Daniela Soto-Hernández, "Lithium Extraction in Chile: Ontological, Ecological and Economic Dimensions" (Routledge, 2025)

Lithium Extraction in Chile: Ontological, Ecological and Economic Dimensions (Routledge, 2025) is a new book from Dr Daniela Soto-Hernández, a Social Anthropologist currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sussex. In this book, published with Routledge, Dr Soto-Hernández uses ethnographic methods during her intensive fieldwork in Chile, specifically in and around the Atacama Desert, to take a relational view on lithium mining in the region.

Chile is the largest and oldest producer of lithium in South America and the second largest in the world, accounting for nearly 32% of the global supply in 2022. Dr Soto-Hernández’s book, Lithium Extraction in Chile, is a crucial and new way of seeking to understand not only lithium, but the worlds that are created around the resource; inclusive of sacred, indigenous relations, the ubiquitous role of water, the discursive and practical dimensions of lithium production, and the social tensions manifest throughout these processes. Dr Soto-Hernández first explores the ways in which the Chilean Atacama Desert has been constructed as a ‘desolate-scape’ through mechanisms and relations of coloniality and capitalism, to render the territory as lifeless and only appropriate for extraction. Then, and by using the rich fieldwork central to the book, Dr Soto-Hernández puts forward the notion of ‘desertscape’ to express the ways of living for indigenous peoples in the territories of the Atacama Desert, such as for the Lickanantay peoples. This paints a direct contrast to the colonised view of the desert as a ‘desolate-scape’, which serves capital, and instead expresses the abundance, world-making, and life-giving properties of the landscape as ‘desertscape’. This relational view of the Atacama Desert, inclusive of non-people, people, and the sacred, is then used to understand the role of lithium, brine, and water extraction in this crucial territory, with implications for a truly transformative energy transition.

Elliot Dolan-Evans is a sessional lecturer and tutor in law at Monash University and RMIT. His research investigates the political economy of global capitalism, forms of international governance, and questions of war and peace. His first book, Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, is now out with Bristol University Press.

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