Groundwater Politics: An Ethnography of Advanced Extractivism and Slow Resistance

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.

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).