This thesis examines how development provides a site for particular performances of indigeneity in Guatemala. It explores what is produced by NGO governmentality amongst a group of indigenous students participating in private scholarship programs in Guatemala City. The thesis draws on existing literature as well as on ethnographic material to analyze three different outcomes when indigenous students engaged with development NGOs that are trying to “empower” them and enable them to superarse, or overcome their conditions. First, an example of Hale’s “indio permitido” (permitted indian); second, one of the erasure of indigenous identity, where success means assimilation into mainstream white/non-indigenous society; finally, a “third space” where indigenous actors become agents of their own development. This latter comprises the main focus of the project by analyzing how this “third space” looks in three different ethnographic works—Nelson (1999); Smith-Oka (2013); Radcliffe (2014)—as well as in independent research among two university scholarship programs in Guatemala City.

Gender and sexuality are a field through which modernity is imagined, measured, and used to justify racial hierarchies, colonization, and dispossession (Stoler 1995; Rofel 1999; Povinelli 2006, Hirsch & Wardlow 2006). Nation-states have played an important role in mobilizing modernity as an aspirational pathway (Dirks 1990). In Mexico, state policy has become especially interested in socially engineering gender practices since the 1970s within a global preoccupation with overpopulation (Soto Laveaga 2007). My dissertation traces how the notion of gender progress, which in the 1970s was expressed as a concern for smaller families, agentive and working women, and a rejection of the Mexican macho, broadened to include the objective of eliminating gender violence and parentally arranged marriages.

I explore how local public servants in the Huasteca region are not only steering the indigenous population towards the ideal of the small nuclear family through conditional cash-transfer programs (Smith-Oka 2013), but also towards the ideal of the dual earning family and non-violent and egalitarian masculinities. I show how, ironically, indigenous women fulfill the ideal of the agentive working woman by working as maids in Nuevo León and Hidalgo where they are vulnerable to sexual violence. I also show how in the process of seeking wage-labor, young indigenous male migrants who aspire to a notion of liberal love by dating outside their local communities learn their subordinate place in the nation by dating mestizas.

My dissertation argues that both state practice and indigenous peoples’ moral reckoning conceptualize gender progress as a move away from the gender barbarous, non-reflexive Indian. In this way, both state practice and indigenous peoples are placing value on a reflexive and modern indigeneity through the embodiment of new kinds of courtships, marriages, and paternities. I posit that, in Mexico’s post-NAFTA economic conjuncture, gender progress is filling the vacuum left by the end of state-sponsored peasant agriculture and peasant citizenship. Thus, while gender progress serves to reproduce new (albeit rehashed) categories of otherness, it may be the most accessible platform by which otherwise marginalized indigenous subjects sidelined to precarious forms of employment can make claims to agency, respect, and national relevance.

Ashrey is a village in North India that is made up of one tribal community that was once nomadic, racialized, and criminalized under British rule, but has been reclassified as a Scheduled Caste (also sometimes known as “untouchable”) and permanently settled in this village since the 1970s. Ashrey has since become what some scholars term a “prostitution village,” a place where the majority of families derive most of their income from sex work. Commercial sexual labor is highly contested in Ashrey, and has been officially banned by the community's extra-judicial council. Despite their directive, sex work continues as an open secret. While it might seem like politics in Ashrey could align with several salient political frameworks in North India, including development and indigenous rights, I did not find that politics took these forms in this community. Instead, political life in Ashrey is a question of who and what is “good.” This dissertation looks at the good first in its historical context as the community came to be categorized by various governance regimes. I then detail the ways in which sex work is contested and debated as a potential site of the good, followed by how an NGO intervention has disrupted its use in the community. I end with two cases in the local village council, where goodness is evaluated through the public performance of dispute resolution. Ashrey, I argue, is a community perpetually enmeshed in hyper-moralized discourses of not only sex work, but race, gender, tribe, caste, class. As a result, politics have become an ethical enterprise motivated by a collective investment in the good. This finding is significant because it implies that what some anthropologists call “the good'' can be a site not just of morality or ethics, but also of political power.

