Critical Analysis of Law Lab
Presents
Alonso Barros
Faculty of Social Sciences
Universidad Nacional Andrés Bello, Santiago, Chile
The Lithium People and the Fetish: A Post-Dogmatic
Case Study of the Atacama Desert Peoples and the
Extractive Industry
Friday, January 25, 2013
3:00 – 4:15
Faculty Lounge (Common Room), Flavelle Hall
Alonso Barros is a lawyer (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) and Doctor
of Philosophy (University of Cambridge, Dept. of Anthropology), with extensive
experience in advocacy and mediation in resource projects affecting indigenous
people in Latin America. 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.
This paper looks into the biopolitical ecology of mining operations that extract brine
and Lithium from Atacameño socio-nature in order to understand the simultaneous
process by which common resources (collective property) are substituted by cultural
commodity fetishism (individualized identity). The conclusion shows how water
divides and cultural lawfare racialize conflicts by fetishizing nature/culture binaries in
the form of law and indigenous rights.
For more information, contact simon.stern@utoronto.ca
