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Background The opioid epidemic has enabled rapid and unsurpassed use of big data on people with opioid use disorder to design initiatives to battle the public health crisis, generally without adequate input from impacted communities. Efforts informed by big data are saving lives, yielding significant benefits. Uses of big data may also undermine public trust in government and cause other unintended harms. Objectives We aimed to identify concerns and recommendations regarding how to use big data on opioid use in ethical ways. Methods We conducted focus groups and interviews in 2019 with 39 big data stakeholders (gatekeepers, researchers, patient advocates) who had interest in or knowledge of the Public Health Data Warehouse maintained by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Results Concerns regarding big data on opioid use are rooted in potential privacy infringements due to linkage of previously distinct data systems, increased profiling and surveillance capabilities, limitless lifespan, and lack of explicit informed consent. Also problematic is the inability of affected groups to control how big data are used, the potential of big data to increase stigmatization and discrimination of those affected despite data anonymization, and uses that ignore or perpetuate biases. Participants support big data processes that protect and respect patients and society, ensure justice, and foster patient and public trust in public institutions. Recommendations for ethical big data governance offer ways to narrow the big data divide (e.g., prioritize health equity, set off-limits topics/methods, recognize blind spots), enact shared data governance (e.g., establish community advisory boards), cultivate public trust and earn social license for big data uses (e.g., institute safeguards and other stewardship responsibilities, engage the public, communicate the greater good), and refocus ethical approaches. Conclusions Using big data to address the opioid epidemic poses ethical concerns which, if unaddressed, may undermine its benefits. Findings can inform guidelines on how to conduct ethical big data governance and in ways that protect and respect patients and society, ensure justice, and foster patient and public trust in public institutions.

The border surrounding the territory of the United States has been interiorized. As efforts intensify to police immigration in the name of creating national security, the locus of securitization ha...

The appearance of effective security making—demonstrated through surveillance, visibility, and ongoing performance—is significant to contemporary sovereign authority in urban spaces characterized by quotidian violence and crime. This article examines La Cancha, Cochabamba, Bolivia’s enormous outdoor market, which is policed not by the state but by private security firms that operate as nonstate sovereign actors in the space of the market. The article provides an ethnographic account of one of these firms (the Men in Black), and documents the work of both municipal and national police—all of them distinguished by differently colored uniforms—in the management of crime, administration of justice, and establishment of public order in the market. Sovereignty here is derived through public performance, both violent and nonviolent, through which the Men in Black demonstrate and maintain their sovereign power.

While matters of security have appeared as paramount themes in a post-9/11 world, anthropology has not developed a critical comparative ethnography of security and its contemporary problematics. In this article I call for the emergence of a critical “security anthropology,” one that recognizes the significance of security discourses and practices to the global and local contexts in which cultural anthropology operates. Many issues that have historically preoccupied anthropology are today inextricably linked to security themes, and anthropology expresses a characteristic approach to topics that today must be considered within a security rubric. A focus on security is particularly important to an understanding of human rights in contemporary neoliberal society. Drawing on examples from Latin America and my own work in Bolivia, I track the decline of neoliberalism and the rise of the security paradigm as a framework for organizing contemporary social life. I suggest that security, rather than a reaction to a terrorist attack that “changed everything,” is characteristic of a neoliberalism that predates the events of 9/11, affecting the subjects of anthropological work and shaping the contexts within which that work is conducted.

Este articulo considera las maneras en que los bolivianos marginalizados e indigenas utilizan la violencia del linchamiento como tactica de auto-representacion en el dominio publico de los medios de comunicacion. En un contexto de exclusion social, ademas caracterizado por un miedo profundo frente el crimen, algunos grupos de vecinos urbanos manifiestan esta violencia para ganar publicidad por sus condiciones de vivencia; para escaramentar a los ladrones, cosa que no regresen a sus comunidades; y para comunicarse con las autoridades para obtener ayuda en su lucha contra la delincuencia. Actores claves en este escenario son los medios de comunicacion escrito y oral, que tipicamente ignoran a los problemas de los "barrios marginales," pero que en los anos recientes han hecho muchos y muy agresivos reportajes al fenomeno de los linchamientos. Los linchadores explotan creativamente esta cobertura para adelantar su propia agenda, utilizando la violencia para publicar sus problemas locales y para dramatizar su vulnerabilidad dentro de la imaginacion publica.

As Bolivia has restructured its economic and political sectors according to a neoliberal model, citizens have been required to become more ‘flexible’ in securing their livelihoods, creating ‘self-help’ economic activities and informal employment schemes to make ends meet. At the same time, as state mechanisms for administering justice and producing ‘security’ fail due to the inadequacies of the neoliberal regime, Bolivian citizens are adopting ‘flexible’ attitudes toward crime and punishment, frequently turning to ‘self-help’ justice mechanisms (including private security patrols and vigilante lynchings) to combat crime in their communities. This article explores the processes by which neoliberal logic and language condition the experiences and responses to crime and insecurity of residents in different neighborhoods of Cochabamba, Bolivia. It suggests that lynchings in Bolivia today be understood as a kind of neoliberal violence, produced both by the scarcities and deficiencies of the privatizing state, and by the logic of transnational capitalism itself, which has saturated civil society and public culture.

