before her, then, Winchell asks how we are to interpret this refusal of the gift of property offered by the state—even a progressive one. Winchell argues that for many of the rural Ayopayans she met, the state’s approach to redressing a violent history relied on the abstraction of both property and indigeneity in ways that failed to take seriously living practices of relating to the land, people, and non-human earth beings connected through it—including enduring relations between formerly-bonded laborers, hacienda masters, and their descendants. When those ways of relating were legible to mestizo reformers, government officials, and frontline Indigenous activists, they often found these relational bonds to be deeply disturbing hold-overs from a racist, exploitative past—a past state-backed decolonial projects were meant to overcome. Throughout After Servitude, Winchell wrestles with those uncomfortable yet persistent asymmetrical attachments and the many ways other residents of Ayopaya wrestle with them, too.

One of the book’s many strengths is its ability to hold together diverging interpretations of both untenable and right relations and how those perceptions and practices are both gendered and sexualized. After Servitude asks us to take seriously Ayopayan recourse to asymmetrical aid relations as one means for achieving accountability for the racial-sexual violence of hacienda labor exploitation and its afterlives. Ayopayans, in this way, Winchell argues, labor to rework the forms of intimacy and authority produced through the hacienda system—including through rape and bonded labor—and to insist on holding mestizo elites accountable for the legacies of that servitude. By sustaining those asymmetrical relations in the present, Winchell argues, Ayopanas refuse to decouple contemporary sources of wealth and authority from the violence and exploitation of the past.

Across six chapters, Winchell explores intersecting tensions between hacienda-era forms of exchange and state efforts to produce bounded property through legal titling; claims and counterclaims to indigeneity and belonging; ongoing critiques about what constitutes legitimate authority and its relationship to both place and the past; and, centrally, the long afterlives of asymmetrical aid relations forged during the hacienda era and sustained in contemporary discourses of kinship and obligation. Here, I foreground three key ways in which Winchell furthers ongoing conversations in anthropology around property, Indigenous sovereignty, and kinship.

This final point is...