Dr. Mareike Winchell is a political and environmental anthropologist whose research explores the intersections of race, property, and kinship in Latin America, with a focus on Indigenous and postcolonial Bolivia. Her first book, After Servitude: Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia (University of California Press, 2022), examines how Quechua communities navigate the legacies of hacienda servitude, racialized land regimes, and state-led justice initiatives. Through long-term ethnographic and archival fieldwork, Winchell reveals how informal practices of care, obligation, and historical redress challenge liberal frameworks of property and citizenship. Her work engages critical theory, Black and Indigenous studies, and feminist anthropology to theorize kinship as a site of ethical negotiation and neo-colonial governance. The book won Honourable Mention for the AAA’s Society for Latin American and Caribbean Studies 2023 Book Prize.

Winchell’s current research expands these themes into two new book projects. Ghostly Invasions: Political Theologies of Fire investigates the racialization of climate politics in Bolivia, tracing how nationalist environmentalism and evangelical expansion shape narratives of guilt, purity, and ecological crisis. Her second project, The Servant’s Properties, explores the legal claims of out-of-wedlock children born to indentured labourers, examining how gender, materiality, and more-than-human landscapes complicate dominant accounts of land redistribution and repair. Across her work, Winchell foregrounds Indigenous epistemologies and affective economies to rethink extractivism, environmental governance, and the ethics of relational life. She is currently based at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she teaches anthropology and continues collaborative fieldwork with Quechua, Aymara, and Chiquitos communities in Bolivia. Before arriving at LSE, she was a faculty member in the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago.

Winchell’s scholarship has appeared in leading journals including Cultural Anthropology, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Comparative Studies in Society and History, American Religion, Journal of Peasant Studies, Critical Times, Bolivian Studies Journal, and Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. Her research has been supported by prestigious fellowships and grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Josephine de Karman Fellowship Trust, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Center for International Social Science Research, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities. 

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