2018FHAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8 (1/2): 48–64

DEBATE

Are anthropologists monsters?

An Andean dystopian critique of extractivist ethnography
and Anglophone-centric anthropology
Anders B U R M A N , University of Gothenburg

The article departs from an ethnographic experience involving the kharisiri, a dystopian, fat-stealing monster of the Bolivian
Andes that has been analyzed by generations of anthropologists to understand Aymara culture. However, it argues that when
Aymara people identify Others, in this case anthropologists, with the kharisiri, they are primarily saying something about those
Others, and not about themselves. Following Wagner’s “reverse anthropology” and Taussig’s study of native evil figures as a cri-
tique of capitalism, this article proposes that people who have been subjected to anthropological scrutiny have a critical vantage
point on anthropological practices. Thus, dystopia and monstrosity fulfill a decolonial purpose by handing over a mirror to an-
thropologists, urging them to meditate on their own monstrous ways of operating, the “extractivist” nature of ethnography, the
Anglophone-centrism of anthropological writing, and, not least, the coercive reward systems of academia which disciplinize us
into practicing “kharisiri anthropology.”
Keywords: extractivism, dystopia, reverse anthropology, colonial difference, decolonization, activist research, Aymara, kharisiri

Introduction: Kharisiri on a motorcycle
It was already afternoon, in June 2001, when sociologist
Davíd Quispe and I got on our motorcycle and left the
small rural town of Lahuachaca on the Bolivian high
plateau, headed for provincia Gualberto Villarroel to
teach at a rural educational institute. It would turn out
to be a journey involving dystopia and alterity, extrac-
tivism and exploitation, and, in the end, a fat-stealing
monster mirroring the colonial monstrosities of con-
temporary anthropology. On our right we soon passed
los chullpas, the pre-Inca burial houses, and before long
we stopped for a ch’alla, a ritual libation, and the sharing
of coca leaves at the pass. Then we descended on the
pampa (plain) that stretches out across the Desaguadero
River and all the way toward the llama-herding western
regions of the Oruro Department and the Chilean bor-
der, only interrupted by a minor ridge separating the La
Paz Department from the Oruro Department.
In order to save time, we left the narrow dirt road and
rode instead on the grid of tiny trails. Halfway to the Des-
aguadero River, the chain of our motorbike suddenly
jumped and got hopelessly stuck between the hub and
the swing arm. We found ourselves in the midst of
the vast pampa without any houses or people in sight,
and with no tools to mend our bike. We decided that
I should stay with the bike while Davíd would go by foot
in search of tools toward the small boatmen’s houses
that we knew were to be found on the riverbanks several
kilometers further west.
I sat down in the tiny shade offered by the motorcycle
while watching Davíd as he walked toward the horizon.
An hour or so after losing sight of my friend, I saw a
man approaching by bicycle along the small dirt trails.
When he was approximately 40 meters away, I stood
up and I seemed to have caught his eye. I was dressed
in rubber boots, black jeans, a black leather jacket,
and an alpaca wool cap. With my 190-centimeters stat-
ure, I was probably an interesting sight there on the des-
olate pampa because he stopped. He looked at me for a
few seconds, and as I raised my hand to say hello he
turned left and went around me in a curve before slowly
disappearing along the same trail as Davíd.
An hour or so later, Davíd returned in a pickup truck
on its way to Lahuachaca. He jumped down from the
back of the truck, paid one peso to the driver, and ap-

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Volume 8, number 1/2. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/698413

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49
proached me with a screwdriver and a monkey wrench
in his hands as the pickup truck took off in a cloud of
dust. “We were warned by a caballero [gentleman] on
a bicycle that we should be careful traveling in this di-
rection,” said Davíd with a mischievous grin on his face.
“It seems there’s a kharisiri, dressed in rubber boots and
a black leather jacket, waiting by a motorbike here on
the pampa for his victims!” We chuckled as we began
to loosen the screw nut of the rear wheel.
Ever since that day, Davíd sometimes jokingly intro-
duces me to new acquaintances as his friend “el kha-
risiri,” and I long thought of the episode as one of those
field anecdotes that are more suitable for dinner parties
than for academic papers. After all, few foreign anthro-
pologists who have set foot in the Andes would not be
able to tell a more or less similar one (see Stein 1961;
Wachtel 1994; Weismantel 2001: chap. 5). However, a
comment from an Aymara friend at an anthropology
conference in La Paz some ten years later made me re-
consider the significance of the incident. My friend nod-
ded toward the two foreign anthropologists on the po-
dium and said: “They are vampires. No, brother, even
worse, they are kharisiris!”
I had heard of the kharisiri before the motorcycle in-
cident, not least owing to the abundance of references
to this fearful figure in Andean urban popular culture.1
At night, on desolate roads in the rural landscape of the
Bolivian Andes, the kharisiri is said to await the soli-
tary traveler. In the past, the kharisiri inflicted the Ay-
mara world and mind in the guise of a Catholic priest
or a landowner of Spanish origin with boots and leather
jacket. Through the hypnotizing use of a small bell, or
by spraying pulverized human bones in the air, or by
reciting Catholic prayers backward, he (in those days
he was always male) put his victims to sleep before he
set to work.2 He cut a small, almost invisible, incision
over the kidneys with a knife (nowadays anything from
1. See, for instance, the film El misterio del kharisiri by
Henry Vallejo (2004) and the Bolivian anarcho-punk
band Kharisiri; see also Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel Death
in the Andes and Nicario Jimenez’s famous retablos de-
picting the kharisiri’s Peruvian equivalence, the pishtaku
(see Weismantel 2001).
2. These victims were often adult Aymara men and women
in their prime years (Spedding 2005: 45), for, as Canessa
(2012: 179) notes, kharisiris strike at the very core of so-
cial reproduction.
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ARE ANTHROPOLOGISTS MONSTERS?
a syringe and a scalpel to remote-controlled instruments
are used) and extracted the victims’ body fat. Through-
out the Andes, fat is central to life (Weismantel 2001:
200); it is associated with vital energy and human agency
and is a means of communication between humans and
the spiritual world (Canessa 2012: 171), which is reflected
in ritual practice: llama fat is an essential ingredient in
almost any ritual offering to the ancestors (Fernández
2004; Burman 2016). In the past, the human fat that
was extracted by the kharisiri was said to be used in
church fabrication of votive candles or chrism oil for
use in the Catholic mass. When the victim woke up,
he or she would not remember anything of the incident.
However, the victim’s health would deteriorate and, if
not cured properly, he or she would die. While the tech-
niques and the appearance of this dystopian, monstrous
figure have changed over time, the kharisiri is certainly,
still today, a patent part of Andean lifeworlds. To the
best of my knowledge, I have never met a kharisiri. How-
ever, I have met a few Aymara men and women who as-
sert they are kharsutas, that is, victims of the kharisiri.
In this article, I will deal only quite sketchily with the
idea that the kharisiri is a fruitful subject for approach-
ing how Aymara people think about alterity, identity,
and capitalist and colonial exploitation. This has been
done eloquently and at length elsewhere; among the
most recent ethnographically thorough analyses we find
those of Andrew Canessa (2012: chap. 5) and Gerardo
Fernández (2008).3 The fundamental assumption in
such analyses is that Aymara narratives about the
kharisiri tell us something about Aymara people, be that
of their notions of identity, alterity, or exploitation.
However rewarding and interesting such analyses may
be, accepting Mary Weismantel’s invitation to think
with and from within such “dystopian mythologies of
racial . . . inequality” (2001: 268) in order to put “an
end to the seemingly hopeless reciprocities of accumu-
lation and impoverishment” (267) that characterize the
colonial, capitalist world-system, I would argue that
there is more to the issue than this. Indeed, the kharisiri
phenomenon reflects a power relation between Aymara
people and powerful outsiders, and as such it tells us
3. While dealing primarily with the pishtaco, that is, the Ec-
uadorian and Peruvian equivalent to the kharisiri, Mary
Weismantel’s Cholas and pishtacos (2001) is a brilliant
exploration of the intricate symbolic webs of violence,
sex, race, and power woven around alterity and exploita-
tion as monstrosity.
