Development Seminar

Alonso Barros

on

"Lithium people: at the crossroads of mining and renewable energy"

Thursday 24 January 1-3pm

AP 246

The Lickanantai or Atacameño spread over the Argentinean, Bolivian and Chilean highland border, and like other indigenous peoples in the Americas, they struggle to defend their fragile habitats from the extractive industry (water, copper, lithium, potash, geothermal). Although official land surveys have identified Atacameño territory on many occasions, the states of Argentina and Chile nonetheless consider the land as ‘state’, ‘fiscal’ or ‘provincial’, and grant exploitation rights to extractive companies that drain communal habitats. Inverting Michael Taussig's famous looking glass on commodity fetishism and devil worship in Andean mines, this presentation looks into the biopolitical ecology of mining operations that extract water, copper, potash and lithium from Atacameño socio-nature in order to understand the simultaneous process by which collective resources like water are substituted by individualized forms of cultural commodity fetishism. This paper explains how water divides and cultural lawfare deepens racialized conflicts by fetishizing nature/culture binaries in the form of indigenous rights and conflicts, as highlighted by mainstream media and politics.  The conclusion reflects on the future of negotiations being held by the Lickanantai over water, lithium and energy production in the Atacama Desert, considering whether the recent signature of an Impact Benefit Agreement (IBA) over Lithium has contributed to improve the relevant standards in both Chile and the rest of Latin America.

About Alonso Barros: Alonso Barros is a lawyer and anthropologist, with extensive experience in advocacy and mediation in resource projects affecting indigenous people in Latin America. He is based in Chile at the Faculty of Social Sciences Universidad Nacional Andrés Bello, Santiago. His work focuses on law in society in Latin America, where he has carried out extended fieldwork periods amongst the Mixe of Oaxaca (Mexico) and with Atacameño, Aymara and Quechua communities and peoples across the Argentinean, Bolivian and Chilean highlands. While undertaking research, he provided advice to these communities in their negotiations with public and private agencies in different legal and contractual settings.  Leaning on longue durée historical and legal data, this challenging experience  translated into a historical ethnography of desert and highland peoples, mining cycles and property regimes (bonanzas and busts), that assesses the conflicting historicities involved (time and memory politics). He is interested in the cyclical (de- and re) territorialization of 'vertical' regimes of truth and domains of objects as expressed in property relations and commodity fetishism. 
 

For publications see http://unab.academia.edu/AlonsoBarros
For CV see  http://unab.academia.edu/AlonsoBarros/CurriculumVitae)
twitter @alonsobarros

Alonso Barros will also give a talk in the Development Seminar, Friday 25 January 12-2pm on "Governing the Transition to Renewable Energies: Towards a new global regulatory framework for key resources, with insights from the Lithium Project in the Chilean Atacama". This talk will focus more on the legal and institutional aspects of resource extraction in Latin America more broadly.