When States Act Like Movements

Abstract

Ethnographic approaches to sovereignty have focused on de jure or de facto practices and relations of rule constituted through culturally mediated violence inscribing incorporation or exclusion onto human bodies. Sovereignty as such is historically and territorially variegated, even within nation-state borders, and observable as emergent processes that seek to (re)order authority, territoriality, and sociality within, against, or in complicity with the formal operations of the state. In post-neoliberal Bolivia, state and social-movement efforts to “seat” (sentar) sovereignty and “reestablish” (refundar) the state pose an interpretive challenge to critical ethnographers of power because sovereignty-making practices have instrumentalized the production of sacrificial subjects in alliance with subaltern movements rather than enactments of violence against them. Examination of a conflict over the Guarani territory of Alto Parapetí reveals the way state and movement tactics of transnational witnessing, legal inscription, and the visualization of violence on the ground are deployed as strategies that shift conventional understandings of sovereign violence and its subjects on the margins of a state in transformation.