Dr Mareike Winchell

Mareike Winchell (PhD, University of California Berkeley) is an interdisciplinary thinker concerned with how the making of race and the making of property intersect. Her research and teaching highlight how ethical paradigms of obligation to place and history interact with tenacious structures of Indigenous dispossession, gender violence, and environmental land capture. This work grows out of ongoing collaborative fieldwork with Indigenous (Quechua, Aymara, and Chiquitos) peoples in Bolivia, and focused most recently on the problem of how to address climate change in the shadow of abiding systems of racial property.

Winchell's first book, After Servitude: Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia (University of California Press, 2022), traces the ways people call upon and actively repurpose the past in their efforts to navigate tenacious structures of racism rooted in earlier hacienda labor subjection and sexual violence. Such engagements reveal a more durative orientation to justice, one that departs notably from utopic state projects of property (and propertied redress) that require disarticulating land and people, and the present from the past. The book received Honorable Mention for the 2022 Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (SLACA) Book Prize and has been positively reviewed in American Ethnologist, Ethnos, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, Anthropological Quarterly, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Journal de la Société des américanistes, and Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR).

Winchell is currently at work on two new book projects. The first, "Ghostly Invasions: Political Theologies of Fire," focuses on the racialization of climate politics in Bolivia. Drawing from fieldwork preceding and since Bolivia's 2019 coup, the book traces the authoritarian tendencies of environmentalisms that preserve nature's purity and reproduce narratives of racialized guilt and responsibility. Conversely, the research reveals the grounded collaborations—feminist horticultural projects, anti-imperialist environmental organizing, and land "restoration" efforts—emerging in the gaps of a divisive nationalist environmental politics. Such collaborations instruct scholars and activists about crucial alternatives to the conventional divide of standard conservation (with the separation of people and nature) and statist approaches that often see Indigenous land redistribution and ecological protection as antithetical.

Another book project, "The Servant’s Properties: Materiality, Gender, and More-than-Human Landscapes in 20th Century Bolivia," examines the legal claims of out-of-wedlock children born to indentured laborers after 1953. Based on archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and collaborative media work, the project asks how incommensurate approaches to land and place came to be cemented within institutional knowledges, and what that process reveals about the remaking of property by non-secular orientations to landscapes and/as kin. More broadly, the project highlights how Indigenous Quechua laborers in this region have sought to embed land in other-than-human relations through practices of legal and bureaucratic maneuver in company with lawyers, saints, Apus, the Pachamama, and the dead.

Winchell’s writing and digital scholarship have appeared in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI), Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Cultural Anthropology, American Religion, Journal of Peasant Studies, Critical Times, Bolivian Studies Journal, and Comparative Studies in Society and History. Her research and scholarship have received generous funding from the Josephine de Karman Fellowship Trust, the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, The Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Center for International Social Science Research, and The Townsend Center for the Humanities. Before joining LSE in 2023, Winchell was assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

All the following articles and an introduction to the book are available for download at: https://lse.academia.edu/MareikeWinchell.

Expertise

Bolivia; Environmental Politics; Kinship; Race and Property; Critical Indigenous Studies; Inequality and Ethics; Post- and de-Colonialisms; Critical Ontologies; Religion; Climate Change