Penelope Anthias | Durham University (original) (raw)

Papers by Penelope Anthias

Antipode, 2024

Indigenous Peoples are gaining renewed attention within both policy and academia, as examples of ... more Indigenous Peoples are gaining renewed attention within both policy and academia, as examples of "resilience" and of non-humanist, non-modern ways of relating to nature, which might, it is hoped, provide tools to withstand the socio-ecological crises associated with "the Anthropocene". This paper argues that such representations obscure both their own colonial foundations and the ongoing forms of racialised dispossession and ecocide faced by Indigenous Peoples today. Instead, we conceptualise indigeneity and nature as deeply entangled categories that are co-produced with capitalist modernity. Engaging anti-colonial and Marxist scholarship, and drawing on our long-term research with Indigenous movements in Bolivia and Colombia, we highlight how discursive and material assemblages of indigeneity and nature are dialectically linked to capitalist processes of dispossession and subaltern efforts to contest these. We further highlight how romanticised accounts of non-modern nature-cultures are unsettled by the violent world-making of colonial capitalism and the unequal burdens placed on Indigenous territories and bodies. We use an ethnographic vignette from the Bolivian Chaco to illustrate the messy everyday ways in which real Indigenous people navigate, contest, endure, and make do amidst the contradictory processes of racialisation, dispossession, and conditional recognition that characterise their positioning within colonial capitalism. In doing so, we show how thinking from the sacrifice zones of extractive capitalism unsettles contemporary debates on decolonising nature in the Anthropocene.

Routledge eBooks, Jun 23, 2023

Routledge eBooks, Aug 4, 2023

Dialogues in Human Geography, 2023

In this commentary, I adapt Derickson's (2020) conception of the 'annihilation of time by space' ... more In this commentary, I adapt Derickson's (2020) conception of the 'annihilation of time by space' to reflect on an experience of making a documentary about women-led resistance to hydrocarbon development in Southern Bolivia, where the forging of new spatial knowledges, practices, and relations-or countertopographies of extraction-played a critical role in disrupting fossil futures. I consider what geographers might learn from these women's example about the potentialities of space and materiality for shifting our collective understandings of disciplinary futures through the making of place-specific countertopographies.

Critique of Anthropology, 2019

This paper reflects on the possibilities and limits of participatory mapping as a tool for interr... more This paper reflects on the possibilities and limits of participatory mapping as a tool for interrogating the power–knowledge inequalities that structure indigenous peoples’ engagements with postcolonial state cartography and bureaucracy. I describe mapping activities conducted in a remote Guaraní community in the Bolivian Chaco as part of a research project exploring the dynamics and legacies of Native Community Lands, a national indigenous land titling programme. While these exercises were designed to explore the disjunctures between state and indigenous knowledges of territory, they generated unexpected power dynamics that led me to reflect more deeply on the power of maps, the pitfalls of ‘countermapping’ as an activist practice and my own imbrication in a bureaucratic field of power. The paper concludes that participatory mapping can be a fruitful if ambivalent method for studying state bureaucracy, which demonstrates the value of examining the legal-cartographic knowledges of t...

Latin American Perspectives, 2016

A growing body of literature examines how the rise of “neo-extractivist” states in Latin America ... more A growing body of literature examines how the rise of “neo-extractivist” states in Latin America is reconfiguring the relationship between resources, nation, territory, and citizenship. However, the implications for indigenous territorial projects remain underexplored. Ethnographic research in the Bolivian Chaco reveals the ways in which indigenous territorial projects are becoming implicated in and being reimagined amidst the spatializing struggles of a hydrocarbon state. The tension between indigenous peoples’ desire for inclusion in a hydrocarbon-based national development project and their experiences of dispossession by an expanding hydrocarbon frontier has given rise to competing modes of “hydrocarbon citizenship” in the Guaraní territory Itika Guasu, where a vision of corporate-sponsored indigenous autonomy is pitted against new forms of state-funded development patronage. These dynamics challenge resistance narratives and resource-curse theories, revealing how resources act ...

