Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The introduction lays the groundwork for the volume’s explorations of indigenous life-making projects in encounters with extractivism in South America. It discusses how people’s contestations of extractive endeavours have opened up questions of alternative ‘politics of nature’, bringing entities of the landscape into the political sphere. Examining ways in which current turbulences actualise questions of indigeneity, difference, and ontological dynamics, the introduction considers the contributions and problems of a ‘turn to ontology’ in anthropology. It argues for an ethnographic exploration of indigenous life projects and for the significance of ontological and cosmological dimensions of indigenous responses and creativities. Amerindian experiences of loss and suffering are discussed as a function of an inflicted inability to realise their life projects in situations saturated by extractivism. We revisit debates on continuities and transformations regarding indigeneity, capitalism, representation, and land, trying to avoid conceptual imperialism while addressing extractivism on a broad front.

The chapter by Guzmán-Gallegos’ examines the diverse and changing ways in which the Kichwa people relate to the leftovers of oil extraction in their everyday lives in the borderlands of Ecuador and Peru. She investigates these remains as part of a landscape of rubble saturated by ruination processes. The chapter shows how ruination embodies capitalist expansion through its persistent disdain of Kichwa as disposable and of their lands as a sacrifice zone. It considers ongoing attempts to take control over the toxic leakages and abandoned installations as acts of contestation that actualise singular notions and enactments of ownership. In turn, through their relational co-constitution of persons and objects, these Kichwa conceptions and practices challenge hegemonic divides concerned not only with ownership but also with the constitution of the political realm itself. Finally, the author proposes that the articulation of distinct indigenous enactments and understandings of ownership redefine the asymmetries that characterise their relations with non-indigenous actors.

The chapter by Penfield focuses on multifaceted responses to extractivism by drawing on field research among the Sanema of Venezuelan Amazonia. The Sanema’s location in the resource-rich forests of the Venezuelan petro-state means that extraction has a twofold bearing on their lives: first as the indirect phenomenon of oil wealth disbursed to citizens and second as the intimate reality of gold mining in their territory. In contrast to the more common depiction of indigenous resistance to extraction, Penfield shows how the Sanema’s responses are deeply interwoven with their social and cosmological ethos, particularly as relates to transforming notions of personhood. Rather than connoting a movement towards individualism and social degeneration, Penfield also shows how the wealth associated with extraction may also facilitate sociality, reciprocity, and compassion on a daily basis. Moreover, these encounters with different forms of extraction play out as a gradual incorporation into the national and global economies.

The chapter by Krøijer considers the devastating consequences of the penetration of the extractive frontier into indigenous territories in Ecuador. She examines the strategies followed by the Sieko-pai for dealing with the transformations to their world caused by decades of oil exploitation. Instead of assuming essences, Krøijer pursues the analytical implications of specific ontological enquiries about oil flows, and how indigenous communities make their lives in a world saturated by extractivism. Documenting the Sieko-pai’s similar considerations about the incorrect treatment of both oil and blood as potential disruptions of positive ‘flows’ between their territory‚ body‚ and powerful ‘others,’ she contributes to current debates around the ontological analogy between oil and the so-called blood of subterranean spirits. Krøijer describes how living with oil extraction hinges on and expresses the Sieko-pai’s flexible ability to deal with transformations and the leaky reality of resource enclaves.

The chapter by Ødegaard leaves the rural scenarios of this book for an urban one, focusing on smugglers of fuel operating in the frontier between Peru and Bolivia. She considers the labour of as a redirection of commodity flows from the official fuel distribution and as contributing to subsume wealth to particular modes of sociality, including ’ relations with market colleagues, kin, and earth-beings. This redistribution entails a semiotic multiplication involving systems of meaning that exceed the capitalist system of commensuration: a hegemonic vision accompanying narratives of progress and extractivism in South America. When exploring ’ relations to the powerful earth-beings, Ødegaard finds a particular relational understanding of wealth which reveals entanglements of locally embedded worldings and dominant extractive practices. Without dismissing the consequences of accumulation and inequality, she describes a set of strategies to mediate extractivism’s forces and wealth while paying attention to the relational and cosmological aspects of mediation; here termed .

