School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemHere, you can live well: Pollution, rural livelihood and the hardness of place on Lake Titicaca, Bolivia( 2022-11)This thesis gives an ethnographic account of how Quehuaya, an Aymara community on Lake Titicaca, Bolivia, is navigating a future circumscribed by water pollution, climate change and the policies of the Movement toward Socialism (MAS) government. As rural livelihoods such as fishing and agriculture become increasingly unviable, a collective life lived in dialogue with the landscape is coming under threat. In response, community members make use of emerging opportunities presented by the MAS indigenist-developmentalist program, the burgeoning urban economy of the nearby city of El Alto, and ongoing opportunities for migration. I develop an account of the hardness of place itself – its solidity in the face of flux – to foreground the dynamics underlying its ongoing but shifting role in this turbulent and threatening context. To unravel the dynamics underlying the hardness of Quehuaya as a place, I demonstrate how the community is reproduced through an Andean collectivism built on practices of livelihood, landscape ritual and syndical political organisation. I analyse how these express Andean ontologies of place, as enmeshed with collectivity and the non-human. Central to my argument is a dialogic theory of agency, which accounts for both individual and collective forms of agency as emergent from a prior intersubjectivity. The hardness of place in Quehuaya rests on the dialogue between the collective will and authorities responsible for establishing relations with the exterior worlds of both landscape and the institutional sphere. This is key to reproducing a cosmology of circulation that constitutes the community in place. This attention to dynamics enables an analysis of ontologies of place that avoids an excessive constructivism that would elide their determining power, without collapsing into essentialism. I demonstrate how in Quehuaya, the cosmology of circulation and the modes of personhood associated with it are threatened as its constitutive relations are disrupted. This is affecting the role of place as an anchor for collective identity and the political possibilities of response to the pollution crisis. I further demonstrate how community members strive to re-establish the stability of place through innovation in livelihood and engagements with state and development actors. These efforts promise to use the material, cultural and relational resources of place to renew the circulatory flows on which it depends, and thereby re-establish the authority of landscape. However, this pursuit of increased articulation with a wider world through novel forms of engagement with the global economy – such as tourism – and the contradictions of the MAS state exacerbates fundamental tensions between individual and collective forms of agency. While the scale of changes threatens to overwhelm the community’s ability to integrate them, I argue that the techniques of Andean collectivism are fundamentally oriented towards the maintenance and steering of collective trajectories in an inherently unpredictable and dangerous world, and a recognition of the unavoidable limits of human agency. This thesis thus offers a contribution to the theorisation of collective life in the context of a shared world becoming increasingly uncertain for all of us.
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ItemThe youth of Panama: everyday negotiations of neoliberal development in an urban context( 2018)This thesis provides an ethnographic analysis of how young lower middle-class urban Panamanians navigate and negotiate neoliberal macro-economic transformations that have accelerated since the 1990s, from increasingly precarious and marginalised positions in society. Unlike much of Latin America which has gained global interest through the turn to centre-left and leftist governments in recent years, Panama has consistently adopted market-oriented policies following structural adjustments programs. Particularly under the administration of former right-wing president, Ricardo Martinelli, the nation has capitalised on its geographic position as a global and regional hub to market itself to the global community through economic goals that seek to attract flows of international capital and foreign investment. It has subsequently focused its attention on developing Panama as an ideal site for luxury tourism, residential migration, and for multinational corporation regional headquarters, leading it to often be described as the most cosmopolitan metropolis in Central America. In spite of this, Panama remains greatly overlooked by anthropologists as a site of study for urban neoliberal development. From within the deepening of Panama’s global market integration, young Panamanians have found themselves navigating the intricacies of everyday urban life within structural conditions that increasingly favour the interests of the international and national elite. Their experiences in this thesis thus emerge as precarious, as known certainties of everyday activities like travelling to and from work, utilising or simply having linguistic or racial autonomy, or transitioning from education into stable waged-labour, are slowly eroded in favour of free market ethics of competition, austerity, and self-responsibilisation. This thesis seeks to capture the more surprising and unexpected ways in which market-oriented policies take shape in the Panamanian context. It pays heed to many unintended consequences of these market-led reforms such as traffic congestion and growing racial divides, and it posits that young Panamanians in this study emerge as important prisms through which various neoliberally-related social ills in Panama City become apparent. At the same time, it elucidates how young Panamanians quietly resist neoliberalism from subject positions in society. It posits that Panamanian youth uphold and create particular values and cultural practices such as interdependence and togetherness, that work against the needs of the Panamanian state.