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The mining industry is an expanding socio-ecological and political problem worldwide, not least in Atacameño-Likanantay (Indigenous) territories in the hyper-arid Salar de Atacama, Chile. Groundwater Politics addresses the social, technical and political conditions it calls ‘advanced extractivism’ to reveal how groundwater extraction sustains both ecological damage and mining economies. It richly describes the area's copper and lithium industries as historically linked with Indigenous communities and their ecological and economic futures. Based on over a decade of ethnographic research, the book casts community strategies to control water and territory as 'slow resistance’, the structural and multifaceted practices that generate a material future amid potential resource exhaustion.
“This book is timely and sophisticated. It is one of only a few social science or humanities studies of groundwaters and depletion, which is a pressing global problem.” • Casey Walsh, University of California, Santa Barbara
“This book is ethnographically rich, develops a strong line of analysis that adds to the current work in the field, and addresses a well-recognized and important topic.” • Josiah Heyman, University of Texas, El Paso
Sally Babidge is an Associate Professor of anthropology at the University of Queensland, Australia. Some of her publications include Aboriginal Family and the State: The Conditions of History Ashgate 2010), and with P. Dallachy and V. Alberts, Written True, not Gammon! Histories of Aboriginal Charters Towers (Black Ink 2007).
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Uncertainty and the Surface
Chapter 1. Ecologies of Advanced Extractivism: A Material Politics of Relations
Chapter 2. Tilopozo: Ecological History and Extractivist Enigma
Chapter 3. The Labour and Logic of Good Water
Chapter 4. Agreements, ‘Development Benefits’ and Their Moral Economies
Chapter 5. Good Work and ‘Shared Benefits’
Chapter 6. Making Relations: Intentional Intimacies of Advanced Extractivsm
Chapter 7. The Overburden of Participation
Conclusion
References
Index