Geoforum, 2015

Abstract During the 1980s and 1990s, an era of neoliberal reform, global development institutions... more Abstract During the 1980s and 1990s, an era of neoliberal reform, global development institutions like the World Bank began promoting and financing the collective titling of indigenous territories. Extending and linking existing discussions of neoliberal multiculturalism and neoliberal natures, this paper interrogates indigenous land rights as a type of “ethno-environmental fix”, designed to synergise protection of vulnerable populations and highly-valued natures from the destructive effects of markets, in an era of multiple countermovements. Using the example of the titling of TCOs (Original Communal Lands) in Bolivia, the paper explores how governmental aspirations for indigenous territories unravelled in practice, producing hybrid, double-edged and “not-quite-neoliberal” spaces – spaces which have, paradoxically, emerged as key sites for the construction of more radical indigenous projects.

Journal of Latin American Studies, 2022

On 20 November 2016, residents of Gran Chaco Province in southeast Bolivia voted by popular refer... more On 20 November 2016, residents of Gran Chaco Province in southeast Bolivia voted by popular referendum to approve a statute that established Gran Chaco as Bolivia's first autonomous region. This article examines regional autonomy in the Chaco as an example of how identities, territory and political power are being remapped at the intersection of an extractivist development model and competing visions of a plurinational state. I chart how regional autonomy, an elite-led project centred on demands for a fixed share of departmental gas royalties, has been institutionalised under the framework of plurinationalism and used to bolster central state power in this gas-rich region. The article considers the historical evolution of this regionalist project, its intersection with broader processes of state formation under the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement towards Socialism, MAS) government and its implications for the Chaco's Indigenous peoples, who have achieved significant representation within the regional assembly while seeing their own visions of territorial autonomy sidelined by an extractivist development agenda.

Geoforum, 2020

"Ethnic territories" were a central political technology of colonial rule, which also shaped stra... more "Ethnic territories" were a central political technology of colonial rule, which also shaped strategies of anti-colonial resistance in diverse contexts. Today, in former colonies, the making of ethnic territories remains a key site of both governmentality and political struggle. This Special Issue brings together six ethnographic case studies (from Argentina, Bolivia, Cambodia, DR Congo, Paraguay and Peru) to explore how discourses of eth-nicity and territory are combined and deployed in various technologies of government and resistance-from colonial native policies, to land titling programs, to struggles for territorial self-rule and recognition. In this Introduction, we set out an analytical approach to understanding the contemporary nexus between ethnicity, territory and governmentality in postcolonial states. Rather than being the result of "top-down" governmental projects, or forms of resistance "from below", we explore how "ethnic territories" are created by diverse subjects engaged in situated struggles over categories, recognition and boundaries. Our approach draws on Foucault's concepts of "governmentality" and "counter-conducts" in order to capture how struggles may simultaneously contest and reproduce dominant ethno-territorial regimes of truth, and how subjects may consciously refuse the "conduct of conduct" of governmentality. We extend this analysis by drawing inspiration from postcolonial and decolonial scholarship to highlight how subaltern actors engage with, appropriate, problematise or refuse governmental interventions in pursuit of their own political projects and visions for self-determination, which may exceed the scope of governmental knowledges. At the same time, we seek to problematise accounts that essentialise ethnic territories as bounded sites of ontological difference and indigenous resistance. Building on recent work by indigenous scholars, we propose an approach that takes seriously subaltern agency and the endurance of alternative ways of being and knowing, while keeping the persistent constraining effects of the colonial nexus between ethnicity, territory and governmentality firmly in view.

