Beginning with the inauguration of Evo Morales as the first self-identifying indigenous president in Bolivia’s history, the country entered a period of radical experimentation with state-making, legal ordering, and social engineering as part of a historic project to construct what the anthropologist Nancy Postero has recently described as an “indigenous state.” An intriguing part of this wider long-term project has been the effort on the part of the ruling MAS government and its propaganda institutions to refashion public understandings of time in ways that reposition the “process of change” within an alternative chronoscape, one that supposedly reflects an indigenous vision of the cosmos and its ontologies. This talk, drawn from material in a forthcoming volume, will examine this use of “timework” in Bolivia and explore its implications for anthropology’s own chronoscapes.

About the Speaker

Mark Goodale is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology and Director of the Laboratory of Cultural and Social Anthropology (LACS) at the University of Lausanne. He conducts research on legal regulation, social and political change, and ideology in Bolivia in addition to more theoretical topics within anthropology on ethics, human rights, epistemology, and history. He is the author or editor of a number of books, including the forthcoming A Revolution in Fragments: Traversing Scales of Justice, Ideology, and Practice in Bolivia (Duke UP 2019). His writing has appeared in journals such as Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, and American Ethnologist, among others, and in more general outlets like Boston Review and The Paris Review.