“Hopes of waste: Non-coherent practices, the search for vitality and abandoned oil installations in the Northern Peruvian Amazon”

• In Event: Ontologías y/o epistemologías alternativas

Abstract

Oil activities in the Upper Tigre River, located in Northern Peruvian Amazonia, started in the early 1970s, and ten years later the Upper Tigre River was declared one of Peru’s largest and most polluted areas. However, it was not until 2014 that the Peruvian environmental authorities demanded that the current oil operator remediated environmental damaged areas and compensated affected populations. In this workshop, I shall focus on defectively closed or abandoned installations located close to two villages in the Upper Tigre River, and consider illness and damaged bodies. Aiming to address both debates on environmental justice and on distinct ontologies and epistemologies, I discuss how to conceptualize the co-existence of non-coherent practices. I explore the ways villagers’ relate to these installations in terms of ownership understood as a relational process of creation and property as private and exclusive. Regarding illness I focus on causation and vitality and I explore the uncertainties of blood samples and of shamanistic attacks. The three main issues I intend to explore in the paper are the following: By attending to the ways the co-existence of non-coherent practices (related to ownership/property and causation/ vitality) happen, can we better understand the ways people relate to state institutions and political allies? How are these ways related to the desires and hopes of people whose lives are deeply entangled with oil extraction? How do affected people relate past grievances with better futures through the diverse materiality of closed oil installations?

Author

• Maria Antonieta Guzman-Gallegos, University of Oslo