 Anders BURMAN
something about the two parties involved and, funda-
mentally, something about the asymmetries of power
that characterize such a relation. However, when Ay-
mara people identify outsiders as kharisiris, their inten-
tion is primarily to say something about those outsiders,
and not about themselves.
What happens if we take Aymara people at their
word and approach their kharisiri statements as asser-
tions that reveal more about the outsiders than about
Aymara people, more about parish priests than about
their subjects of salvation, more about anthropologists
than about their “objects of study”? In this article, I fun-
damentally make a claim for letting ethnographic expe-
riences and knowledge gained in social interaction in
“the field” serve as something more than collected data
representational of the people who are examined through
our ethnographic magnifying glasses. I argue that such
experiences and knowledge should be allowed to criti-
cally mold anthropological thought and thoughts about
anthropology in a direct way, much in line with Michael
Taussig’s (1980) argument that people on the periphery
of the capitalist world-system have a critical vantage
point on capitalism. Taussig, therefore, argued that an-
thropologists should study societies on the margins of
the capitalist world-system, not primarily in order to un-
derstand the cultural characteristics of the Other, but in
order to gain novel and critical insights into the struc-
tures, practices, and assumptions of the powerful socie-
ties and institutions at the core of the capitalist world-
system within which tenured anthropologists like myself
tend to enjoy quite privileged positions. In a similar vein,
it could be argued that people who have been subjected
to anthropological scrutiny, and the asymmetric power
relations inherent therein, have a critical vantage point
on anthropology. In other words, Taussig characterized
the former objects of anthropological study as knowl-
edgeable, critical thinkers in their own right. Likewise,
Roy Wagner (see also Kirsch 2006) has recognized the
existence of “reverse anthropology”: that is, a practice of
“literalizing the metaphors of modern industrial civiliza-
tion from the standpoint of tribal society” that emerged
as a result of European colonial expansion, in which
“many of the world’s tribal peoples found themselves
in a ‘fieldwork’ situation through no fault of their own”
(Wagner 1981: 31). Thus, the people with and among
whom anthropologists work do not only share with,
teach, or domesticate these ambiguous interlopers in con-
tinuous negotiations over subjectivity, power, and mean-
ing, they also ethnograph them, invent them as they are
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50
invented, counterexemplify them as they are counter-
exemplified (18, 31).
In this article, I argue that rather than using our an-
alytical tools and practices to make sense of given eth-
nographic data, we may use the frictions of such critical
engagements to rethink our analytical tools and the
tricks and traits of our trade and to critically reflect
upon the extractivist nature of ethnography, the reward
systems of academia—based on neoliberal metrics of
production—and, not least, the Anglophone-centrism
of anthropological writing. At the end of this article, I
make a tentative effort to explore the prospects for “other
anthropologies and anthropology otherwise” (Restrepo
and Escobar 2005).
A first step on such a journey would be to take people
and their narratives seriously—certainly, a standard re-
frain within ontologically oriented anthropology that
has been critically assessed by Rita Astuti (2017) and
others—and not as mere metaphoric representations
there to be dissected in order to gain knowledge of Ay-
mara culture. Posed otherwise, what if there is truth to
the accusations occasionally directed at foreign anthro-
pologists (and, by all means, also at scholars from other
disciplines working in the Andes; see, e.g., Herrera and
Lane 2006)? As argued by Yasmin Musharbash in her
edited book Monster anthropology, monsters are after
all not “mere metaphors or imaginary beings that stand
for something else” (2014: 5). What if the caballero on
the bike was right? What if my friend at the conference
was right? What if anthropologists are kharisiris? But,
then, kharisiris in what sense—literally or figuratively?
And if we are not, literally, kharisiris—what can be
learned, not primarily of Aymara people, but of anthro-
pological practices, if assessed from kharisiri accusa-
tions and compared to kharisiri practices? Rather than
yet another contribution to the ethnography of the
kharisiri, this piece is a critique of the practices of and
institutional conditions for anthropological knowledge
production. There is, after all, a similarity between khari-
siris and anthropologists (especially anthropologists like
myself who work within academia in the Global North—
Scandinavia in my case—and do research in the Global
South) that goes far beyond any physical resemblance, a
similarity that goes to the core of the anthropological pro-
fession as it currently tends to be practiced.
Thomas H. Eriksen argues that the reason why an-
thropology has not “changed the world” (2006: 1) yet is
that anthropologists don’t know how to write in a way
that is intelligible and attractive to nonanthropologists
51
and people outside academia, since “academic educa-
tion tends to destroy our ability to write well” (15). I
would argue that Eriksen singles out only one (minor)
part of the problem with anthropology and its (dis)en-
gagement in the world. Academic education and reward
systems tend to destroy things that are more vital than
our ability to write well; they coerce us into producing
a form of anthropology that is incompatible with any
genuine commitment to “change the world”; they dis-
ciplinize us into practicing an anthropology I call “kha-
risiri anthropology.”
However, before we explore the monstrosities of ac-
ademia, we need to take a closer look at the kharisiri and
the scholarly interpretations of this dystopian Andean
fat-robber.
A metaphor of exploitation
and a tale of alterity
The kharisiri goes under many names. In the Bolivian
Andes, this monstrous person—yes, apart from the fact
that he or she steals human fat for rather obscure rea-
sons and sometimes transforms into animals, they are
quite ordinary human beings—is called kharikhari
(“cut-cut”), lik’ichiri (“fat-robber”), khariri (“cutter”/
“the one who cuts”), or kharisiri (“cutter”/“the one
who cuts”). In the Quechua-speaking parts of Peru and
Ecuador, he or she is mostly known as pishtaku/pishtaco
or ñak’aq (Weismantel 2001). While there are regional
variations in the southern as well as in the northern An-
des, there are some general interesting differences be-
tween the pishtaku and the kharisiri. The pishtaku often
assaults his4 victims violently, kills them with a machete
or a knife, decapitates them (the pishtaku is often re-
ferred to as “degollador,” “decapitator”), and hangs them
from a rope over a vessel in order for the body fat to drip
into it (Ansión 1987: 174–75; Spedding 2005: 38). More-
over, the pishtaku seems to have an appetite for cutting
human bodies open and treating them like animals in
a slaughterhouse (Fernández 2008: 90–91). The kharisiri,
the point of departure of this article, is not a degollador.
His or her ways are much more discrete and less explic-
itly violent; the kharisiri steals fat with sophisticated in-
4. While the kharisiri of the twenty-first century can be ei-
ther a man or a woman, the pishtaku, or ñakaq is a male:
“The ñakaq’s race is inextricably connected to his sex, as
though whiteness brought with it a phallus” (Weismantel
1997: 26).
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ARE ANTHROPOLOGISTS MONSTERS?
struments and lets the victims slowly wither away within
the four walls of their homes. This technological sophis-
tication is related to the fact that the kharisiri is not in-
terested in all kinds of body fat. He or she has a specific
craving for the brown, hard fat (tallow or suet; sebo in
Spanish and lik’i in Aymara) around the organs, not
the white “liquid” fat from other parts of the body. Inter-
estingly, it is common knowledge in the Bolivian Andes
that such hard brown fat is most abundant on fit and slim
rural indigenous bodies owing to the staple-rich, dry
“Indian food,” coca chewing on a daily basis, and the
hard manual work on the fields that characterize rural
Andean life (Fernández 2008: 80, 83, 159; Canessa 2012:
181). Very little or none of this brown fat, it is argued,
is found on nonindigenous Bolivians or anyone else liv-
ing for longer periods in urban areas; they rather tend to
have much of the liquid white body fat that is of no inter-
est to the kharisiri. In other words, the kharisiris have de-
veloped a craving for brown, hard fat from hard-working
rural Indians eating Indian food and chewing coca leaves,
that is, a craving for “authentic” Indians.
