Wetland Alterities: Geological Refusal and the Excess of Lafkenche Sovereignty

• In Event: Finitude in Other Terms: Uncommoning Extinction - I

Abstract

The 2010 tsunami radically altered the geomorphological conditions of the Tubul Raqui wetland, in the heart of the Lafkenche territory. New conditions proved inhospitable to the ​​pelillo​​ seaweed (​G​racilaria chilensis​​), which abruptly disappeared from the wetland—and from the fragile, pelillo-based economy of Lafkenche communities. The new geoeconomic context proved inhospitable, in turn, to the participatory process implemented by a public-private consortium to harmonize the conservation of the Tubul Raqui with the economic activities in and around the wetland. Lafkenche communities had long resisted the plan for its reluctance to recognize ancestral relations to the ​​wetland​, and hence celebrated the tsunami-driven cancellation of the process despite the destruction of their means of subsistence. In this paper we track ethnographically the conflict around the ​bude​ to theorize about the relation between two seemingly disparate forms ontological excess at play in Tubul Raqui: the excess of indigenous worlds with regard to liberal environmentalism, and the excess of the tsunami in relation to life. We coin the term “geological refusal” both a as an ethnographic device to follow the work of hydrological forces in the perspective of Lafkenche struggles for sovereignty, and as an analytics for accounting for indigenous alterity not in terms of the animation or liveliness of otherwise inert things, but in the possibility of engaging with the radical aloofness of geological matter. Finally, “geological refusal” rehearses a conversation between political ontology and feminist geophilosophies to think about the excesses and politics of the life/death binary in times of massive extinction.

Authors

• Manuel Tironi, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

• Denisse Vega, P. Universidad Católica de Chile