“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
The mining industry is an expanding socio-ecological and political problem worldwide, not least in AtacamenĚo-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).
LC: GB1001.7 .B32 2025
BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; BUS070150 BUSINESS & ECONOMICS/Industries/Natural Resource Extraction; SOC026020 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Sociology/Rural