Aymara people often make a distinction between
three different nonindigenous categories of people.
While “misti” is an Aymara term for mestizo, and “rinku”
(“gringo”) denotes European or North American for-
eigners, “q’ara” is the Aymara term for Bolivians of Eu-
ropean descent, or people who behave as such. Q’ara lit-
erally means “peeled,” and people often explain the
concept by referring to how the Spaniards came to the
Andes “without anything; no women, no belongings,
no land”—in other words, peeled. The elites are cultur-
ally and socially peeled, or, in Giddens’ (1990) terms,
“disembedded.” They are also, it is argued, exploiters
who live off others’ labor and they have nothing that is
the fruit of their own labor; in this sense, too, they are
peeled (Burman 2017: 932–33).
A fifty-five-year-old Aymara man with whom I have
been working for some years, and who moved from his
natal rural community to the city of El Alto approxi-
mately two decades ago (and who therefore may be ac-
cumulating white liquid fat), explained the difference
between what he calls misti-q’aras and jaqi5 thus: “They
are of another kind, they are not jaqi. They don’t speak
like we do, they don’t eat what we eat, right? And they
have other bodies, not the same fat, lik’i right? And they
don’t know how to work.”
5. Ay. “human,” “person,” “Indian” (see Canessa 2012 for
an initiated discussion of the concept).
 Anders BURMAN
Molded by an entangled, syncretic, and power-laden
colonial history (Weismantel 2001; Spedding 2005: 35;
Fernández 2008: 77; Canessa 2012: 168), the kharisiri
phenomenon tends to manifest a significant racialized
difference between kharisiris (perpetrators) and khar-
sutas (victims) (Canessa 2012: 169; see also Weismantel
1997, 2001), and this racialized difference is often at
the core of anthropological interpretations of the phe-
nomenon.6 In other words, “in the Aymara world, the
lik’ichiri [i.e. kharisiri] is a representation of the ‘other’”
(Rivière 1991: 23) or “a powerful image of the Other”
(Canessa 2012: 170). However, the kharisiri is not only
Other, he or she is also exploitative.
Accordingly, the kharisiri (or kharisiri-like figures
throughout the Andes) has been discussed in terms of
a metaphor for the colonial Other, the European ex-
ploiter extracting vital energy from the colonized In-
dian; a metaphor for the extraction of surplus labor by
the state and other actors (Ansión 1987) and the “hor-
rific nature of labor relations when viewed through the
lens of race” (Weismantel 2001: 201); a reference to the
cultural change that Aymara people are going through
in an “asymmetric and uncontrollable way at the be-
ginning of the twenty-first century” (Fernández 2006:
58); a dramatic indigenous Andean way of articulating
detestation for outsiders after centuries of colonial and
state dominance and exploitation of labor, land, and re-
sources (Crandon 1991; see also Rivera 2010: 29); a con-
sequence of the anxiety and fear caused by an impos-
ing and ambiguous modernity (Wachtel 1994); or, as
Degregori (quoted in Canessa 2012: 169) frames it, the
kharisiri tells of “a brutal intuitive understanding of the
relation between locality, country, and the ‘world capi-
talist system’.”7 I could go on, but I think the picture is
quite clear. To most scholars, the kharisiri is a metaphor
or a representation that allows them to explore Aymara
notions of alterity and Aymara experiences of exploita-
tion. However, Canessa (2012: chap. 5) suggests that the
kharisiri is just as much about identity. The kharisiri is
“a powerful image of the Other, which constructs the
identity of those who aren’t Other” (170). The kharisiri
violates the social norms and mores of Aymara society
6. See Canessa (2012) and Weismantel (2001) for fruitful
discussions of different scholarly interpretations of the
kharisiri and kharisiri-like figures throughout the Andes.
7. For an innovative and critical decolonial reading of extrac-
tivism in South America, see Macarena Gómez-Barris re-
cent book The extractive zone (2017).
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52
and constitutes the antithesis of the socially responsible
and integrated jaqi who thereby constitutes him- and
herself as that which the kharisiri is not. The kharisiri
creates fear and thereby constitutes “the identity of the
people he preys on” (170).
Inspired by Weismantel’s (2001) approach to the
pishtakus of the northern Andes, instead of primarily
probing deeper into the metaphors and the symbolism
of these ethnographic accounts of kharisiris and khar-
sutas, I now aim to explore what happens if we focus less
on what kharisiri narratives tell us about Aymara peo-
ple, and more on what Aymara people’s kharisiri narra-
tives tell us about us, the outsiders, the “disembedded,”
in this case the anthropologists. Because, as argued
above, when Aymara people identify outsiders as khar-
isiris, they are primarily saying something about those
outsiders, and not about themselves. This is not to deny
that a consequence of such accounts directed at the
Other, as Canessa (2012: chap. 5) has shown in an elo-
quent way, can be an intensified collective sense of Self,
that is, identity.
I have identified four characteristics that anthropol-
ogists and kharisiris tend to share: (1) they are “strange”;
(2) they are powerful (relatively speaking); (3) they are
exploitative; and (4) the resources they extract are used
in “strange” contexts. Assessing these characteristics one
by one involves a very critical reading of contemporary
ethnography and anthropology. While, undeniably, indi-
vidual anthropologists have the option to produce other
anthropologies and therefore have an individual respon-
sibility for the anthropological knowledge they produce,
my criticism is not aimed at individual anthropologists’
research ethics or social skills (or lack thereof) in the
field, but at the institutional structures, the academic re-
ward systems, and the professional culture and disci-
plinization that coerce us into producing kharisiri an-
thropology. In other words, my aim is not first and
foremost to put more postcolonial guilt on the shoulders
of individual practitioners of an “increasingly . . . guilty
discipline, desiring to escape its complicity in pernicious
othering” (Gable 2014: 252), but to turn the tables and
let “difference” talk back. Let us begin, then, with the first
characteristic that anthropologist and kharisiris share.
They are “strange”
There is an Aymara word to denote those who are Other,
those who are not part of the local web of social, eco-
nomic, and ritual interaction, commitments, and respon-
53
sibilities: that is, those who are disembedded and “strange.”
The word is yaqha.8 Anyone who is yaqha is a potential
kharisiri. While the Aymara altiplano at first glance may
seem a culturally and ethnically quite homogeneous terri-
tory where people are deeply rooted in their local commu-
nities, it actually bursts with more or less yaqha activities,
elements, and subjects, some more persistent than others,
and some more caricatured and stereotyped by local people
than others, as follows. There are schoolteachers (the more
or less permanent outsiders of the rural community, on a
civilizing quest), doctors and nurses (often young urban
practitioners doing their mandatory one-year rural service
and often ill at ease in their new rural surrounding; some-
times suspected by the locals to be involved in illegal blood
and organ dealing), occasional engineers, lawyers, and
agronomists (with an arrogant air of modernity and knowl-
edge around them), NGO personnel (in four-wheel-drive
pickups, promising “development,” or nowadays “suma
qamaña/vivir bien”), sporadic gringo backpackers (dirty
and with no manners), university students (doing field-
work; rolling their eyes when their local informants do
not understand the terminology of their questionnaire), ur-
ban dwellers visiting their parents’ or grandparents’ natal
village (showing off ), traders and wholesalers (always on
the move, making a lot of money), bus and truck drivers
(always on the move), and then there is the anthropologist
(strange looks, strange manners, asking strange questions,
no enduring social ties, no imperative family bonds, prob-
ably making a lot of money from pictures and information,
giving nothing or very little back, trying to infiltrate the lo-
cal community in a way that few other external actors do).
While caricatured in this account, from the perspective of
a local rural community, many of these characters are
“strange” and many of them are perceived as relatively
powerful in one way or another; they are potential khar-
isiris. However, there is one specific actor, the parish priest
(“strange” and powerful), and one specific institution, the
Catholic Church (“strange” and powerful), that for centu-
ries have been most intimately associated with kharisiri
practices. A middle-aged Aymara man, a former catechist
and a rural schoolteacher, once told me over a crate of
Paceña beer: “The tata cura [the parish priest] is the khar-
isiri. I know, I’ve been there, right? I’ve seen with my own
eyes how he comes and goes at all hours. . . . But there are
others too, it’s not only the tata cura.”
