Bruno Octavio Sanchez Omonte

This anthropological research examines a paradoxical phenomenon in contemporary Bolivia: the coexistence of state human rights discourses with persistent practices and widespread rumors about human sacrifices and lynchings. Rather than treating these rumors as mere falsehoods or remnants of a “traditional” past, this project explores how they function as social technologies that actively shape behaviors, legitimize violence, and configure moral boundaries between communities. The research investigates how rumors circulate across multiple spaces—from popular markets and construction sites to digital platforms and courtrooms—transforming as they move between different social worlds. Through twelve months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Cochabamba, the study will document how these narratives reveal tensions between universal human rights frameworks and local conceptions of justice, prosperity, and social cohesion. By following rumors about sacrifices and lynchings, this project aims to understand how certain lives become “sacrificeable” in Bolivia’s ambivalent modernity, where Western state structures coexist conflictively with Andean cosmologies. The research contributes to anthropological debates on violence, rumor, postcolonial modernities, and the cultural politics of human rights, while generating knowledge from and for Bolivia about the complex ways communities navigate between tradition and modernity, state law and communal justice.