The recent proliferation of indigenous land titling processes has generated debate around the pos... more The recent proliferation of indigenous land titling processes has generated debate around the possibilities and limits of indigenous engagements with modern forms of cartography, territory and property. This paper makes a novel contribution to these discussions by highlighting the contradictory effects of territory and property in indigenous land claims processes. My analysis departs from a consideration of multicultural cartographies of territorially-bounded indigeneity and their awkward articulation with the racial regimes of ownership (Bhandar, 2018) that undergird settler and postcolonial property systems. The paper then examines how this tension has played out in the mapping and titling of Native Community Lands in Southeastern Bolivia. I trace how the discursive and cartographic representation of Native Community Lands as bounded, contiguous spaces of in-digeneity has been undermined by the socio-spatial effects of propertisation, which has reinscribed colonial hierarchies of race and property, leaving indigenous villages isolated within discontinuous fragments of marginal land. The paper concludes by examining how the tensions between territory and property continue to haunt indigenous resource politics in the Bolivian Chaco two decades after the creation of Native Community Lands.

Critique of Anthropology, 2019

This paper reflects on the possibilities and limits of participatory mapping as a tool for interr... more This paper reflects on the possibilities and limits of participatory mapping as a tool for interrogating the power-knowledge inequalities that structure indigenous peoples' engagements with postcolonial state cartography and bureaucracy. I describe mapping activities conducted in a remote Guaran ı community in the Bolivian Chaco as part of a research project exploring the dynamics and legacies of Native Community Lands, a national indigenous land titling programme. While these exercises were designed to explore the disjunctures between state and indigenous knowledges of territory, they generated unexpected power dynamics that led me to reflect more deeply on the power of maps, the pitfalls of 'countermapping' as an activist practice and my own imbrication in a bureaucratic field of power. The paper concludes that participatory mapping can be a fruitful if ambivalent method for studying state bureaucracy, which demonstrates the value of examining the legal-cartographic knowledges of the state 'from the margins'-including from the perspective of the people and places they claim to represent.

A growing body of literature examines how the rise of “neo-extractivist” states in Latin America ... more A growing body of literature examines how the rise of “neo-extractivist” states in Latin America is reconfiguring the relationship between resources, nation, territory, and citizenship. However, the implications for indigenous territorial projects remain underexplored. This paper draws on ethnographic research in the Bolivian Chaco to examine the ways in which indigenous territorial projects are becoming implicated in and being reimagined amidst the spatializing struggles of a hydrocarbon state. The tension between indigenous peoples’ desire for inclusion in a hydrocarbon-based national development project and their experiences of dispossession by an expanding hydrocarbon frontier has given rise to competing modes of “hydrocarbon citizenship” in the Guaraní territory Itika Guasu, where a vision of corporate-sponsored indigenous autonomy is pitted against new forms of state-funded development patronage. These dynamics challenge both resistance narratives and resource-curse theories, revealing that resources act as conduits for deeper postcolonial struggles over territory, sovereignty, and citizenship.

Geoforum, 2016

Contemporary debates around the ontological turn have pitted efforts to take indigenous ontologie... more Contemporary debates around the ontological turn have pitted efforts to take indigenous ontologies seriously against demands to make visible the forms of dispossession and environmental suffering that characterize the (post)colonial and capitalist present. Meanwhile, a growing array of governmental projects seeks to identify and protect indigenous ontologies in the face of capitalist development processes, including through forms of collective tenure. How can we make sense of such initiatives, and what kind of territories do they encounter and produce? This paper engages this question ethnographically through an examination of everyday life in a legally recognized Native Community Land in the Bolivian Chaco. Drawing on Bolivian Aymara scholar Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui's notion of ch'ixi, I argue that indigenous territories are neither ontologically separate from, nor entirely subsumed by, capitalist development processes. Rather, they are subject to multiple land values, ontologies, and investments. A contested indigenous land titling process, capitalist labor relations, hydrocarbon compensation money, and efforts to maintain relations with spirit beings are all interwoven in the fabric of Guaraní everyday life. Such ch'ixi landscapes emerge at the confluence of capitalist efforts at rendering territories investable, governmental efforts at managing dispossession, and Guaraní efforts to maintain life and exercise territorial sovereignty amidst contradictory processes of (post)colonial governmentality.