8. For a discussion of the term, see Burman (2016: 31, 240–
43).
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ARE ANTHROPOLOGISTS MONSTERS?
Yes, there are definitely others too. Kharisiri narra-
tives change with changing relations of power. The as-
sociation of kharisiri practices with the Catholic Church
and the parish priest is not as strong as it once was.
Other “strange” actors are identified as kharisiris, often
q’aras and gringos, but also actors who are not osten-
sibly “strange”: “The suspicion has extended to the in-
terior of the Aymara communities, especially to those
peasants who reject communitarian responsibilities
and obligations” (Fernández 2008: 82). In other words,
Aymara men and women are no longer exempt from
kharisiri suspicions (Spedding 2005: 41). There is an
Other within; Others who “no longer behave like ‘in-
dios’” (Rivière, quoted in Spedding 2005: 41); Aymara
men and women who “reject normal social intercourse
and accumulate riches” (Canessa 2012: 175). Recent
economic stratification, urbanization, and a lack of will
to occupy community cargos (offices) seem to provoke
uncertainty and mistrust. Consequently, the kharisiri–
kharsuta relation is no longer exclusively modeled on
racialized differences; it is also modeled on notions of
social personhood and morality. Spedding (2005) ques-
tions the prevalent interpretation of the kharisiri fig-
ure as a metaphor for colonial exploitation by remark-
ing that anyone can now be a kharisiri. The kharisiri
is no longer only described as a tata cura, but may
even be a señora de pollera (a “traditionally” dressed
Aymara woman). As I have argued elsewhere (Burman
2016: 130), the categories of “insider” and “outsider” also
change as demography changes. The kharisiri no longer
appears only along the desolate dirt roads of rural com-
munities, but also in urban areas where the constant
coming and going of people makes the borders between
“insider” and “outsider” fuzzy. While urban neighbor-
hood associations in, for instance, the city of El Alto
provide a certain degree of social control, their scope is
less far-reaching than the social control exercised by ru-
ral communities. In urban areas, what appears to be an
insider might in fact be an outsider. There is free scope
for speculation. Some are able to accumulate riches,
but most stay poor. The rich are afraid of the “envidia”
(envy) of the poor and the poor question the morality
of the rich. Fear and uncertainty leak into neighbor-
hoods, homes, and social relations. Hence, fear exists
not only as an external threat but also as a threat from
within.
If the kharisiri of the twenty-first century is not ex-
clusively modeled on racialized differences but also on
notions of sociality and morality and on the importance
 Anders BURMAN
of community responsibilities and obligations, then Ay-
mara people (jaqi) who do not fulfill their responsibili-
ties and obligations, who accumulate riches and who do
not share their resources with the community, can be
accused of being kharisiris (and hence of not being jaqi).
However, this does not exclude the more conventional
Others from accusations.9 The foreign anthropologist
fits very well also into this image. To start with, the an-
thropologist tends to be an outsider in the community
with no enduring social ties and no imperative family
bonds. From a methodological standpoint it has been
argued that this is not an entirely bad thing, since only
by deliberately alienating ourselves from the world un-
der study can anthropologists “understand it as it can-
not understand itself” (Hastrup 2004: 468), that is, dis-
embeddedness for methodological purposes. Arguably,
establishing imperative family bonds in ethnographic
fieldwork settings is probably far from appropriate on
many occasions. Nevertheless, the decree within acade-
mia to “publish or perish” (see, e.g., Ross 1974), and its
intensification within the current process of neoliberal
metrics in which output is “quantified, audited, metri-
cized and individualized in a highly differentiated, com-
petitive and increasingly corporate environment” (Kember
2014), hampers the creation of even ordinary uncom-
modified, noninstrumentalized social relations between
anthropologists and the people with and among whom
we work. Likewise, however, it may lead to the creation
of instrumentalized bonds of affinity (e.g., compadrazgo
relations) that may be exploited by the anthropologist to
extract more in-depth knowledge as efficiently and cost-
effectively as possible. Who has the time to do extensive
9. It could furthermore be argued that similar processes
and factors (urbanization, disintegration and stratifica-
tion of rural communities, an assimilationist educational
apparatus, a certain socioeconomic mobility) that turned
certain categories of Aymara people into potential kha-
risiris made it possible for Aymara people to become an-
thropologists. While indigenous anthropologist (for dis-
cussions concerning the meaning of “indigeneity” in the
Aymara context, see Canessa 2012 and Burman 2014) ar-
guably tend to have a different “locus of enunciation”
(Mignolo 1999) and therefore may produce an anthropol-
ogy that has less of a kharisiri character, they nevertheless
tend to be subjected to the same institutional structures and
mandates as their nonindigenous peers. In other words,
“indigeneity” is no guarantee against either kharisiri ac-
cusations or the practice of kharisiri anthropology.
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54
fieldwork when one’s Ph.D. thesis is supposed to be man-
ufactured according to an assembly-line kind of logic?
Who has the time and energy to consider local people as
anything else than informants (whether relabeled “inter-
locutors/collaborators” or not) from whom we can extract
useful data when one’s professional career depends on the
manufacturing of a certain number of publications each
year in journals with high impact factors? Who has the
time to take Taussig seriously and consider people not as
research objects, but as knowledgeable, critical thinkers
who have a critical vantage point from which they might
tell us more about ourselves and our practices and the
world we live in than we might want to know?
Moreover, while doing fieldwork, we tend to dedicate
ourselves to activities and topics that, while dealing in
one way or another with local community issues, still
tend to be quite distanced from what holds any kind
of practical or everyday importance in local community
life. Our research topics may be of academic interest,
but they are often totally irrelevant to the local com-
munity. This is so because our research agendas are
generally set not in dialogue with the local community,
but in dialogue with foreign research councils, policies
for international development, academic policies and
research focuses, the anthropological canon, and, not
least, the ever-changing trends of the fashion industry
of social science theory. As Julia Suárez-Krabbe (2016:
156) asks: “Is the description of shamanistic ontology
relevant for the shaman, or is it more relevant for the
scholar who is doing career?” Once in the field, who
has the time to change research focus and dedicate
one’s effort to something that is relevant to the commu-
nity? More than attributing this primarily to the self-
ishness of individual anthropologist careerists, I would
say this is simply the way we do our job; this is the way
we get research grants; this is the way we get published;
this is the way we get rewarded by academia. By being
“strange.”
Being Other, being a “strange” outsider, is a social
position, the result of being socially positioned outside
of a certain moral economy. Anthropology was assigned
the Global South (“the Third World” or simply “the Col-
onies”) in the scientific division of labor (Mignolo 2009:
171). European and North American anthropologists
in the Global South are thereby professional strangers
(Wagner 1981: 17), certified outsiders, disembedded ex-
tractors of difference.
So far, however, I have not taken my argument be-
yond the analogous dimension of resemblances and
55
similarities; I have not explained what I mean by saying
that the caballero on the bike might be right. The fact
that anthropologists are yaqha and someone accuses
them of being kharisiris does not necessarily mean that
they are kharisiris in a literal sense. My argument is not
based on the more or less inevitable circumstance that
individual anthropologists are considered Others in
certain local contexts; after all, “the experience of differ-
ence is central to the agenda of anthropology as a com-
parative discipline” (Gable 2014: 238). Rather, as will
become clear as we proceed, my argument deals with
the institutional conditioning and professional disci-
plinization that exhort anthropologists into practicing a
certain kind of (extractivist) ethnography and producing
a certain kind of (kharisiri) anthropology. Our strange-
ness, our yaqha condition, is simply the basic precondi-
tion for this ethnography to be practiced and for this an-
thropology to be manufactured.
