“Community justice”, ancestral rights, and lynching in rural Bolivia

Yates, D. (2020) “Community justice”, ancestral rights, and lynching in rural Bolivia. Race and Justice, 10(1), pp. 3-19. (doi: 10.1177/2153368717713824)

Abstract

Lynching in Bolivia has been portrayed as a largely routinized and primarily urban occurrence that is a direct response to the state's inability to provide security. Using a recent case of rural lynching as a starting point, I will evaluate the idea of rural Bolivian lynching in Indigenous communities as vigilantism. I contrast what little is known about rural lynching in Bolivia to the known pattern of urban lynching and ask if these are distinct phenomena. Finally, I discuss the idea of ancestral validation and the punishment rights implied by a western-style state sanctioning aspects of non-western justice. I ask, do our existing models for such extreme cases as fatal vigilantism exclude lynching in rural Indigenous Bolivian communities? At the heart of this discussion is how we define a cultural practice vs. how we define deviance in a multicultural society; how we nest authority structures and how we afford them legitimate rights to the use of force and other extreme control measures.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Yates, Dr Donna
• Authors: Yates, D.
• College/School: College of Social Sciences > School of Social and Political Sciences > Sociology Anthropology and Applied Social Sciences
• Journal Name: Race and Justice
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• ISSN: 2153-3687
• ISSN (Online): 2153-3687
• Published Online: 19 June 2017
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2017 The Author
• First Published: First published in Race and Justice 10(1): 3-19
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced in accordance with the publisher copyright policy