Emerging at the intersection of grassroots decolonial struggles and evolving forms of neoliberal ... more Emerging at the intersection of grassroots decolonial struggles and evolving forms of neoliberal governmentality, Bolivia’s Tierras Comunitarias de Orígen (TCOs) were framed by utopian visions of ethnodevelopment as well as indigenous aspirations for “recovering territory”. Yet, in Bolivia’s multi-ethnic and gas-rich Chaco region, sedimented structures of race and territory, combined with intensifying hydrocarbons development, have presented enduring obstacles to the legal and material consolidation of indigenous land rights. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Guaraní TCO Itika Guasu, this paper examines the emergence of a new indigenous vision of territory and autonomy, forged in the context of a frustrated land titling process and a decade-long hydrocarbon conflict. Rather than demanding land rights from a recalcitrant state, Guaraní leaders in Itika Guasu have come to view legal and financial negotiations with hydrocarbon companies as an alternative route to territorial recognition and indigenous self-governance – a vision that has, however, left them increasingly distanced from the concerns of land-poor communities. Subject to such projects, TCOs begin to look less like “territories of difference” (Escobar, 2008) and more like the “ethnic governable spaces” of an emergent petro-state (Watts, 2003). These dynamics illustrate the complex dilemmas faced by indigenous peoples struggling for territorial control and self-determination in the context of extractives-based development. As well as revealing the surprising legacies of multiculturalism’s “territorial turn”, TCO Itika Guasu points to the complex entanglements between struggles over identity, land rights, and resource governance in “post-neoliberal” states.

Antipode, 2024

Routledge eBooks, Jun 23, 2023

Routledge eBooks, Aug 4, 2023

Dialogues in Human Geography, 2023

Critique of Anthropology, 2019

Latin American Perspectives, 2016

Geoforum, 2015

Journal of Latin American Studies, 2022

Geoforum, 2020

Critique of Anthropology, 2019

This paper reflects on the possibilities and limits of participatory mapping as a tool for interr... more This paper reflects on the possibilities and limits of participatory mapping as a tool for interrogating the power-knowledge inequalities that structure indigenous peoples' engagements with postcolonial state cartography and bureaucracy. I describe mapping activities conducted in a remote Guaran ı community in the Bolivian Chaco as part of a research project exploring the dynamics and legacies of Native Community Lands, a national indigenous land titling programme. While these exercises were designed to explore the disjunctures between state and indigenous knowledges of territory, they generated unexpected power dynamics that led me to reflect more deeply on the power of maps, the pitfalls of 'countermapping' as an activist practice and my own imbrication in a bureaucratic field of power. The paper concludes that participatory mapping can be a fruitful if ambivalent method for studying state bureaucracy, which demonstrates the value of examining the legal-cartographic knowledges of the state 'from the margins'-including from the perspective of the people and places they claim to represent.

A growing body of literature examines how the rise of “neo-extractivist” states in Latin America ... more A growing body of literature examines how the rise of “neo-extractivist” states in Latin America is reconfiguring the relationship between resources, nation, territory, and citizenship. However, the implications for indigenous territorial projects remain underexplored. This paper draws on ethnographic research in the Bolivian Chaco to examine the ways in which indigenous territorial projects are becoming implicated in and being reimagined amidst the spatializing struggles of a hydrocarbon state. The tension between indigenous peoples’ desire for inclusion in a hydrocarbon-based national development project and their experiences of dispossession by an expanding hydrocarbon frontier has given rise to competing modes of “hydrocarbon citizenship” in the Guaraní territory Itika Guasu, where a vision of corporate-sponsored indigenous autonomy is pitted against new forms of state-funded development patronage. These dynamics challenge both resistance narratives and resource-curse theories, revealing that resources act as conduits for deeper postcolonial struggles over territory, sovereignty, and citizenship.

