Outlawed

Daniel M. Goldstein (2012) Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian City, Duke University Press ( Durham, NC), ix + 344 pp. £70.00 hbk. £16.99 pbk. I was initially sceptical about Outlawed, since it seemed to cover much the same ground as Goldstein's previous book, The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia (2004). In fact, it nicely complements that work, demonstrating the value of viewing complex social phenomena from diverse theoretical angles. The Spectacular City focused on Villa Pagador, a rural-urban migrant community renowned for its folkloric street festivals and its residents' vigilantism against the petty crime that plagues their precarious existence and it showed how these migrants challenge state narratives of ethnicity, nationality and security through two types of public spectacle: folkloric performance and collective violence. Outlawed takes us to Loma Pampa, another rural-urban migrant community, but one lacking the social cohesion of Villa Pagador. What unites Loma Pampa is people's shared vulnerability to crime and their powerlessness before the maze of bureaucratic requirements through which the state renders its subjects ‘legible’ (Scott, 1999). Unable to comply with the state's arbitrary demands, residents live on the margins of legality, while the state's inability to provide security leads to acts of collective vigilantism, transforming victims of crime into perpetrators. Residents are thus doubly outlawed vis-à-vis the phantom state – so called because it is both frustratingly absent and intrusively present in residents' lives. Goldstein's descriptions of the vulnerability of working-class Bolivian life ring true; the brazenness and frequency of crimes against persons and property, combined with a corrupt, ineffective, legal system, produce a collective frustration that is palpable and taxing. Given citizens' impotence in the face of injustice, violent responses begin to seem insidiously reasonable. However, Goldstein challenges the stereotype of the uniformly enraged mob, uncovering a deep ambivalence among residents who recognise that their own children could eventually become the targets of community justice. To his credit, Goldstein touches only briefly on the more spectacular aspects of linchamientos (acts ranging from beating a thieving teenager to setting a suspected rapist on fire). The book is, at heart, an examination of how communities strive to create order in a context of pervasive insecurity, as Bolivia's legacy of neoliberal ‘reform’ clashes with president Evo Morales' movement toward socialism. Bolivia's new constitution acknowledges the role of traditional indigenous practices – including community justice – in social governance. However, this state narrative does not reference communities like Loma Pampa; rather, it defines indigeneity in terms of rural campesinos (peasants), even as more and more of these leave the countryside for the urban margins. Although residents appeal to the state's discourse of community justice to justify violence against those who threaten the social body, Goldstein argues that their vigilantism actually represents a creative, ad hoc assemblage produced by desperate people lacking strong social networks or any common ancestral tradition: not legal pluralism, but legal bricolage. Outlawed links local dilemmas to broader global processes by exploring conflicting meanings around the concepts of security (increasingly defined in terms of national security) and human rights. Global human rights discourses open space for the incorporation of indigenous traditions within frameworks of state governance (see Bybee et al., 2013), but the state's inability to provide real security leaves many feeling that it prioritises the rights of delinquents over those of law-abiding citizens. Given the growing number of failing states where notions of justice, security and human rights seem mutually incompatible (see Marcelin, in press), Goldstein's analysis of how these global discourses are taken up and reworked in local contexts is not only broadly relevant, but urgent. In the end, Goldstein argues not for resolution of these contradictions, but for the primacy of uncertainty itself. His call for an ‘uncertain anthropology’ and his own struggles to combine activism/advocacy with academic research interrogate key concepts at the core of engaged anthropology (see Hale, 2008). Amid this uncertainty, one truism endures, as observed by Loma Pampa's inhabitants: ‘The law is like a snake; its bite is worse for those who must go barefoot

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