Jonathan Alderman
Biographic Data
| ID | 194659 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jonathan Alderman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jonathan |
| FAMILY NAME | Alderman |
| SIGNATURE | ALDERMAN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of St Andrews |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6928-2849 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 21 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Healing as political care: Kallawaya ethnomedicine in Bolivia’s plurinational state
Bolivia’s transformation into a plurinational state, explicitly recognising the existence and rights of its Indigenous peoples, was ideologically underpinned by an agenda to decolonise quasi-colonial political structures while being unable to escape them. This article engages with Dürr and Rohrer’s call to recognise Indigenous practices of healing as crucial responses to the planetary crisis, through ethnographically examining how the Kallawaya, …
Quechua and Aymara Textbooks in an Autonomous Education Project in the Kallawaya Region of Bolivia
An educational initiative called Aynikusun in northwest Bolivia, run by rural Indigenous communities with the assistance of a Belgian agronomist, significantly transformed social relations between Spanish-speaking townspeople and their campesino neighbors in the 1980s and 1990s. This article-co-authored by an anthropologist and one of the school's directors-highlights the 'revolutionary' education Aynikusun provided by enabling students to comple…
Si esto no es el pueblo, el pueblo dónde está? Discursive Disagreement in the 2019-2020 Post-electoral Conflict in Bolivia
The 2019 electoral crisis in Bolivia was characterized by division and disagreement. In the three weeks between the country's presidential election in October 2019 and sitting President Evo Morales's resignation, both Morales's supporters and his detractors marched in the streets chanting parallel slogans in which each identified themselves as "the people" (el pueblo). This article examines what it means to identify collectively as "the people" i…
Chapter 2 A Hall of Mirrors: Watchfulness as Ethnographic Method
Watchful Lives in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
Watchfulness shapes many Chicanxs’ and other People of Color’s everyday lives in San Diego. Experiencing racist discrimination can lead to becoming vigilant, which frames their subjectivity. Focusing particularly on Chicanxs, we show how they seek to intervene against structural inequalities and threats in their lives, such as by re-claiming space, consciousness raising, participating in protests, and healing practices. We argue that contestation…
The Social and Political Life of Latin American Infrastructures
This cross-disciplinary book makes a novel contribution to global infrastructure debates and provides important new insights into Latin America’s history and politics. It captures the characteristics, limits and vibrancy of Latin America’s infrastructures, exploring irrigation networks in Peru to nuclear plants in Cuba. It demonstrates the value of understanding infrastructure as a relational and experimental process
The politics of coproduction during Latin America’s ‘Pink Tide’: Water, housing, and waste in comparative perspective
Coproduction brings together a diverse range of state and non-state actors to create and deliver public services. These processes, which occur across the Global South, have been widely studied. However, insufficient critical attention has been paid to their politics. We address this gap in the literature by analysing the politics of coproduction in Latin America during the ‘pink tide’ of the early twenty-first century. Drawing on original qualita…
Social and Political Life of Latin American Infrastructure: Meanings, Values, and Competing Visions of the Future
From houses to roads, infrastructures offer a unique lens through which to explore social and political change. Serving as an important conduit between states and citizens, infrastructures provide governments with a powerful tool to mould subjects and control populations. Yet, at the same time they also give individuals, communities, and movements a platform to challenge the state and forge alternative forms of citizenship and politics. Infrastru…
City Thinking: Rural Urbanisation and Mobility in Andean Bolivia
Drawing on fieldwork in Andean Bolivia, this article examines rural urbanisation as a process of disconnection between people and place impacted by flows of rural to urban migration. Ritual relations with place are perceived as particularly significant for Kallawaya healers in the municipality of Charazani. They take a disruption of acts that maintain bonds between people and place as a result of urbanisation - examined particularly in relation t…
The Houses That Evo Built: Autonomy, Vivir bien, and Viviendas in Bolivia
