Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology
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Images of Cochabamba, Bolivia

Daniel M. Goldstein is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Rutgers University. Goldstein received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 1997, where his dissertation research was funded by awards from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Inter-American Foundation, and the Fulbright IIE. Subsequently, Goldstein has received a Grant for Research and Writing from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and a Richard Carley Hunt fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, which he used to complete his work on the book The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia, published by Duke University Press in 2004. Goldstein joined the Anthropology Department at Rutgers in 2005.

A political and legal anthropologist, Dr. Goldstein studies the effects of political democratization, economic globalization, and the law on poor, indigenous residents of a Bolivian city, exploring the often unintended consequences of global processes for the daily lives of these people. He is concerned with questions of security, human rights, and social justice for marginalized urban people in Latin America. Goldstein is the co-editor (with Desmond Arias) of a collection titled Violent Democracies in Latin America, from Duke University Press.

Currently, Goldstein is working on two research projects based on this ongoing research in Cochabamba. One of these focuses on problems of insecurity for urban residents, and the conflicts that arise when the quest to make “security” clashes with transnational discourses of “human rights.” The second project involves legal and illegal market vendors in the Cancha, Cochabamba’s huge outdoor market; it compares the security concerns of these two groups of vendors, to explore the consequences for people deemed “illegal” as they try to make a living in the city’s enormous informal economy. This research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, programs in Cultural Anthropology and Law and Social Science.

In addition to his scholarly work, Goldstein has been exploring the possibilities of an engaged anthropology, joining his pedagogy and research by creating an anthropological field school/service-learning program in the communities in which he works in Cochabamba (http://studyabroad.rutgers.edu/program_bolivia.html). Each summer, he leads a group of undergraduates as they practice ethnographic research methods and engage in service work with local communities in Bolivia. (For an example of student work, visit www.losambulantes.com). Goldstein has also helped to found an NGO, la Fundación Pro Justicia Bolivia, which is working to create access to justice centers in marginalized communities in Cochabamba.

Book

View resources for teaching Spectacular City

The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia Since the Bolivian revolution in 1952, migrants have come to the city of Cochabamba, seeking opportunity and relief from rural poverty. They have settled in barrios on the city's outskirts only to find that the rights of citizens - basic rights of property and security, especially protection from crime - are not available to them. In this ethnography, Daniel M. Goldstein considers the significance of and similarities between two kinds of spectacles - street festivals and the vigilante lynching of criminals - as they are performed in the Cochabamba barrio of Villa Pagador. By examining folkloric festivals and vigilante violence within the same analytical framework, Goldstein shows how marginalized urban migrants, shut out of the city and neglected by the state, use performance to assert their national belonging and to express their grievances against the inadequacies of the state's official legal order. During the period of Goldstein's fieldwork in Villa Pagador in the mid-1990s, residents attempted to lynch several thieves and attacked the police who tried to intervene. Since that time, there have been hundreds of lynchings in the poor barrios surrounding Cochabamba. Goldstein presents the lynchings of thieves as a form of horrific performance, with elements of critique and political action that echo those of local festivals. He explores the consequences and implications of extralegal violence for human rights and the rule of law in the contemporary Andes. In rich detail, he provides an in-depth look at the development of Villa Pagador and of the larger metropolitan area of Cochabamba, illuminating a contemporary Andean city from both microethnographic and macrohistorical perspectives. Focusing on indigenous peoples' experiences of urban life and their attempts to manage their sociopolitical status within the broader context of neoliberal capitalism and political decentralization, The Spectacular City highlights the deep connections between performance, law, violence, and the state.