Then again, anthropologists and kharisiris are not
only Others, but relatively powerful Others, which di-
rects us to the second characteristic that anthropologists
and kharisiris share.
They are powerful
Neither kharisiris nor anthropologists are born into this
world as skillful practitioners of a trade. Their respec-
tive skills are learned. However, they are not autodi-
dacts; their skills are acquired in institutional settings.
While anthropologists gain their skills at universities,
kharisiris are said to learn directly from Catholic priests.
What is more, there are stories of veritable kharisiri
schools where young men and women study to become
kharisiris (Spedding 2005: 34). Kharisiris and anthro-
pologists are not only formally trained in certain insti-
tutional settings; their respective practices are endorsed
or even sponsored by powerful institutions. So, while
anthropologists are disciplinized within academia and
are institutionally espoused primarily by universities,
kharisiris are trained and institutionally supported by
the Catholic Church. In Peru, the pishtakus are even
said to be hired by the government to perform their
dreadful deeds, and are reported to have been so since
at least the 1930s (Ansión 1987: 174; Spedding 2005:
38). In Bolivia, besides working for the Catholic Church,
the kharisiris are sometimes said to work for large for-
eign corporations, primarily in the cosmetics industry,
but also in the pharmaceutical and the arms industries.
Consequently, the kharisiris have certain bonds to power-
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ARE ANTHROPOLOGISTS MONSTERS?
ful actors beyond the local contexts within which they op-
erate, and these bonds bestow them with a certain
amount of power. Moreover, the frequent racialized dif-
ference between kharisiris and their victims, as discussed
above, tends to situate the kharisiris on one side of “the
colonial difference” (Mignolo 2002) while their victims,
the kharsutas, are virtually without exception firmly sit-
uated on the other side. However, as Canessa (2012:
chap. 5) has demonstrated, these positions are dynamic
and based on everyday practices and livelihood rather
than any inherent essences. “Race” in the Andes is any-
thing but stable (Weismantel 2001; Canessa 2012).
By all means, and in spite of caricatured images of
pith-helmet-wearing anthropologists, it would be erro-
neous to maintain that an anthropologist is synony-
mous with a white, upper- or middle-class European or
North American. There are, evidently, anthropologies
that are practiced outside of the locations and traditions
of the hegemonic anthropology of the North—and, not
least, from within the cracks and fissures of those loca-
tions and traditions—and that are not “confined within
the epistemological space constituted by a given field
of conceptual and institutional practices” (Restrepo and
Escobar 2005: 99). However, the majority of anthropolo-
gists in the world probably still accompany the kharisi-
ris on one specific side of the colonial difference. And
although anthropology has diversified its geographical
and cultural range and no longer only dedicates itself
to community studies in the Global South, the majority
of its “objects of study” probably still accompany the
kharsutas on the other side of the colonial difference.
In other words, Maximilian C. Forte’s (2012) definition
of anthropology is still largely valid: “a room filled with
white people, talking about non-white people” (see also
Brodkin, Morgen, and Hutchinson 2011). And the “long
and violent history of racial oppression is written onto
the descendants of Europeans whether we like it or not,
for our bodies represent the destruction of other, Indian
bodies” (Weismantel 2001: 218). Kharisiris and anthro-
pologists, then, just like kharsutas and “informants,” tend
to share certain loci of practice and enunciation in a co-
lonial, capitalist world-system that is global in scope but
necessarily embedded and enacted in local processes
and contexts.
The kharisiris are powerful partly owing to their
bonds to powerful global actors, or they embody these
powerful actors in their very being, be that the Catholic
Church or transnational corporations, or even the state.
The anthropologists likewise so; we would be nothing
 Anders BURMAN
without our bonds to powerful institutions such as uni-
versities and research centers, research councils, foun-
dations, states, NGOs, and corporations.
Then again, one could raise the objection that far
from all kharisiris today are racial Others or embodi-
ments of powerful global actors. In contemporary ac-
counts, as described above, they tend to be pictured
not exclusively as q’aras or gringos but also as “persons
of humble appearance” (Spedding 2005: 34): that is, Ay-
mara men and women may also be accused of being
kharisiris. However, such an objection is a lot less con-
vincing than it seems at first glance, since it comes out of
assuming that “race” in the Andes is constituted in the
same way as race in Europe, and it is not (Weismantel
2001; Canessa 2012: chap. 5;). Moreover, kharisiri accu-
sations are not directed against any Aymara man or
woman, but against those who do not exhibit an appro-
priate social and moral conduct of behavior and those
who in one way or another are related to powerful ac-
tors beyond the local context.
Bonds to powerful institutions and/or certain loci in
the world-system, then, are among the factors that make
kharisiris and anthropologists powerful in the local con-
texts of their horrifying deeds and fieldwork, respec-
tively (another factor is discussed below). This power
allows them to establish a certain kind of relations with
their victims/informants, relations that contain self-
reinforcing mechanisms that intensify and solidify the
power asymmetry between the parties. These are rela-
tions based on extraction, be that of body fat or of knowl-
edge, which leads us to the third characteristic that an-
thropologist and kharisiris share.
They are exploitative
Not without reason, the kharisiri has been characterized
as a “powerful metaphor of exploitation” (Canessa 2012:
182). As capitalists extract surplus value from the labor
of the workers and the church extracted tithes from its
subjects, the kharisiri extracts fat from indigenous bod-
ies.10 Thereby, the kharisiri “takes vital generative powers
out of the proper form of circulation among gods, men,
and animals, in order to produce an antisocial kind of
10. For a thorough ethnographic account of how structural
continuities connect historical regimes of exploitation
of indigenous labor to current “racialized resource ex-
traction” in Bolivia, see Winchell (2017).
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56
wealth that cannot sustain itself” (Abercrombie, quoted
in Canessa 2012: 182). Thus, the kharisiri “accounts for
the power of the q’aras” (Canessa 2012: 183), the colonial
exploiters who live off the labor of others and possess
nothing that is the fruit of their own labor. In an ex-
tended sense, the kharisiri also accounts for the power
of the Global North and the current order of the colo-
nial, capitalist world-system: the concentration of capi-
tal in few hands made possible through the exploitation
of human labor and nature in the Global South. Anthro-
pology is part and parcel of this world-system and all too
often functional to it, or as Paulin Hountondji argues
for science in general:
It was natural that the annexation of the Third World,
its integration in the worldwide capitalist system
through trade and colonization, also comprise a “scien-
tific” window, that the draining of material riches goes
hand in hand with intellectual and scientific exploita-
tion, the extortion of secrets and other useful informa-
tion. (Quoted in Mignolo 2009: 167)
For their purpose, the kharisiris have developed a range
of extractivist technologies and tools that encompass
anything from bells, syringes, scalpels, knives, and pul-
verized human bones to watch-like small gadgets, radio-
controlled devices, prayers, books, and communion
wafers. Likewise, anthropologists use dictaphones, tape-
recorders, cameras, camcorders, and GIS equipment. Al-
though rural Aymara people are far from unfamiliar
with modern technology, such devices in the hands of
“strange” people may be a source of uneasiness, as re-
flected in the words of a rural Aymara man in his sixties
who had had a visit by anthropology students from La
Paz the week before I met him: “They had all kinds of
máquinas (gadgets). I don’t like it.” Moreover, anthro-
pologists have developed an array of ethnographic meth-
ods and analytical tools that allow us to extract knowl-
edge from individuals and communities and transform
it into analyzable and cross-culturally comparable data
that subsequently are commodified and used for our
own career advancement and professional advantage. As
kharisiris extract fat, we extract knowledge. At the core
of kharisiri anthropology is therefore what I call “ex-
tractivist ethnography”: that is, a cost-benefit-oriented
methodology for extracting knowledge and informa-
tion and an instrumentalist approach toward the people
among whom we work and through which, as Taussig
argues, critical and knowledgeable thinkers are turned
57
into informants or objects of study. Certainly, there is a
difference between extracting fat and extracting knowl-
edge. Extracting fat involves a process of relocating a ma-
terial substance and dispossessing the victim. Knowledge
has, in this regard, no materiality and its extraction does
therefore not involve dispossession in the same sense.