The concept of vivir bien (living well) has become ubiquitous in Bolivian state discourse and policy since the election of Evo Morales as Bolivia's president in 2005. While Bolivia's constitutional refounding as plurinational is supposed to facilitate indigenous peoples' living according to their conception of living well, the state still appears to be attempting to implement its own conception through rural social programs promoted as enabling r…
A Bridge that Divides: Hostile Infrastructures. Coloniality and Watchfulness in San Diego, California
The construction of the Coronado Bridge, completed in 1969, over Barrio Logan in San Diego in the US-Mexico borderlands physically manifests relations of coloniality that those in the neighbourhood experience on a daily basis. Drawing on anthropological approaches and the philosophy of Jacques Rancière, this article examines the unintended consequences of infrastructure construction. We reveal how political subjectivity develops through actions …
House personhood in rural Andean Bolivia
In the rural Bolivian Andes, personhood is defined by intersubjective reciprocal relationships between human and nonhuman beings. This paper examines the role of the house as a living being in itself and a conduit between its inhabitants and local place deities. In the rural Andes, houses (traditionally made from adobe but increasingly from brick) materially connect their inhabitants with a sacred landscape, and rituals performed at their constru…
Unpacking disavowals of indigeneity in Bolivia
Beyond Indigeneity: Coca Growing and the Emergence of a New Middle Class in Bolivia . By Alessandra Pellegrini Calderón. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2016.Deference Revisited: Andean Ritual in the Plurinational State. By Into Goudsmit. Carolina Academic Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2016.The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia. By Benjamin Dangl. AK Press, Edinburgh, 2019.Coca Ye…
Indigenous autonomy and the legacy of neoliberal decentralization in plurinational Bolivia
This article examines the legacy of 1990s' neoliberal decentralization reform in shaping an indigenous autonomy project in Bolivia. It focuses on the municipality of Charazani, which is in the process of becoming an Indigenous Autonomy, or Autonomía Indígena Originario Campesina (AIOC), examining the local origins of the autonomy project, and the reasons why it has stalled. To do so, I refer to political projects of indigenous authorities in Char…
Mountains as actors in the Bolivian Andes: The interrelationship between politics and ritual in the Kallawaya ayllus
This essay will examine the way that a Bolivian Andean people, the Kallawayas, incorporate mountains—seen as beings with agency in their own right—into their structure of kinship and politics. The Kallawayas interpret mountains as inhabited by ancestral spirits, who are incorporated into the local political structure as authorities. This understanding of the mountains denies the Western separation of politics and nature. I follow de la Cadena (20…
Indigenous autonomy and the legacy of neoliberal decentralization in plurinational Bolivia
This article examines the legacy of 1990s' neoliberal decentralization reform in shaping an indigenous autonomy project in Bolivia. It focuses on the municipality of Charazani, which is in the process of becoming an Indigenous Autonomy, or Autonomía Indígena Originario Campesina (AIOC), examining the local origins of the autonomy project, and the reasons why it has stalled. To do so, I refer to political projects of indigenous authorities in Char…
Mountains as actors in the Bolivian Andes: The interrelationship between politics and ritual in the Kallawaya ayllus
This essay will examine the way that a Bolivian Andean people, the Kallawayas, incorporate mountains—seen as beings with agency in their own right—into their structure of kinship and politics. The Kallawayas interpret mountains as inhabited by ancestral spirits, who are incorporated into the local political structure as authorities. This understanding of the mountains denies the Western separation of politics and nature. I follow de la Cadena (20…
The Houses That Evo Built: Autonomy, Vivir bien, and Viviendas in Bolivia
The concept of vivir bien (living well) has become ubiquitous in Bolivian state discourse and policy since the election of Evo Morales as Bolivia's president in 2005. While Bolivia's constitutional refounding as plurinational is supposed to facilitate indigenous peoples' living according to their conception of living well, the state still appears to be attempting to implement its own conception through rural social programs promoted as enabling r…
The politics of coproduction during Latin America’s ‘Pink Tide’: Water, housing, and waste in comparative perspective
Coproduction brings together a diverse range of state and non-state actors to create and deliver public services. These processes, which occur across the Global South, have been widely studied. However, insufficient critical attention has been paid to their politics. We address this gap in the literature by analysing the politics of coproduction in Latin America during the ‘pink tide’ of the early twenty-first century. Drawing on original qualita…
