This website is designed to provide supplementary resources for readers and teachers of the book, The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia, by Daniel M. Goldstein. Here you will find a range of materials to enrich your reading of the book, and to help facilitate your teaching of it. Included are study questions for students and others reading the book; supplementary images (including video) that do not appear in the book; and information about the author. Visitors will also find original materials that illustrate for students the process by which an ethnography like this one comes into being - from the proposal, through fieldnotes, to the final written product.

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at Duke University Press

“The Spectacular City is a highly original contribution to the ethnography of law, violence, and the state. Goldstein explores the connections between localism and violence both as situated action and as genres of performance, resulting in a nuanced analysis of politics between state and nonstate forms.”

—Carol Greenhouse, coeditor of Ethnography in Unstable Places: Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change

“Fascinating and rich in ethnographic detail, The Spectacular City is particularly important at this moment because it examines the increase in common crime that has accompanied the consolidation of neoliberal capitalism in Latin America. Although it is widely appreciated that crime has gotten worse, there are very few anthropological studies that explore this phenomenon at the local level.”

—Lesley Gill, author of The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas

 

Daniel Goldstein invites you to email him any comments or suggestions by clicking here.