This investigation focuses on women’s constrained exercise of agency, gained through the sale of drugs in Quito, Ecuador. The global surge in female incarceration through the ‘80’s and ‘90’s produced a myriad of studies that attempted to explain their participation in the drug world. However, only recent publications have focused on understanding this phenomenon outside of a structuralist approach. In a context of a failed drug war and re-drawing of anti-drug policies, it is important to understand why women continue dealing drugs after incarceration, outside of the ‘economic necessity’ discourse. I argue that, in a multiply constrained context, the ten Ecuadorian women I interviewed did not only seek to sustain their children through drug dealing, but also to define themselves outside of motherhood. The sale of drugs allowed them to negotiate with the available state and culturally imposed narratives to attain wellbeing. This study is based on ethnographic fieldwork that took place from July to September 2015 in Quito and surrounding areas of Ecuador. I conducted 35 semi-structured interviews and participant observation during my stay. I conclude that women’s lived experiences reveal their resistance to the state imposed exclusion from leading purposeful lives. If the state and society continue avoiding women’s assertive (and not only victimizing) narratives explaining their incursion into drug dealing, any future changes in penal policy (as they relate to drugs and “reinsertion”) will fail to curb the incarceration of women on minor drug offenses.

Paulo Freire stated that there are two ways to be in this world: a "non-reflexive" one, which implies being an object of the history, and a "critical" one, which means being a historical subject. As part of his pedagogy, this Brazilian educator designed a transition methodology between one conscience and the other, in order to liberate the oppressed people. This proposal has been applied in a wide variety of contexts throughout the world, not only in populations with limited resources. However, there is little literature on these processes.

This work is an ethnographic research that focuses on the experience of promoting indigenous women (factory workers, domestic workers, store sellers) with low schooling, who become teachers of high academic and human quality within a Freirean project of Popular Education and Local Development of INEPE (community-based organization from La Dolorosa de Chilibulo / Isoloma) in Quito - Ecuador. It is argued that the agency (conceived as the act of educating for freedom) is part of the development of critical awareness of these indigenous women; and also, that these are simultaneous, collective and spiral processes, driven by solidarity, participation and dialogue of knowledges.

In this thesis, I argue that the anthropological study of Kichwa-speaking peoples in the Ecuadorian Amazon is characterized by two categories of analysis: one with a focus on structuralist topics of interest and the other with a decidedly political economy overtone. Through a selective literature review of each theoretical shift, I offer a critical analysis of both of these trends, examining their origins, strengths, productions, and erasures, as well as their relative successes in reflecting Kichwa self-interpretations. I also describe how these trends build off of each other, forming, in part, out of reactions to the other’s shortcomings while still falling short of either the political or religio-cultural aspects of Kichwa life. In sum, structuralism lacks emphasis on power and politics, while political anthropology tends to undermine the importance of ethnography and unique indigenous cosmologies.

Because of these limitations, I propose that the best way to bridge the gap between the structural and the political is through political ontological literature, which brings to light indigenous cosmology and radical difference while also highlighting how indigenous uniqueness is played out in the political arena. Although not without its own failings, political ontology attempts to bring together the benefits of both of these theoretical shifts without falling into their traditional traps. Political ontological analyses have been applied to indigenous peoples elsewhere in Latin America, but it has yet to be applied to lowland Kichwa. Furthermore, such an analysis is vital in order to understand anthropologists’ intellectual approaches to difference, including indigeneity as difference.

This dissertation examines how individuals and groups in Timor, including Timor’s State, have been engaging with, talking about, commemorating, and creating historical narratives of the brutal 24-year Indonesian occupation of Timor from 1975-1999. While the dissertation begins with an examination of remembrance of Indonesian rule in Timor’s immediate post-independence period, as conducted by Timor’s truth commission (the CAVR), its focus is on the “post-transitional justice period” following the end of the CAVR’s formal operations in 2005, and continuing to the present day. It focuses most specifically on the period from 2011-2012.

I argue that there has been a shift in Timor’s post-independence period from a CAVR-sponsored narrative of the past focused on human rights violations and suffering victims, to a narrative focused on Timor’s struggle for independence from Indonesia and the veterans or heroes of that struggle. The dissertation explores how this narrative, which involves the allocation of various benefits to those deemed veterans, has been promoted or embraced by various actors in Timor for different purposes. Among other things, Timor’s political leaders, who themselves are mostly veterans, have promoted a narrative of past resistance to Indonesian rule in order to maintain personal political power.

