THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION OF "NATURE": THE COPIAPÓ RIVER AND WATER IN THE ATACAMA´S MINING CAPITAL METAMORPHOSIS. XVIII-XIX CENTURIES.

In November 2017 I had the opportunity to participate in the First Research Conference "Urban Rivers: new perspectives for the study, design and management of river territories". La Plata / San Martín, November 2 and 3, 2017, Organized by the National University San Martín and the National University of La Plata (both in Argentina), that past was registered at the time in another post. The justification for going back on that now is that the presentation I had the opportunity to share has been published in the UNLP congress web.

The work takes up and disseminates findings from chapter III of my master's thesis in social anthropology, originally titled "The Nature and the Political Economy of Oblivion". It is a work of environmental history and economic anthropology that starts from the notion of "great transformation" by Karl Polanyi, to analyze diachronically and in long duration the installation of capitalism in the Atacama region and in particular, in the Copiapó valley . We introduce the concept of regionality, to understand the articulation of spaces, flows and movements, from the notion of assemblages and the theory of the Latour network actor stressed to rethink processes in historical retrospective and in a geographical key. In the work I show how long-term processes give shape to processual networks in which some elements of nature, such as water and mineral resources, play an articulating role.

I thanks and appreciate the comments of Fernando Williams (Universidad Nacional de la Plata), and also Diego Rios (Universidad de Buenos Aires), both coordinators of the Work Table No. 1 "History of the relationship between fluvial and urban".

I have good memories of that rainy day in the city of La Plata.

here below I leave the link to the file at academia.edu and a version of the abstrac in English (article in Spanish).

LA GRAN TRANSFORMACIÓN DE LA“NATURALEZA”: EL RÍO COPIAPÓ Y EL AGUA EN LA METAMORFÓSIS DE LA CAPITAL MINERA DE ATACAMA. SIGLOS XVIII-XIX

Abstract

Based on a historical research, this work aims to identify some key transformations in relations between society and environment, mediated by the place of water and the Copiapó River in the context of the trajectories and historical drifts of Copiapó city in the current Atacama region, in the north of Chile. We affirm that the insertion of the city and the region to the world capitalism from 1830, through the mineral resources of the subsoil, produced a great transformation in the place of water and the figure of the river derivated from the new spatial logics of capitalism, in which the centrality of "nature" would be associated to the notion of mineral "natural resources", thus displacing water and the river as articulating elements from the political "regionality" that had shaped territorial and urban development during the colonial period, to a economic “regionality” articulated trough minerals in the mining modernisation. The long-term study of spatial relationships between the city, environment, the territory and the mining economic development allow us to better understand the genealogies of the present in the city and the valley.

Key words: nature, mining capitalism, regionality, Copiapó river