Rivers and worth

: a study on the political ecology of the energy frontier in south-central Chile

Abstract

In Chile, the south-central Andean region has recently emerged in the national geographies of energy as one harbouring a huge potential for new modalities of hydropower generation. Small hydropower projects at different stages of development now proliferate on most of the region’s watersheds. This process has given rise to an equal proliferation of territorial struggles that circulate at different scales, from the strictly local, to the national. The socio-historical and cultural relations in which Andean waterscapes are embedded thus appear as being at the centre of the current dynamics of enclosure and struggle through which the energy frontier is unfolding in Chile. This thesis presents an ethnographic investigation of the struggles emergent from the clashing layers of value, meaning, and practice in which these landscapes are implicated. In particular, it analyses the conflict-ridden relation between the shifting geographies of extraction and rent expressed in the expansion of hydropower infrastructure—and enabled by the commodification of water rights—and the forms of value, commonality, and difference emergent from the historical and socio-territorial constitution of Mapuche and campesino communities in the locality of Huife, and the ways in which these are entangled with the local lands and waterscapes. To approach this, the thesis will develop a theoretical argument exploring the ecological dimensions of Marx’s theory of value, with particular attention paid to the category of use-value and the notion of social form. It will then analyse the recent transformations of the energy frontier and the political economic processes behind its dynamics. In doing do, the thesis explores in detail the different social fields in which local rivers and territorialities are implicated, detailing how these produce the vernacular values that mediate socio-ecological reproduction at the local level—social fields and values from which oppositional forces draw their momentum, and in relation to which current infrastructural transformations acquire their local meaning.

Date of Award	1 Jul 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	King's College London
Supervisor	Alex Loftus (Supervisor) & Raymond Bryant (Supervisor)