my.evergreen.edu
Arthur Scarritt
Education
B.A., The Evergreen State College 1993
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin 2005
Website
Biographical Note
Arthur is an Associate Professor in the sociology department at Boise State University. He teaches and researches how people contest and reproduce the multiple forms of inequality in which they are enmeshed, particularly under conditions of austerity.
Publication Type
Scholastic
Academic Research
Latest Publication Title
Racial Spoils from Native Soils: How Neoliberalism Steals Indigenous Lands in Highland Peru
Publication Excerpt
“Though there is broad agreement that colonial legacies are all too alive and well in Latin America, there are few works as meticulous and detailed as Scarritt’s in describing the mechanisms that racialize political economies and reproduce those legacies – particularly the way in which they take root in Native community disputes and interact with other “outside” forces. The book is an impressive work of political ethnography that engages with a staggering number of theorists (of coloniality, development, and Indigenous politics) and is in thoughtful dialogue with Andeanists from various disciplines and community members of Huaytabamba.”
— José Antonio Lucero, University of Washington
This book explains how one man swindled his Andean village twice. The first time he extorted everyone’s wealth and disappeared, leaving the village in shambles. The village slowly recovered through the unlikely means of converting to Evangelical religions, and therein reestablished trust and the ability to work together. The new religion also kept villagers from exacting violent revenge when this man returned six years later. While hated and mistrusted, this same man again succeeded in cheating the villagers. Only this time it was for their lands, the core resource on which they depended for their existence.
This is not a story about hapless isolation or cruel individuals. Rather, this is a story about racism, about the normal operation of society that continuously results in indigenous peoples’ impoverishment and dependency. This book explains how the institutions created for the purpose of exploiting Indians during colonialism have been continuously revitalized over the centuries despite innovative indigenous resistance and epochal changes, such as the end of the colonial era itself. The ethnographic case of the Andean village first shows how this institutional set up works through—rather than despite—the inflow of development monies. It then details how the turn to advanced capitalism—neoliberalism—intensifies this racialized system, thereby enabling the seizure of native lands.