While most studies focus on the boom in oil, minerals, and logging, Stensrud’s chapter explores another form of extractivism, which is growing in importance: the extraction of economic value from the water that flows to infrastructural megaprojects, which are damming the water for agribusiness. Focusing on the implications of the Majes Irrigation Project (MIP) for Quechua-speaking farmers in Peru, and how they make claims to the water springing from the mountains, Stensrud analyses the conditions that make land claims in Majes possible. Their claims are connected to notions of belonging and ownership that emerge from particular ontological compositions of water, mountains, personhood, and earth-beings that are not deliberately invented as part of an indigenous strategy to stop extractivism. Rather, these compositions form part of relationships that are continuously nurtured as part of ongoing life projects that conflict with the extractivist and modernising project of colonising water by turning it into an economic resource.

The chapter by Rivera Andía examines the terms by which the Cañaris Quechua-speaking people of the Northern Peruvian highlands establish their relationship with the land in a context marked by a ghostly extractivism. Leaving open the possibility of a radically distinct multiplicity of an environment with whom humans relate in social terms that exceed modern conceptions of private property, he describes local practices and conceptions relating to the production, access, and administration of land. What emerges is an entity that is less ‘natural’ and ‘indigenous’ than what is usually the focus of Andean ethnographies: the (Quechua term for Spanish , church). Clandestinely built of earth and plants by eighteenth-century Indians, this land- and child-temple does not only represent the land but constitutes it. Rivera Andía considers the material and ritual aspects of the human-land relationship that produces the as a truly cosmopolitical device with which Cañarenses are able to contend on their own terms with the threat of extractivism.

The chapter by Brightman discusses the works of international environmental NGOs that seek to conserve biodiversity among native Amazonian people in Suriname as a nonconventional form of extractivism. Based on his fieldwork in Suriname, he investigates the Carib-speaking Trio people’s understanding of this relatively new economic, political, and ideological scheme promoted through the marketisation of conservation. What emerges is an account of how Trio conceptualisations (in particular, those regarding land ownership) contrast and entangle with the perspectives of technical and governmental agents intervening in their territory. Thanks to this comparative approach, Brightman is able to contribute an ethnographically informed insight into the different sets of distinctions and continuities between carbon and biodiversity accounting and other more conventional forms of extractivism.

The chapter by Li and Paredes Peñafiel explores the manifold interconnections between community-based resistance and national as well as international activist networks. They trace the organised opposition to a proposed mining project in Peru’s Northern Highlands (the Conga mine) and how local activism travels through documentaries, news media, lawsuits, and networks. Analysing the international reverberations of the conflict and activist efforts, they interrogate the emergence of key leaders—particularly women—and how they and media actors represent the conflict. These representations of environmental conflict in Peru also gain importance elsewhere, and the authors explore how they both travel and translate into a situation of increasing resistance to extraction in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Local resistance thus reverberates and spreads and may challenge the logic of extractivism by opening up a space for alternative life-making projects that both transcend and communicate between connections to a local landscape.

Addressing how indigeneity in Bolivia is actualised in social mobilisation as well as by the Morales regime, Fabricant and Postero’s chapter examines the different ways in which indigeneity is performed and represented. Focusing on protests against the construction of a highway through indigenous territories, they consider how performance can play a central role in what they call moral reflection about indigeneity, gender, and the articulation of alternative social worlds. Using the concept of ‘ethical substance’, the authors explore how, through performance, indigeneity serves as a central site of moral reflection and conduct. In so doing, they show how protests and performance also call into question the legitimacy of the Morales government’s claim to stand for all indigenous peoples. The chapter demonstrates how distinct actors can claim access to indigeneity, and that multiple actors perform indigeneity to push through their own ethical and political agendas.