Abstract
Lynching in Bolivia has been portrayed as a largely routinized and primarily urban occurrence that is a direct response to the state's inability to provide security. Using a recent case of rural lynching as a starting point, I will evaluate the idea of rural Bolivian lynching in Indigenous communities as vigilantism. I contrast what little is known about rural lynching in Bolivia to the known pattern of urban lynching and ask whether these are distinct phenomena. Finally, I discuss the idea of ancestral validation and the punishment rights implied by a western-style state sanctioning aspects of non-western justice. I ask, do our existing models for such extreme cases as fatal vigilantism exclude lynching in rural Indigenous Bolivian communities? At the heart of this discussion is how we define a cultural practice versus how we define deviance in a multicultural society; how we nest authority structures and how we afford them legitimate rights to the use of force and other extreme control measures.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 3-19 |
Number of pages | 17 |
Journal | Race and justice |
Volume | 10 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Jan 2020 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Indigenous people
- race
- ethnicity
- Latin Americans
- race and policing
- lynching
- race and death penalty
- community corrections
- race and corrections
- VIOLENCE