Project Title: Ghostly Invasions: Political Theologies of Fire in Post-Coup Bolivia

In Bolivia, uncontrolled wildfires have been weaponized by a populist far-right as exemplary of the duplicity and deceit of Leftist politicians and irrationality of their Indigenous and populist supporters. This study is aimed at learning about collaborative responses to climate change that have emerged since Bolivia’s 2019 coup, including feminist horticultural projects, anti-imperialist environmental organizing, and grounded land restoration efforts. Such efforts push back against the co-optation of conservationism within a polarized nationalist milieu, wherein conservative politicians have used uncontrolled fires to inflame tensions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Methodologically, the study combines attention to environmental changes with an attunement to the broader political configurations at play in global climate change and in localized efforts to address a rapidly heating planet. Renewed attention to the intersections of race, religion, and climate can cast new light on urgent environmental crises, and on the limits to science in resolving wildfires. Resulting publications will support scholarly and policy efforts to address climate change through the tools of interpretive social science, pressing past a focus on cultures of fire to examine their religious and theological underpinnings and to reveal how competing ontological frames obstruct—and generate—novel possibilities for climate justice.

Biography:
Mareike Winchell is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the racialization of property in light of ongoing histories of Indigenous land dispossession, and how such formations find new expression in contemporary engagements with environmental change. Winchell's first book, After Servitude: Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia (University of California Press, 2022), traced the ways Quechua people in central Bolivia call upon and actively repurpose the past in their efforts to navigate legacies of labor subjection and sexual violence. She is currently at work on two projects (one ethnographic, another archival) that extend her interest in contested formations of racial property to issues of climate change, on the one hand, and more-than-human intimacies, on the other. Winchell is involved in several collaborative projects concerning the intersections of race and climate change. These include collaborative ethnographic research with the Center for Indigenous Peoples of Chiquitos Turubó in Bolivia and comparative research and policy advising as part of the Habitable Air project.