  BRET GUSTAFSON Assistant Professor, Sociocultural Anthropology PhD, Harvard, 2002 314-935-8630 Website gustafson@wustl.edu |
|
| BRET GUSTAFSON Assistant Professor, Sociocultural Anthropology PhD, Harvard, 2002 314-935-8630 Website gustafson@wustl.edu |
|
My research focuses on the ethnography of the state, the politics of knowledge, and the production of sovereignty and territoriality. My regional expertise is Latin America. I came to these interests through my study and work with indigenous movements, first in Guatemala, and later in Bolivia, where I have worked with the indigenous Guarani people since late 1992. The Guarani pursuit of linguistic, epistemic and territorial rights and their engagement with state sponsored education reform is the subject of a book, New Languages of the State: Indigenous Resurgence and the Politics of Knowledge in Bolivia (Duke, forthcoming).
My current project examines how territorial(izing) violences and de facto sovereignties emerge through legal and extralegal political practice in the context of Bolivia's natural gas boom. Engaging work from geography, political science, and economics, I ask what anthropology and ethnography might contribute to debates on the "resource curse," the breakdown and reconstitution of the state, and links between hydrocarbons, violence, inequality, territory, and identity.
For more details on these and other interests, please visit my webpage at artsci.wustl.edu/~bdgustaf/.
Indigenous Peoples and Movements in Latin America; Anthropology of Latin America; Anthropology of Development; Culture, Power, and the State; Social Movements; Ethnographic Research Methods.
Gustafson, Bret
(forthcoming, 2008) "La educación y el resurgimiento indígena en Bolivia: desafíos al proyecto de ‘descolonización’" In Cultura y Cambio Social, Mabel Moraña, ed.
(expected, 2008) New Languages of the State: Indigenous Resurgence and the Politics of Knowledge in Bolivia. Durham: Duke University Press.
(in press) "Flashpoints of Sovereignty: Natural Gas and Spatial Politics in Eastern Bolivia." In The Anthropology of Oil.
2002 "Paradoxes of Liberal Indigenism: Indigenous Movements, State Process, and Intercultural Reform in Bolivia." In Identities in Conflict: Indigenous Peoples in Latin American States. David Maybury-Lewis, ed., pp. 267-306. Cambridge: Harvard Univeristy Press.