Nevertheless, in the sense that kharisiris and anthropol-
ogists feed on their victims and “informants,” respec-
tively, they are both extractive agents.
Kharisiris, then, are exploitative in the sense that
they extract vital body fat from their victims. However,
they are also exploitative in the sense that they estab-
lish relations that lack any resemblance to reciprocity;
kharisiris take and give nothing back, they are lun-
thatanaka, thieves. They are the “antisymbol” (Wag-
ner 1981: 31) to community. I would argue that extrac-
tivist ethnography, and kharisiri anthropology more
broadly, works in a similar way. This is not to deny that
there are individual anthropologists out there who give
all kinds of things to “their” informants, anything from
money and medicine to clothes and food (see Low and
Merry 2010: S208). However, on a structural level, the
anthropologist tends to be the taker. The anthropolog-
ical practice implies a general and more or less con-
stant flow of knowledge (turned into data) from the
Global South to the Global North, or, if you wish, from
one side of the colonial difference to the other. Dis-
cussing the identification of the kharisiri with the
Catholic Church, Canessa (2012: 173) argues that “the
priest is seen to derive his powers, not from his God,
but from the fat of the Indians to whom he is minister-
ing.” Likewise, I would argue, anthropologists derive a
substantial part of their power from the knowledge ex-
tracted from the people they study. Taking into consid-
eration that entire academic careers are built upon this
flow of knowledge, anthropologists give very little back.
A sack of flour, a machete, or a cellphone in exchange
for knowledge that allows the anthropologist to get a
book published at a prestigious US university press is
by all means quite a poor deal, or quite a good deal, de-
pending on whether you are an informant or an anthro-
pologist; anyway, it is an unequal exchange.
One could, of course, think of other ways of “giving
back.” One could think of ways to put one’s work at the
service of the community and the people with and
among whom one carries out research. I think of differ-
ent forms of scholar activism, what Charles R. Hale
(2001) calls “activist research,” Davydd Greenwood
(2002) and others call “action research,” or Jeffrey S. Ju-
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ARE ANTHROPOLOGISTS MONSTERS?
ris (2007) calls “militant ethnography.” I also think of
different ways of reconceptualizing the anthropological
endeavor as one of doing “anthropology with” instead
of “anthropology of” (cf. Ingold 2008: 89) and to prac-
tice anthropology by “being there and with as a political
act in the excavation of subjugated knowledges and be-
longings for the creation of alternative futures” (Madi-
son 2007: 829; see also Conquergood 2006). However,
to give back in this sense is generally not rewarded by
academia. Rather, there is often a conflict between so-
cial justice activism and academic success: “Academics
who seek to combine activism with work in the univer-
sity can be subject to threats, abuse, silencing tactics,
and peer pressure and scholarly expectations to shift
away from activism” (Flood, Martin, and Dreher 2013:
1).
There are, of course, exceptions; there are people
who have managed to combine a critical engagement
for social justice with global academic success. In gen-
eral, though, to give back and to be engaged is not re-
warded by the system (Watermeyer and Lewis 2014).
What is rewarded is extraction and distance. This way,
the reward systems of academia (status, tenure, and pro-
motion) exhort anthropologists into extractivist and ex-
ploitative practices. This has made me reconsider the
significance of the incidents related at the beginning
of this article. The caballero on the bike might be right.
My friend at the anthropology conference might be
right. But then again, right in what sense? And can both
of them be right? The caballero on the bike had no
knowledge of my profession. His identification of me
with the kharisiri was therefore no criticism of anthro-
pology or anthropologists per se. My appearance there
on the desolate pampa was rather a schoolbook example
of a kharisiri encounter, and when the caballero told peo-
ple he had met the kharisiri, he most likely meant it in
a literal sense. My friend at the conference, however,
knew the professional identity of the anthropologists
he characterized as kharisiris. His claim is not to be un-
derstood in a literal sense—that is, as an assertion of the
two foreign anthropologists’ nocturnal fat-extracting ac-
tivities—but rather in a figurative or transferred sense,
pointing to the exploitative, extractivist nature of an-
thropological practices, and thereby to the characteris-
tics shared by anthropologists and kharisiris. Hence,
“taking people seriously” is, as argued by Astuti (2017),
not about ingenuously and at all times interpreting peo-
ple’s utterances in a literal sense. It is rather about pay-
ing serious attention to the fruitful frictions between
 Anders BURMAN
the figurative and the literal in people’s narratives, to
the creative contradictions between ascertainment and
transformative critique, to the tensions between exis-
tential trepidation and political rage, and to how people
navigate such seeming discordant tracts. The kharisiri,
then, stands as a dystopian, monstrous figure who crit-
ically challenges the role of the anthropologist by em-
bodying an “oppositional and critical energy or spirit”
(Booker 1994: 3), while simultaneously being an essen-
tial but terrifying character of twenty-first-century Ay-
mara lifeworlds.
Both kharisiris and anthropologists, therefore, are
exploitative. They extract fat and knowledge, respec-
tively, and give very little back. The principal driver be-
hind the extractive practices of the kharisiri is an ob-
scure foreign or misti-q’ara demand for Indian fat. To
those who are subjected to anthropological scrutiny,
the anthropologist’s motives may seem likewise murky,
and rarely are “informants” able to take part in the final
results of anthropological research. This leads us to the
fourth and last characteristic that anthropologists and
kharisiris share.
The resources they extract are used
in “strange” contexts
One of the principal questions in most anthropological
research on the kharisiri is: What do people think the
kharisiris do with the extracted body fat? Aymara peo-
ple sometimes have quite clear notions about the usage
the fat is put to and often tell of soap, cosmetics, and
medicine manufacturing for sale on the global market
(profit); they frequently tell of votive candle and chrism
oil manufacturing for use in the Catholic mass—and
the chrism oil is, moreover, said to be used for giving
shine to the saints’ plaster (ritual use)—and of candle
production for sale to parishioners (profit); people also
occasionally tell of ch’amakanis (a specific class of Ay-
mara ritual specialists, associated with the dark; see Fer-
nández 2004; Burman 2016) using body fat in their cer-
emonies (ritual use); and they occasionally tell of body
fat being used as grease in factories and mining and for
the arms industry (profit, military power). However,
these latter usages seem to be more frequently referred
to in Peru—where people even tell of body fat being
used to amortize the national debt—than in Bolivia
(Weismantel 2001; Spedding 2005: 39). In other words,
people know of the diverse usages the extracted body fat
is put to. However, they have themselves hardly ever
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58
seen the fat being manufactured into this range of com-
modities and artifacts, and only occasionally do they see
these commodities and artifacts being put to use, as is
the case, for instance, when they are used in the Catholic
mass (mass is celebrated only on very rare occasions
in rural communities). Moreover, only occasionally do
they handle such commodities and artifacts themselves,
as is the case, for instance, when they buy candles at the
gateway of the church. In other words, the extracted
body fat and its derivatives are usually out of reach to
the rural indigenous people who are at risk of becoming
kharsutas and tend instead to be handled by “strange”
agents in “strange” contexts beyond ordinary, everyday
local life, in distant warehouses, drugstores, churches,
and factories. Moreover, the body fat and its derivatives
are often out of reach to rural indigenous people for
plain economic reasons, and are instead marketed to
“strange” people with economic resources. Thus, the ra-
cial difference between the kharisiri and the kharsuta
is reflected and reproduced in their respective degrees
of access to commodities: “On picture postcards, an ab-
sence of commodities makes people into Indians. Whites,
in turn, are surrounded—and defined—by a profusion
of purchases” (Weismantel 2001: 213).