In an urban barrio on the outskirts of a Bolivian city, the municipal government engages in a variety of techniques to regulate and manage the illegal settlers and the lands they occupy on the urban periphery. These forms of governmentality are underscored by a paternalist discourse that enjoins barrio residents to embrace urban inclusion as part of a generalized urban Bolivian family. Barrio residents desire such inclusion as a path to citizenship and the socioeconomic rights that such belonging entails, but are skeptical of paternalist rhetoric and the claims of Bolivian politicians to be 'good fathers' to their barrio children. This article examines the engagement between municipal leaders and barrio residents in the struggle to subject one urban neighborhood to state authority.

Vigilantes in the marginal communities of a Bolivian city take the law into their own hands both to police their communities against crime and as a way of expressing their dissatisfaction with the state and its official policing and justice systems. In this article, I examine an incident of vigilante violence (lynching) in one such Bolivian barrio to explore the ways in which vigilantism acts as a moral complaint against state inadequacy, challenging state legitimacy and redefining ideas about justice, citizenship, and law in the process. I also analyze the range of discourses that surrounds lynching in contemporary Bolivian society, exploring the interpretive conflict that results as barrio residents attempt to counter official representations of the meaning of vigilantism in their community. [violence, vigilantism, legal anthropology, citizenship, Bolivia, the Andes]

This paper presents a direction for narrative ethics based on ethical ideas found in the works of Michel Foucault. Narrative ethics is understood here at the meta-level of cultural discourse to see how the moral subject is constituted by the discursive practices that structure the contemporary debate on reproductive technologies. At this level it becomes meta-narrative-ethics. After a theoretical discussion, this paper uses two literary narratives representing the polarized views in the debate to show how the moral subject may be compelled to relate to its self. Ethics is redefined as Foucauldian rapport a soi, and ethical analysis, at this meta-level, shows how the moral self is intimately connected to cultural discourse.

Anthropologists writing about "indigenous media" have identified ways in which ethnographic research involving visual technology can affect the cultural identity and political power of ethnographic subjects, providing them with tools to enhance their own identity-building projects. In this essay I contend that ethnographic writing can also be a form of indigenous media, an implement of self-representation for people otherwise marginalized from the national political mainstream. But the efforts of native informants to establish control over the ways in which they will be represented in print can also create desconfianza , a feeling of mistrust and suspicion of the ethnographer among the people being studied. I reflect on the relationship between desconfianza and the politics of ethnographic practice, and the extent to which questions of performance and representation, far from being mere matters of ethical or philosophical interest to anthropologists alone, are in fact deeply implicated in the political and economic survival of the peoples being represented.

In a migrant barrio of Cochabamba, Bolivia, a community considered marginal in the social geography of the city, people struggle to assert their integration to urban and national life. They accomplish this through dance performances that are widely recognized as components of Bolivia's national Carnaval. By demonstrating mastery of national culture, barrio residents offer alternative constructions of urban space, restore community pride, and improve the area's physical infrastructure. Photographs of a local fiesta illustrate this process of contesting marginality. [Urban space, marginality, Andes, Bolivia]

Despite recent political movements to establish democratic rule in Latin American countries, much of the region still suffers from pervasive violence. From vigilantism, to human rights violations, to police corruption, violence persists. It is perpetrated by state-sanctioned armies, guerillas, gangs, drug traffickers, and local community groups seeking self-protection. The everyday presence of violence contrasts starkly with governmental efforts to extend civil, political, and legal rights to all citizens, and it is invoked as evidence of the failure of Latin American countries to achieve true democracy. The contributors to this collection take the more nuanced view that violence is not a social aberration or the result of institutional failure; instead, it is intimately linked to the institutions and policies of economic liberalization and democratization. The contributors—anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, and historians—explore how individuals and institutions in Latin American democracies, from the rural regions of Colombia and the Dominican Republic to the urban centers of Brazil and Mexico, use violence to impose and contest notions of order, rights, citizenship, and justice. They describe the lived realities of citizens and reveal the historical foundations of the violence that Latin America suffers today. One contributor examines the tightly woven relationship between violent individuals and state officials in Colombia, while another contextualizes violence in Rio de Janeiro within the transnational political economy of drug trafficking. By advancing the discussion of democratic Latin American regimes beyond the usual binary of success and failure, this collection suggests more sophisticated ways of understanding the challenges posed by violence, and of developing new frameworks for guaranteeing human rights in Latin America. Contributors : Enrique Desmond Arias, Javier Auyero, Lilian Bobea, Diane E. Davis, Robert Gay, Daniel M. Goldstein, Mary Roldan, Todd Landman, Ruth Stanley, Maria Clemencia Ramirez