Mareike Winchell

Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Associated Faculty, Divinity School; affiliate, Center for the Study of Race, Culture, and Politics, Center for Latin American Studies, and Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality

PhD, University of California Berkeley, 2015

Mareike Winchell is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, with affiliations in the Divinity School, the Center for Latin American Studies, the Center for the Study of Race, Culture, and Politics, and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. A political anthropologist, Winchell focuses on the racialization of property in light of ongoing histories of Indigenous land dispossession, as well as how such formations find new expression in contemporary engagements with climate change. Her first book, After Servitude: Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia (University of California Press, 2022), traces the ways people call upon and actively repurpose the past in their efforts to navigate legacies of labor subjection and sexual violence. Such engagements reveal a more durative orientation to justice, one that departs notably from utopic projects of property that require disarticulating land and people, and the present from the past.

Winchell is currently at work on two new book projects. The first, "Ghostly Invasions: Political Theologies of Fire," focuses on the racialization of climate politics in Bolivia. The book traces the authoritarian tendencies of environmentalisms that preserve nature's purity and reproduce narratives of racialized guilt and responsibility. Conversely, it considers grounded collaborations—feminist horticultural projects, anti-imperialist environmental organizing, and land “restoration” efforts—that seek to move past the divide of standard conservation (with the separation of people and nature) and statist approaches that have often seen land redistribution and ecological protection as antithetical.

A second book, "The Servant’s Properties: Materiality, Gender, and More-than-Human Landscapes in 20th Century Bolivia," explores the legal claims of out-of-wedlock children born to indentured laborers after 1953. Based largely on archival materials, the book asks how incommensurate approaches to land and place came to be cemented within institutional knowledges, and what that process reveals about the remaking of property by non-secular orientations to landscapes and/as kin. More broadly, the project shows how marginalized hacienda workers transformed land relations and hierarchies through practices of bureaucratic maneuver and legal subversion.

Winchell’s writing and digital scholarship have appeared in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI), Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Cultural Anthropology, Journal of Peasant Studies, Critical Times, Bolivian Studies Journal, and Comparative Studies in Society and History. She has received generous funding from the Josephine de Karman Fellowship Trust, the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, The Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Center for International Social Science Research (CISSR), and The Townsend Center for the Humanities. In 2021, Winchell was a finalist for the Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders Award, awarded by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Association).

Learn more about Winchell's research & read her published work at:
https://chicago.academia.edu/MareikeWinchell

After Servitude: Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia is available for purchase here: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520386440/after-servitude 

Contact Information

Office: Haskell 205
Phone: (773) 702-6755
Email: mareike@uchicago.edu

BOOKS

JOURNAL ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS (*indicates peer-reviewed)