The dissertation examines how the CAVR’s previously dominant narrative of victims and veterans has come to be largely displaced from Timor’s public sphere. I argue that a victim-veteran binary has developed in Timor, in which the victim has come to be defined in negative relation to the veteran as one who did not resist Indonesian rule and is devalued accordingly. At the same time, I show how the superficial displacement of an official narrative of victimhood and human rights by a heroic narrative of veteranhood in post-independence Timor, belies the fact that certain values of human rights and transitional justice have been incorporated into attempts to define veteranhood and to determine who are the most heroic Timorese.

Since 1895, Compañía Topo Chico has bottled mineral water from the Topo Chico hot springs at the base of Cerro Topo in northern Monterrey, Mexico. Utilizing iconography and a fabricated myth of an Aztec princess, the company has capitalized on representations of indigenous women to market their product. To read this representation, I theorize the creation of cultural identity within Monterrey at the intersection of discursive and economic production, seeking to understand the evolution of ideas of indigeneity in the norteño understanding. I argue that the longevity and growth of this company reflects Monterrey’s corporate move to modernity and discursive sense of exceptionalism. Yet I decenter the role of regional identity with the advent of new national discourses following the Mexican Revolution and so indicate the power of the nation-state to control images and symbols in the national imaginary. However, the growing power of the post-revolutionary Mexican state manifested itself materially as well, as the government facilitated the privatization of the thermal waters and the consequent expansion of capitalist logics in Topo Chico. Lastly, I look at the consumption of Topo Chico in Mexico and the United States, exposing how representations of indigenous women on consumable products reify colonial ideas of indigenous women as consumable themselves.

This thesis is a narrative and analysis of the MAPU-Lautaro, a Chilean Marxist-Leninist organization active from 1983-1994. The group fought to replace socioeconomic inequality and the brutality of the Pinochet dictatorship with a Socialist vision for Chilean society. Through direct action the group aimed to alter the mindset of the Chilean population and thereby spark revolutionary consciousness within the working class. Members of the Lautaro, as they preferred to be called, recuperated basic goods and redistributed them in Santiago's poorest neighborhoods. They later became increasingly involved in more violent actions and confrontations with Chilean security forces, eventually leading to the dismemberment of the group. Interviews with former members were conducted to gauge their levels of engagement in politics and social movements and to determine the forms of resistance they are currently engaged in.

This dissertation examines the effects of state-led decolonization in Bolivia among historically marginalized rural indigenous communities the Andean highlands. As part of its efforts to decolonize society, Bolivia’s revolutionary 2009 constitution declared the country a “communitarian, plurinational state” and granted indigenous people the right to exercise their own forms of justice. My analysis shows significant disagreement over the meaning of justice as indigenous leaders develop grassroots legal strategies to implement this right in a variety of contexts. At the national level, indigenous legal activists seek to redirect institution building processes back toward their own longstanding project of self-determination, revealing significant disagreement over who decides the proper role of the state in plurinational Bolivia. At the local level, I show how winning legal recognition of jurisdiction over (often decades-long) land disputes in rural highland communities carried with it the onerous task of untangling the extremely complicated and historically constructed problems that were often entangled into the disputed land itself, including competing claims to land rights and government corruption. Unable to address communities’ practical concerns, local organizations lost legitimacy, often leading to more even uncertainty or conflict.

Ultimately, this research shows how liberal law operates to maintain hierarchies of race, even in context like Bolivia, where new forms of legal pluralism have been advanced as a tool to dismantle them. I approach indigenous justice, not as an object with distinct values and practices to be studied, but rather as a diagnostic tool that leaders take up to analyze overlapping structural harms masked by state recognition and discourses of indigeneity. Writing from the uncertainties that indigenous legal activists face as they come up against the constraints of their own legal strategies, my research shows how the search for indigenous justice nonetheless opens critical space for imagining alternatives from the perspective of entangled and always-contested social projects on the ground.