Geoforum, 2016

Limits to Decolonization, 2018

This book review symposium critically evaluates Penelope Anthias’ recent text Limits to Decoloniz... more This book review symposium critically evaluates Penelope Anthias’ recent text Limits to Decolonization: Indigeneity, Territory, and Hydrocarbon Politics in the Bolivian Chaco (Cornell University Press 2018). Through deep ethnographic attention, Anthias’ text evaluates Indigenous struggles for territory in the context of “post-neoliberal” Bolivia under the Evo Morales administration, showing the variegated and nuanced politics of autonomy in an era of hydrocarbon extraction and increasingly contradictory state-Indigenous relations. The text examines the “limits” of rights and state-led territorial titling processes to radically challenge the racialized extractive geographies that shape the Bolivian Chaco region. In so doing, Anthias’ ethnography provides a rich analysis of how Guarani Indigenous peoples are reshaping their relations with non-Indigenous landowners and the hydrocarbon industry to advance new forms of territorial autonomy and self-determination with significant ramifications on Indigenous studies in Latin America. This book review symposium draws from a session at the 2019 American Association of Geographers Conference, featuring two leading geographers who share their critical readings of Limits to Decolonization with a conclusion by Anthias that responds to the written reviews.

Límites a la descolonización Territorios indígenas y política de hidrocarburos en el Chaco boliviano, 2022

Límites a la descolonización aborda uno de los asuntos más importantes de la política indígena co... more Límites a la descolonización aborda uno de los asuntos más importantes de
la política indígena contemporánea: las luchas por el territorio. Revisando
la experiencia de 36 comunidades guaraníes en el Chaco boliviano, Penelope
Anthias revela que unas dos décadas de mapeo y titulación de tierras
indígenas no han logrado revertir un decurso histórico de despojo indígena
en tierras bajas de Bolivia. Mediante un estudio etnográfico de los “límites”
que encontraron los guaraníes en todo el trayecto de su demanda territorial
–desde demarcaciones político administrativas y oposición patronal
hasta proyectos hidrocarburíferos– Anthias plantea interrogantes clave
respecto al papel de los mapas y la titulación de territorios en las luchas
indígenas por su autodeterminación.

Anthias sostiene que las demandas territoriales sin resolución están
perlando los rasgos de un período “post neoliberal” en la política boliviana,
mostrando las maneras sorprendentes en que los pueblos indígenas
están reformulando sus proyectos territoriales en base a sus experiencias
de las limitaciones del reconocimiento estatal en el contexto de un Estado
dependiente de los hidrocarburos. En Límites a la descolonización, se
revisan los actuales debates sobre los derechos culturales, las políticas
sobre los recursos y los gobiernos de izquierda latinoamericanos. En
resumen, este libro pone en evidencia las maneras creativas y pragmáticas
con que los pueblos indígenas se oponen a los límites de la dominación
poscolonial, sin dejar de salir adelante en búsqueda de sus propias visiones
de autonomía territorial.

Human Geography: a new radical journal, 2019

This book review symposium critically evaluates Penelope Anthias' recent text Limits to Decoloniz... more This book review symposium critically evaluates Penelope Anthias' recent text Limits to Decoloniza-tion: Indigeneity, Territory, and Hydrocarbon Politics in the Bolivian Chaco (Cornell University Press 2018). Through deep ethnographic attention, Anthias' text evaluates Indigenous struggles for territory in the context of "post-neoliberal" Bolivia under the Evo Morales administration, showing the variegated and nuanced politics of autonomy in an era of hydrocarbon extraction and increasingly contradictory state-Indigenous relations. The text examines the "limits" of rights and state-led territorial titling processes to radically challenge the racialized extrac-tive geographies that shape the Bolivian Chaco region. In so doing, Anthias' ethnography provides a rich analysis of how Guaraní Indigenous peoples are reshaping their relations with non-Indigenous landowners and the hydrocarbon industry to advance new forms of territorial autonomy and self-determination with significant ramifications on Indigenous studies in Latin America. This book review symposium draws from a session at the 2019 American Association of Geographers Conference, featuring two leading geographers who share their critical readings of Limits to Decolonization with a conclusion by Anthias that responds to the written reviews.

