Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
As Loïc Wacquant has argued, the anthropology of neoliberalism is
roughly divided into two approaches: “a hegemonic economic concep-
tion anchored by variants of market rule, on the one side, and an insur-
gent approach fuelled by loose derivations of the Foucaultian notion of
governmentality, on the other.”
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The first approach to neoliberalism
imagines a state retreating or withering in the face of an expanding mar-
ket. The second approach defines neoliberalism as a fluid, transnational
set of rationalities, calculations, or technologies that reorder the conduct
of the governed themselves according to widespread appropriation of
market logics of competition, efficiency, and use.
The notion of neoliberal (post-)multiculturalism, as developed by
scholars of Latin American indigeneity, is appealing precisely because
it promises to synthesize these two academic models. Thus, Nancy Pos-
tero argues that neoliberalism reveals “the state as an inefficient, often
corrupt actor that only encumbers the market's neutral and unselfish
actions.”
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At the same time, she suggests “the bottom line is that success-
ful neoliberal subjects must govern themselves in accordance with the
logic of global capitalism.”
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Here, the ascendancy of a neoliberal order is
reflected in both the erosion of the state and the creation of subjects who
govern themselves according to neoliberal rationalities.
Yet the neoliberal governance of Indigenous subjects is often
presumed to subsequently follow an exceptional trajectory—post-
multiculturalism—because of what is believed to be an inherent antago-
nism of “the Indigenous” and “the cultural” to “the neoliberal.” Thus
the present can be described as an era characterized by “a new form of
protagonism that both incorporates and challenges the underlying phi-
losophies of neoliberalism,” through social mobilizations that “push to
make [neoliberal state] institutions more inclusive.”
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In such models, the
Indigenous appropriation of neoliberal logics explains the increased trac-
tion of broad social movements, insofar as this appropriation is imagined
to create a “post-multicultural alternative” and “anti-neoliberal state”
characterized by inclusion. Or, as the preamble to the 2009 Constitution
of Bolivia puts it, “We have left the colonial, republican and neoliberal
State in the past.”
The Ayoreo figures of madness and vice suggest the opposite may also
be the case. The exclusionary structures and logics of recent years are not
always threatened by Indigenous mobilizations, but rather redistributed
in response to them. This implies a dual reversal of some conventional
conceptualizations of the relationships between the Indigenous and the
neoliberal. First, it suggests that the figure of the post-multicultural Latin
American state is characterized not by its erosion but by its recasting
