ABSTRACT
While imprisoned for drug offences in Bolivia, the anthropologist Alison Spedding, a lecturer at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, worked on two highly unusual and very different books. The first, published in 2004, was De cuando en cuando Saturnina/Saturnina from time to time: una historia oral del futuro, and the second, published in 2008, was La segunda vez como farsa: etnografía de una cárcel de mujeres en Bolivia (The Second Time as Farce: Ethnography of a Women’s Prison in Bolivia). The first is a queer, anarcha-feminist, cyber punk fantasy set in the late twenty-first century which anticipates the political victories of Evo Morales by imagining a future Aymara society characterised by radical social structures and advanced space technology. The second is an ethnographic study of the prison in which Spedding was held in La Paz. This chapter looks at how these texts advance Spedding’s feminist, penal abolitionist politics, in contrasting and complementary ways. In so doing, it interrogates the relationship between imprisonment and creative, critically utopian, political thought.