Quechua and Aymara Textbooks in an Autonomous Education Project in the Kallawaya Region of Bolivia
An educational initiative called Aynikusun in northwest Bolivia, run by rural Indigenous communities with the assistance of a Belgian agronomist, significantly transformed social relations between Spanish-speaking townspeople and their campesino neighbors in the 1980s and 1990s. This article-co-authored by an anthropologist and one of the school's directors-highlights the 'revolutionary' education Aynikusun provided by enabling students to comple…
City Thinking: Rural Urbanisation and Mobility in Andean Bolivia
Drawing on fieldwork in Andean Bolivia, this article examines rural urbanisation as a process of disconnection between people and place impacted by flows of rural to urban migration. Ritual relations with place are perceived as particularly significant for Kallawaya healers in the municipality of Charazani. They take a disruption of acts that maintain bonds between people and place as a result of urbanisation - examined particularly in relation t…
House personhood in rural Andean Bolivia
In the rural Bolivian Andes, personhood is defined by intersubjective reciprocal relationships between human and nonhuman beings. This paper examines the role of the house as a living being in itself and a conduit between its inhabitants and local place deities. In the rural Andes, houses (traditionally made from adobe but increasingly from brick) materially connect their inhabitants with a sacred landscape, and rituals performed at their constru…
Unpacking disavowals of indigeneity in Bolivia
Beyond Indigeneity: Coca Growing and the Emergence of a New Middle Class in Bolivia . By Alessandra Pellegrini Calderón. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2016.Deference Revisited: Andean Ritual in the Plurinational State. By Into Goudsmit. Carolina Academic Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2016.The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia. By Benjamin Dangl. AK Press, Edinburgh, 2019.Coca Ye…
Mountains as actors in the Bolivian Andes: The interrelationship between politics and ritual in the Kallawaya ayllus
This essay will examine the way that a Bolivian Andean people, the Kallawayas, incorporate mountains—seen as beings with agency in their own right—into their structure of kinship and politics. The Kallawayas interpret mountains as inhabited by ancestral spirits, who are incorporated into the local political structure as authorities. This understanding of the mountains denies the Western separation of politics and nature. I follow de la Cadena (20…
Indigenous autonomy and the legacy of neoliberal decentralization in plurinational Bolivia
This article examines the legacy of 1990s' neoliberal decentralization reform in shaping an indigenous autonomy project in Bolivia. It focuses on the municipality of Charazani, which is in the process of becoming an Indigenous Autonomy, or Autonomía Indígena Originario Campesina (AIOC), examining the local origins of the autonomy project, and the reasons why it has stalled. To do so, I refer to political projects of indigenous authorities in Char…
Unpacking disavowals of indigeneity in Bolivia
Beyond Indigeneity: Coca Growing and the Emergence of a New Middle Class in Bolivia . By Alessandra Pellegrini Calderón. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2016.Deference Revisited: Andean Ritual in the Plurinational State. By Into Goudsmit. Carolina Academic Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2016.The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia. By Benjamin Dangl. AK Press, Edinburgh, 2019.Coca Ye…
The Houses That Evo Built: Autonomy, Vivir bien, and Viviendas in Bolivia
The concept of vivir bien (living well) has become ubiquitous in Bolivian state discourse and policy since the election of Evo Morales as Bolivia's president in 2005. While Bolivia's constitutional refounding as plurinational is supposed to facilitate indigenous peoples' living according to their conception of living well, the state still appears to be attempting to implement its own conception through rural social programs promoted as enabling r…
A Bridge that Divides: Hostile Infrastructures. Coloniality and Watchfulness in San Diego, California
The construction of the Coronado Bridge, completed in 1969, over Barrio Logan in San Diego in the US-Mexico borderlands physically manifests relations of coloniality that those in the neighbourhood experience on a daily basis. Drawing on anthropological approaches and the philosophy of Jacques Rancière, this article examines the unintended consequences of infrastructure construction. We reveal how political subjectivity develops through actions …
House personhood in rural Andean Bolivia