While anthropologists doing research on kharisiri
narratives wonder what people think the kharisiris do
with the extracted body fat, people who are subjected
to anthropological scrutiny wonder, and justifiably so,
what the anthropologists do with the extracted knowl-
edge. Or in the words of a middle-aged, rural Aymara
woman whom I talked with a couple of years ago:
“What do they do, huh, with everything we tell them?
And all the photos? They earn a lot of money, people
say.” Yes, what do we do with it? We transform it into
data out of which we manufacture anthropological com-
modities: that is, the “monetizable deliverables” (Luka
et al. 2015) built from the knowledge extracted in “the
field,” in the form of papers, articles, books, and lectures
based on which we in turn build our academic careers,
obliged as we are to “publish or perish” and subjected
as we are to the “regimes of performance” (Morrissey
2015) and the neoliberal metrics of academic production
(Mountz et al. 2015). Aymara “informants” occasionally
have quite clear ideas about the usage to which the ex-
tracted knowledge is put and tell of books and pictures
sold for thousands of dollars in the United States and Eu-
rope. However, they have themselves hardly ever seen
their knowledge being manufactured into anthropolog-
ical commodities, and only occasionally have they seen
59
these commodities being put to use. Even less frequently
do they handle such commodities themselves. In other
words, the derivatives of the extracted knowledge are
usually out of reach to the “informants” and tend instead
to be handled by “strange” agents in “strange” contexts
beyond ordinary, everyday local life: in distant lecture
halls, seminar rooms, libraries, bookstores and databases,
not only geographically and institutionally out of reach
but also economically so. Moreover, these anthropolog-
ical commodities tend to be manufactured in such a way
that they exclude a large portion of humanity, not only
for being written in an academic idiom that is anything
but accessible (quite independently of language), but also
for being published mainly in English—reflecting the
Anglophone hegemony in the current world-system (see
Asad 1986). Or in the words of a young urban Aymara
indianista activist: “All that research is of no use to us;
it’s all in English!”
Out of the fifty journals with the highest impact fac-
tor in the ISI Web of Knowledge Journal Citation Re-
ports (Thomson Reuters 2014) in the subject category
“Anthropology” (widely defined for sure), thirty-nine
are from the United States or United Kingdom. Ten
journals are from other European countries and Austra-
lia. Only one journal is published in the Global South
(Chile). Forty-six journals are published only in En-
glish. Two journals claim to be multilingual but publish
almost exclusively in English. Only two journals publish
mainly in another language than English (Spanish). No
journal publishes in non-European languages.
These figures could be interpreted in the sense that
anything of worth that is being said in the international
anthropological debate is being said in English and is
being published in the Global North. Drawing on Talal
Asad’s (1986) notion of “the inequality of languages,” I
have another interpretation of these figures: anthropol-
ogy is unashamedly Anglophone-centric. On a couple
of occasions, I have been urged by reviewers for promo-
tion and heads of department to take a more active part
in “the international scholarly debate.” My publications
in the second largest language in the world with approx-
imately 470 million native speakers, that is, Spanish,
seem not to fulfill the requirements for being “interna-
tional.” My experience from Scandinavian academia
echoes that of British anthropologist Alison Spedding,
who has lived and work in Bolivia since the mid-
1980s and, coincidentally or not, happens to be one of
the most distinguished scholars on the subject of khar-
isiri:
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ARE ANTHROPOLOGISTS MONSTERS?
For the last ten years I have written almost exclusively
in Spanish and published in Bolivia . . . . European and
North American colleagues have told me this is “wilful
obscurity” and even suggest I have some obscure psy-
chological motive for “refusing” to write in English or
publish in the Real World, that is, the North. Appar-
ently Spanish is not an international language, or any-
way not one that gives you access to academic prestige.
If I write in English, however, no-one in Bolivia will
read what I write . . . . (Spedding 1999: 17)
To publish within my field of research in Spanish is
to partake in a rich and critical Latin American anthro-
pological debate that often is the intellectual seedbed
of the anthropological debates on Latin America tak-
ing place in the high-impact-factor journals referred to
above.11 It is a crucial debate in the sense that critical ac-
ademic discussions that find no place in mainstream An-
glophone high-impact journals carve out a space for
themselves there. Moreover, Latin American anthropol-
ogists and scholars generally, and indigenous anthropol-
ogists and scholars specifically (see, e.g., the works of
Calixta Choque [2009]; Esteban Ticona [2009]; Davíd
Quispe [2014]; Simón Yampara [2016]; Richard Mújica
[2017]), tend to contribute to the anthropological debate
from other cultural and linguistic horizons and from
other geopolitics of knowledge and experiences of politi-
cal struggles than anthropologists from the Global North.
To engage with them in scholarly debates, in Spanish—
or why not in Aymara?—is by all means of great value for
my own anthropological practice and for my own at-
tempts to decolonize my research practices, but to “‘sub-
mit’ to the guidance” of indigenous anthropologists, to
use Mignolo’s phraseology (2009: 172), is also an eth-
ically justifiable way for an anthropologist from the
Global North to continue to do anthropological research
with and among indigenous people in the Global South.
We cannot continue to practice our profession as though
we were still in the bad old days when Euro-American
anthropologists could chart “their” ethnographic terri-
tories as the most natural thing in the world, speak un-
challenged of “their” peoples, and publish exclusively for
what Harry Wolcott (1995: 134) calls the insular “closed
11. This is another, but related, form of kharisiri anthro-
pology, in which foreign anthropologists extract and
simply translate anthropological arguments being ar-
ticulated in Spanish: that is, academic, epistemic extrac-
tion (Rivera 2006), or what Ramón Grosfoguel (2016)
calls “epistemical extractivism.”
 Anders BURMAN
system” of other anthropologists in the Global North.
Nevertheless, there is also an additional value in pub-
lishing in a language that many of the people with and
among whom we work understand: we give something
back. It might not be much to start with; it might be of
little practical value to people. But still, our anthropo-
logical practice becomes less of a kharisiri practice.
My interpretation of the figures regarding high-
impact journals presented above, then, is not that any-
thing of anthropological worth is being said in English
and in US or European journals, but rather that an-
thropology as it tends to be practiced today is a kharisiri
practice, an extractivist, Anglophone-centric, and colo-
nial practice—and as such quite monstrous.
Conclusions: Kharisiri anthropology
and beyond
The machineries of neoliberal academia have, as men-
tioned above, been dealt with by a range of critical
scholars (e.g. Kember 2014; Morrissey 2015; Mountz
et al. 2015). Likewise, exploitation and colonial asym-
metries of power have been central to scholarly inter-
pretations of the kharisiri phenomenon (Weismantel
2001; Fernández 2008; Canessa 2012). Thus, the two
pillars of my main argument are by no means in them-
selves new to the scholarly debate. Nevertheless, when
the seemingly innocent practices of the bibliometricized
anthropologist are read in the light of the horrific deeds
of the kharisiri, problematic aspects of our trade be-
come critically visible. This article, then, is not primarily
a contribution to “monster anthropology” (Musharbash
and Presterudstuen 2014), but a critique of monstrous
anthropology.
Is what I have pictured in this article a spiteful, over-
generalizing caricature of anthropology and anthropol-
ogists? I think not. What I label “kharisiri anthropol-
ogy” is currently the dominant form of anthropology,
which: (1) is based on asymmetric power relations
between anthropologist and “informant”; (2) is based
on extractivist ethnography; (3) is Anglophone-centric;
(4) publishes within an insular, closed system; (5) gives
nothing, or very little, back (not even a text in a language
that might be intelligible to the people with and among
whom we work); and (6) keeps a distance (scholar activ-
ism is a no-no!).
