Indigenous Life Projects and Extractivism: Ethnographies from South America

m a social anthropologist who has conducted fieldwork in Peru since 1997. My research there has been concerned with cultural belonging among Quechua- and Aymara speakers, and intersections of racism, class and gender hierarchies under neoliberal rule. In recent years, my research has focused on informal economies and conflictive claims to ownership in poor urban neighbourhoods in Peru; the ethics of collective action, precarity, and the uncertainties created under neoliberal capitalism and juridicalization. In short, my research has been directed at the crossroads between the corporate state and local improvisations, with a particular interest in women’s involvement in neighbourhood organizations, urban markets, and cross-border trade. I combine my focus on economic relations and processes with an interest in the anthropology of place, landscape, and cosmologies. Central for this interest is a focus on non-Western nature practices and cosmologies of landscape in the Andes; the continuation of these practices from rural to urban settings, and the significance of ritual relations and offerings among Andean migrants. My more recent research has been concerned with energy politics and environmental instabilities in the Anthropocene, or the Capitalocene. I have developed these interests in continuation of my involvement in the research project “Contested Powers in Latin America” (2011-2013), where I explored Quechua- and Aymara speakers’ contestation of extractivist developmentalism; their relations to landscape, and practices of fuel smuggling. In an edited volume with Juan Javier Rivera Andia, Indigenous Life-Making Projects and Politics of Extractivism in Latin America, we discuss these issues further by exploring indigenous life projects and world-making practices in contexts of extractivist turbulences in South America.  Currently, I am developing an interest in how human societies reassess the relationship with the material world in encounters with environmental instabilities and climate change. As an intake to explore this relationship, I pay particular attention to questions of ownership and the commons. I have therefore initiated research also in the Arctic, Svalbard, where I examine dilemmas of housing, ownership and work in the transition to a post-mining society. In so doing, I examine various place-making practices as Svalbard is (un)made as extractivist frontier – and showcase for future solutions. The (re)making of place through post-mining imaginaries is central for this research, as I investigate – among other things – the dismantling of the Svea mining community in Svalbard. Due to my engagement with such issues, I am also part of the network Svalbard Social Science Initiative.

اظهر أقل