The Business of Belonging: Fraud and Markets in Bolivia

2024-25 Associate Scholar Susan Ellison's ethnographic research in Bolivia challenges conventional understandings of fraud, revealing how multilevel marketing companies speak to broader questions of trust, race, and economic opportunity.

When anthropologist Susan Ellison met Casimira, an Indigenous schoolteacher in Bolivia, she was already several months into research on multilevel marketing and was interviewing Casimira at her Herbalife club. But her conversation quickly opened onto something larger than the business itself. Casimira spoke enthusiastically about Herbalife, a U.S.-based multilevel marketing company with operations in Latin America and around the world.

For Casimira, success was embodied not by a university professor or government official, but by Antonia—an Indigenous woman with only a third-grade education who had become a "millionaire" within Herbalife's ranking system. While the title did not represent actual wealth, it symbolized recognition, status, and the possibility of a different future. "I am following her path," Casimira told Ellison. 

That encounter informed Ellison's broader research into why multilevel marketing companies continue to attract participants despite the financial risks they often pose. During a recent DRCLAS research colloquium, she drew on years of ethnographic fieldwork in El Alto and La Paz to argue that these organizations offer more than the promise of income they can provide a sense of dignity, community, and alternative pathways to recognition in a society where race, class, and opportunity remain deeply intertwined.

Rather than approaching fraud simply as financial deception, Ellison's forthcoming book examines it as "a political, legal, and moral category." Her research explores how accusations of fraud shape everyday life in Bolivia—from politics and housing markets to family relationships and entrepreneurship—and how people decide whom to trust in a world where formal institutions have often failed to deliver on their promises. 

Ellison argues that the appeal of multilevel marketing cannot be understood solely through the promise of financial success. Instead, these organizations resonate because they tap into aspirations for dignity, social mobility, and belonging while offering participants new forms of recognition often unavailable through traditional educational or professional pathways. As one woman she interviewed explained, "Nobody asked me for my diploma. Nobody asked me if I could read or write. I wouldn't exchange this company for the world." 

At the same time, Ellison emphasizes that these aspirations often exist alongside exploitation. Participants may invest savings, take out loans, or mortgage property in pursuit of opportunities that overwhelmingly benefit those at the top of the organizational hierarchy. Rather than dismissing participants as simply deceived, her research asks why these promises become persuasive in the first place—and what they reveal about broader inequalities embedded in society. 

By examining multilevel marketing companies and pyramid schemes as a lens through which to understand trust, citizenship, race, and economic opportunity, Ellison's work challenges conventional assumptions about fraud and entrepreneurship. In doing so, it offers a powerful reminder that the most revealing questions are often not about why people fail, but about what they are striving to achieve.