There was a time when anthropology justified its ex-
istence and its practices by participating in public de-
bate “at home” and by critically assessing taken-for-
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60
granted Eurocentric notions of the world and, at its best,
undermining racism. There was a time when anthro-
pologists were not only academics but also, and perhaps
primarily, intellectuals. There was a time when the an-
thropological ivory tower was mainly a myth, since an-
thropologists continuously reached out beyond it and
participated in public debate (Eriksen 2006). (Currently
it is a myth because it is withering in the face of corpo-
rate power as universities are being transformed into
neoliberal handmaidens of capital.) However, if, as
Eriksen (2006) argues, we no longer shoulder the re-
sponsibility of cultural critique “at home” (see also Hale
2006), if we have retreated into the insular, closed sys-
tem of academia and publish only for the sake of our
own careers—coerced as we are by neoliberal metrics
of production—our practices are, I would argue, simply
not justifiable. Dystopia and monstrosity, embodied
here in the kharisiri, thus fulfill a decolonial purpose
by handing over a mirror to the anthropologist, urging
us to meditate our own monstrous ways.
If any of my students would ask me how to become a
successful anthropologist within academia, I would ad-
vise them to produce kharisiri anthropology. “But,” I
would add, “don’t be offended next time an Aymara
man or woman calls you a ‘kharisiri.’ And most impor-
tantly, don’t think they are saying something about
themselves. They are saying something about you and
your practice as an anthropologist.” If that answer failed
to satisfy the student, I would talk to them about the
prospects for decolonial, non-kharisiri anthropologies
that point toward relations beyond the “thefts and rapes”
(Weismantel 2001: 267) that characterize the kharisiri–
kharsuta relation, anthropologies that often are not re-
warded within academia, but that: (1) would reconceptu-
alize anthropological knowledge and recognize that it
was ethnographic experiences (real people teaching us
things in “the field”) that made us think in certain terms
to start with; (2) would be based on other forms of eth-
nography than the extractivist one and in which our in-
terlocutors would be regarded not as objects of study or
informants, but as critical and knowledgeable thinkers,
as Taussig insisted, and in which uncommodified, non-
instrumentalized social relations between anthropolo-
gists and the people with and among whom we work
would be possible, and in which we would be doing “eth-
nography and anthropology with,” not “of”; (3) would
dare to join forces with community organizations or so-
cial movements to advance social or environmental jus-
tice or to address other problems identified by the people
61
with and among whom we work; and (4) would publish
also in other languages than English, and also in other
media than the ones acknowledged in the Journal Cita-
tion Reports, preferably freely accessible and noncom-
mercial. However, we should probably not overempha-
size the importance in itself of publishing our work in
other languages than English; more is needed to counter-
act kharisiri anthropology.
Though not without its own dilemmas and problems
(see Greenwood 2002; Hale 2006; Low and Merry 2010:
S211–14; Sillitoe 2015), and clearly not applicable in all
contexts and to all research topics, I think scholar activ-
ism could be not a blueprint, but a source of inspiration
for imagining non-kharisiri anthropologies. Hale (2001:
2006) suggests that research should be carried out in di-
rect cooperation and dialogue with the people with and
among whom we do our work. This applies to every
phase of the research process, from conception (design
of the research, the questions we pose, the focus we
choose) through dissemination (publication and distri-
bution of the research results, in which language, in
which journals, in which media, how is it validated—ex-
clusively by other scholars or also by organizations and
communities using this knowledge in one way or an-
other?). This would be a means of better understanding
local conditions of social or environmental injustice
caused by extralocal actors and structures, and subse-
quently to formulate strategies for transforming these
conditions and structures (cf. Juris 2007: 171). Never-
theless, the webs of causality behind injustices usually
go beyond local settings. This underlines the impor-
tance of anthropologists being engaged also in critical
public debate beyond the immediate local or national
context of their fieldwork. In other words, my argument
is not that anthropology should be limited to a specific
existing genre of local scholar activism, but that it would
gain in critical potential by letting itself be inspired by
the concept of research found in scholar activism and
activist research. Scholar activism asks us to “identify
our deepest ethical-political convictions” (Hale 2001:
14) and to let them, in continuous and horizontal dia-
logue with the people with and among whom we do re-
search, set the research agenda. Thus, we can practice an
ethnography that is “both politically engaged and col-
laborative in nature” (Juris 2007: 166) and even think
of research as “the art of producing tools you can fight
with” (Russell 2014: 1). However, though the starkest
positivist stances have been abandoned in anthropology
(Low and Merry 2010: S211), what is rewarded in aca-
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ARE ANTHROPOLOGISTS MONSTERS?
demia is still the opposite (Watermeyer and Lewis
2014); to become successful anthropologists we should
stifle our convictions and produce distanced and sup-
posedly neutral social science. Yet scholar activism is
not about expressing our own personal opinions, “going
native,” or leaving academia behind in order to focus
solely on political activism. It is about being explicit
about with what kind of political and ethical luggage we
do our research, why we do it, with whom we do it and
who we are doing it for, and then put it to work (Hale
2001). It is, moreover, about questioning engraved co-
lonial methodological and epistemological assumptions
about what ethnography is about, what anthropology is
about, and how and by whom anthropological knowl-
edge is produced.
Moreover, “there is no necessary contradiction be-
tween active political commitment to resolving a prob-
lem, and rigorous scholarly research on that problem”
(Hale 2001: 13). Rather the opposite: scholar activism
may lead to better research in the sense that it may pro-
vide deeper and more thorough knowledge (Juris 2007:
165–66; Burman 2016: 20). It may also be a way of pro-
ducing theory from within a joint project of knowledge
production in which people are not subjected to anthro-
pological extraction, but have an active stake in the re-
search process and in which there is a shared middle
ground of social and political commitment between the
anthropologist and themselves (see, e.g., Hale 2001; Ju-
ris 2007). This also has the potential of breaking with
the conventional idea of “them” being informants, pro-
viders of raw data, objects of study, and “us” being the
analysts, the producers of knowledge. Such a dichotomy
is all too similar to the racialized kharisiri–kharsuta di-
chotomy to stand unchallenged.
This specific form of scholar activism or activist re-
search is only one potential source of inspiration for
critical anthropological engagement and anthropology
otherwise; there are of course other scholarly stimuli
for producing non-kharisiri anthropology and for in-
cluding our own actions and positions in a critical ana-
lytical endeavor (see, e.g., Weismantel 2001; Restrepo
and Escobar 2005; de la Cadena 2010; Suárez-Krabbe
2016; Gómez-Barris 2017; cf. Low and Merry 2010).
As for now, however, critical engagement is not rewarded
within academia. Eriksen’s (2006) bewilderment over the
fact that anthropology has yet not “changed the world” is
therefore quite ingenuous. Students and scholars who are
interested in engaging in decolonial, non-kharisiri an-
thropologies would, for now at least, have to face the fact
 Anders BURMAN
that they will have to look for rewards elsewhere, for in-
stance in the satisfaction of seeing their work being put
to use by the people with and among whom they work
and in the contentment of, when accused of being khar-
isiris, being able to truthfully say: “Janiwa, nayax janiw
kharisirikti; nayax antrupulukutwa!” “No, I’m not a khar-
isiri; I’m an anthropologist!”
Acknowledgments
The generosity of many people has allowed me to write this
article. I especially want to thank Davíd Quispe, Carlos Yujra,
and Freddy Acarapi for sharing their knowledge, critical in-
sights, and experiences with me, and Dan Rosengren, Stefan
Permanto, Alf Hornborg, Andreas Malm, Julia Suárez-Krabbe,
Mary Weismantel, Sebastian Hachmeyer, and Mirna Ticona
for their critical but supportive comments along the way. I also
thank four anonymous reviewers and Giovanni da Col for
their constructive critique.
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Anders BURMAN is Associate Professor in Human Ecology at the University of Gothenburg and holds a Ph.D. in So-
cial Anthropology from the same institution. He has conducted ethnographic research in the Bolivian Andes for
many years, focusing on social movements, ritual practice, questions of indigeneity, knowledge production and de-
colonization, and, more recently, environmental conflicts and climate change. He is author of Indigeneity and de-
colonization in the Bolivian Andes: Ritual practice and activism (Lexington Books, 2016).
Anders Burman
School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg
Box 700, 405 30 Gothenburg, Sweden
anders.burman@globalstudies.gu.se

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