A. Bartlett Giamatti Graduate Fellow
About
"Negotiating with Powerful Sentient Lands and Mining Corporations: Science, Christianity, and Livelihood Dependencies in Espinar, Peru"
For over half a century, Protestant churches from diverse traditions and mining corporations have become deeply embedded in the Andes, promising autonomy and development while also producing new forms of dependency and obligation. My dissertation examines these overlapping encounters by analyzing the political and epistemological struggles through which Indigenous peoples in the Southern Peruvian Andes negotiate relations with sentient lands and corporations. In this context, Indigenous peoples must continually decipher the agency, intentions, and obligations of beings whose capacities are never fully transparent, but whose effects are profoundly consequential for their livelihoods and well-being. These negotiations entail pragmatic, epistemological, and moral challenges of self-presentation, interpretation, persuasion, and speech, as people seek to make themselves legible to powerful actors while drawing on the full range of political and epistemological resources available to them.
Jose Enrique Solano del Castillo is a PhD candidate in Anthropology.
