Description
- Abstract:
- Despite the increasing presence of formerly excluded ethnoracial populations in state spaces across the Americas, research seldom investigates how race shapes their experiences within the state bureaucracy, and how the formerly excluded navigate race within these settings. This dissertation ethnographically examines these questions in the Bolivian central state bureaucracy and particularly the Ministry of Foreign Relations in the context of a government state decolonization project. It focuses on the situated politics around dominant notions of the ideal bureaucrat, or the criteria of worth that defines which kinds of actors are authorized or de-authorized to govern bureaucratic practice. Drawing on participant observation, interviews, and documents, the analysis reveals that dominant notions of the ideal bureaucrat in Bolivia are embedded in circulating narratives of race and modernity that draw a bright boundary between indigeneity and bureaucracy. Under decolonization, indigenous movement control of key authority posts in the state bureaucracy and the state sanctioning of an oppositional ethnoracial project expanded the symbolic and material resources available for boundary work among new indigenous entrants and their allies. This enabled the articulation of competing criteria of bureaucratic worth that contest the old white-mestizo guard’s conception of the ideal bureaucrat and seek to redraw the ethnoracial boundaries of the Foreign Ministry. Bridging theories of the racial state, boundary dynamics, and race in organizations, this dissertation proposes a cultural analytic framework for race and bureaucracy that focuses on how competing macro- and micro-level ethnoracial projects target notions of the ideal bureaucrat to (re)negotiate the racial state.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2018
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Citation
Bohrt, Marcelo A.,
"(Un)Making the Racial State: Decolonization, Race, and the Ideal Bureaucrat in Bolivia"
(2018).
Sociology Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/bvrh-5r93