Forthcoming in Social History

Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2013

Bolivian Studies Journal/Revista de Estudios Bolivianos, 2014

Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2021

Human Geography, 2019

This book review symposium critically evaluates Penelope Anthias' recent text Limits to Decoloniz... more This book review symposium critically evaluates Penelope Anthias' recent text Limits to Decolonization: Indigeneity, Territory, and Hydrocarbon Politics in the Bolivian Chaco (Cornell University Press 2018). Through deep ethnographic attention, Anthias' text evaluates Indigenous struggles for territory in the context of "post-neoliberal" Bolivia under the Evo Morales administration, showing the variegated and nuanced politics of autonomy in an era of hydrocarbon extraction and increasingly contradictory state-Indigenous relations. The text examines the "limits" of rights and state-led territorial titling processes to radically challenge the racialized extractive geographies that shape the Bolivian Chaco region. In so doing, Anthias' ethnography provides a rich analysis of how Guaraní Indigenous peoples are reshaping their relations with non-Indigenous landowners and the hydrocarbon industry to advance new forms of territorial autonomy and self-determination with significant ramifications on Indigenous studies in Latin America. This book review symposium draws from a session at the 2019 American Association of Geographers Conference, featuring two leading geographers who share their critical readings of Limits to Decolonization with a conclusion by Anthias that responds to the written reviews.

This PhD combines insights from postcolonialism, political ecology and critical development geogr... more This PhD combines insights from postcolonialism, political ecology and critical development geography to interrogate the ambivalent role of land titling in indigenous struggles for decolonisation – that is, in addressing colonial legacies of racialised exclusion, dispossession and inequality. It does so through an ethnographic case study of one Guaraní indigenous group’s struggle to gain legal rights to their territory – “Itika Guasu”, located in Bolivia’s Chaco region – as a Communal Land of Origin (Tierra Comunitaria de Orígen, TCO), a collective land title created under Bolivia’s 1996 INRA Law. Through an exploration of the dynamics and outcomes of this land struggle – which is emblematic of a wave of indigneous counter-mapping and land titling that took place across the Americas during the 1990s – I trace the gradual unravelling of a multicultural project of indigenous territory, predicated on the creation of bounded spaces of ethnic cultural difference, amidst the “entangled landscapes” (Moore, 2005) of postcolonial and neoliberal development. Specifically, I argue that governmental efforts to “spatialise race” through collective land titling – which both responded to and fuelled indigenous peoples’ own historically-grounded aspirations for “recovering territory” – were undermined in practice by entrenched state and settler geographies, persistent colonial power relations and discourses of rights, and new reterritorialising processes of extractive industry development. The result, I reveal, is a territory that is internally fragmented, incompletely titled, and subject to protracted conflict over land and resources.

I argue that the insurgent identities and frustrated aspirations this produced are essential for understanding the emergent dynamics of “post-neoliberal” development under the government of Evo Morales (2005 – present). As the case of Itika Guasu shows, despite Morales’s discursive support for indigenous territorial rights and decolonisation, indigenous territorial claims have continued to be subordinated to colonial and neo-colonial capitalist geographies – in particular, to the nation-state’s own claim to hydrocarbon resources, now framed as the economic basis for a state-led project of decolonisation and social redistribution. The creative and surprising ways in which the Guaraní of Itika Guasu have responded to this scenario – abandoning state land titling in favour of transnational negotiations over gas rents – challenge us to rethink common assumptions about indigenous development, autonomy and decolonisation. Specifically, I argue that emerging territorial imaginaries and strategies in Itika Guasu are illustrative of indigenous peoples’ place-based and historically-grounded engagement in an emergent regime of “hydrocarbon citizenship”.

The first in-depth and ethnographic study of indigenous TCO land titling in Bolivia, this thesis makes an important contribution to current debates in political ecology, postcolonialism and critical development geography – including on the production of territory; neoliberal territorial governance; extractive industry development; indigenous rights; and Latin American “post-neoliberal” development. More broadly, it highlights the contested meanings and ongoing challenges of decolonisation in the contemporary (post)colonial world, and the value of a critical geography perspective for interrogating and addressing these.

Un estudio etnográfico del proceso de titulación territorial indígena en el Chaco boliviano.