The socionature that neo-extractivism can see: Practicing redistribution and compensation around large-scale mining in the Southern Ecuadorian Amazon
Esben Leifsen
Abstract
In this article I address the complex processes of transformation taking place due to industrial mineral extraction in the Ecuadorian Amazon through a focus on state and company led practices of redistribution, social investment and compensation. The analysis of three empirical examples related to the Mirador industrial mining project is viewed in relation to a more extensive assembling of a mining surface. I introduce the concept ‘surfacing’ to refer to discursive and material practices that state and corporate actors make use of to manage, facilitate and enact a redistributive economic policy, and at the same time produce value in and for the global capitalist market. A main argument is that these practices make certain socio-natural relations visible to the project of large-scale mining while obscuring affected peoples' ‘place-based life projects’. Restricted by neo-extractivist modes of recognition, of ‘seeing’ and ‘not-seeing’, indigenous Shuar, and mestizo livestock peasants, colonos, respond to mining intervention based on their differentiated engagements and trajectories with the Amazonian landscape and ecology. The paper is an intent to understand geosocial transformations and the differentiated practices of non-recognition while analyzing these responses.