In the rural Bolivian Andes, personhood is defined by intersubjective reciprocal relationships between human and nonhuman beings. This paper examines the role of the house as a living being in itself and a conduit between its inhabitants and local place deities. In the rural Andes, houses (traditionally made from adobe but increasingly from brick) materially connect their inhabitants with a sacred landscape, and rituals performed at their constru…
The Social and Political Life of Latin American Infrastructures
This cross-disciplinary book makes a novel contribution to global infrastructure debates and provides important new insights into Latin America’s history and politics. It captures the characteristics, limits and vibrancy of Latin America’s infrastructures, exploring irrigation networks in Peru to nuclear plants in Cuba. It demonstrates the value of understanding infrastructure as a relational and experimental process
The politics of coproduction during Latin America’s ‘Pink Tide’: Water, housing, and waste in comparative perspective
Coproduction brings together a diverse range of state and non-state actors to create and deliver public services. These processes, which occur across the Global South, have been widely studied. However, insufficient critical attention has been paid to their politics. We address this gap in the literature by analysing the politics of coproduction in Latin America during the ‘pink tide’ of the early twenty-first century. Drawing on original qualita…
Social and Political Life of Latin American Infrastructure: Meanings, Values, and Competing Visions of the Future
From houses to roads, infrastructures offer a unique lens through which to explore social and political change. Serving as an important conduit between states and citizens, infrastructures provide governments with a powerful tool to mould subjects and control populations. Yet, at the same time they also give individuals, communities, and movements a platform to challenge the state and forge alternative forms of citizenship and politics. Infrastru…
City Thinking: Rural Urbanisation and Mobility in Andean Bolivia
Drawing on fieldwork in Andean Bolivia, this article examines rural urbanisation as a process of disconnection between people and place impacted by flows of rural to urban migration. Ritual relations with place are perceived as particularly significant for Kallawaya healers in the municipality of Charazani. They take a disruption of acts that maintain bonds between people and place as a result of urbanisation - examined particularly in relation t…
Chapter 2 A Hall of Mirrors: Watchfulness as Ethnographic Method
Watchful Lives in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
Watchfulness shapes many Chicanxs’ and other People of Color’s everyday lives in San Diego. Experiencing racist discrimination can lead to becoming vigilant, which frames their subjectivity. Focusing particularly on Chicanxs, we show how they seek to intervene against structural inequalities and threats in their lives, such as by re-claiming space, consciousness raising, participating in protests, and healing practices. We argue that contestation…
Si esto no es el pueblo, el pueblo dónde está? Discursive Disagreement in the 2019-2020 Post-electoral Conflict in Bolivia
The 2019 electoral crisis in Bolivia was characterized by division and disagreement. In the three weeks between the country's presidential election in October 2019 and sitting President Evo Morales's resignation, both Morales's supporters and his detractors marched in the streets chanting parallel slogans in which each identified themselves as "the people" (el pueblo). This article examines what it means to identify collectively as "the people" i…
Quechua and Aymara Textbooks in an Autonomous Education Project in the Kallawaya Region of Bolivia
An educational initiative called Aynikusun in northwest Bolivia, run by rural Indigenous communities with the assistance of a Belgian agronomist, significantly transformed social relations between Spanish-speaking townspeople and their campesino neighbors in the 1980s and 1990s. This article-co-authored by an anthropologist and one of the school's directors-highlights the 'revolutionary' education Aynikusun provided by enabling students to comple…
Healing as political care: Kallawaya ethnomedicine in Bolivia’s plurinational state
Bolivia’s transformation into a plurinational state, explicitly recognising the existence and rights of its Indigenous peoples, was ideologically underpinned by an agenda to decolonise quasi-colonial political structures while being unable to escape them. This article engages with Dürr and Rohrer’s call to recognise Indigenous practices of healing as crucial responses to the planetary crisis, through ethnographically examining how the Kallawaya, …
Sociology (10 works) · Political science (9 works) · Law (7 works) · Geography (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Indigenous (5 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (4 works) · Indigenous Cultures and History (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Politics and Society in Latin America (4 works)