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This special issue is part of a shift in social science and humanities thinking and in public awareness towards planetary water concerns. As societal and scholarly attention to the wet element – and its political import and its cultural constitution – is growing, we ask, how can we rethink our relationships with water in Australia now and into the future? The collection of papers in this issue shows that water responds to human practices which in turn are grounded in cultural imaginaries. Water is thus real in diverse ways, and makes possible diverse material, political and cultural relationships. Taking our lead from the ideas that contributors have developed from this and other questions posed for the issue, our introductory discussion considers three themes that are key to the understanding of water futures in Australia: materialities, temporalities and imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'Green economy', a central plank of the sustainable development political and economic international agenda, relies on industrial extraction of water, minerals and other earths to produce 'green energy' to feed capitalist growth. The term Green extractivism describes a global problem that we examine through the case of lithium extraction in the territory of Atacameño-Likanantay (Indigenous) peoples in the Salar de Atacama, Chile. Green extractivism is a multiscalar logic and practice justified in international sustainable development policies, responding to the demands of capital, modifying international and national legal and political instruments, and permeating social, ecological and political realities in the territories of extraction. Green extractivism has many consistencies with the asymmetries of power and economic dependency that characterises the history of extractivism in Chile and Latin America. As such, Green extractivism provides a new logic to sustain consistencies in transnational capitalism. This paper traces national political and legal histories of lithium from the mid-twentieth century, demonstrating the long extractivist relationship between the state and the lithium companies that operate in the Salar de Atacama. We consider, in particular, the dynamics of Atacameño-Likanantay peoples' participation in and refusals of industry and state processes, which trouble extractivist logics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While acknowledging advances in legal recognition of Indigenous rights, much of the research literature positions negotiated agreements between Indigenous peoples and corporations simply as 'neoliberal technology' that gives the appearance of Indigenous consent while allowing exploitation to continue. This analysis is flawed in considering agreements as discrete, stand‐alone phenomena. It ignores the possibility that Indigenous peoples may use agreements as part of broader strategies to achieve control over extractive industry activity and to secure a share of 'development' benefits — strategies that involve selective engagement with the state. This article supports its argument by locating an agreement between the Chilean lithium mining company, Albemarle, and the Council of Atacameño Peoples within a broad and sustained strategy by Atacameño people to address the negative impacts of mining in the Salar de Atacama, Chile, while securing its economic benefits. This strategy includes using the agreement to voice Atacameño territorial claims and environmental concerns to the state, and to insist that the state lives up to its responsibilities. The analysis leads to a fuller appreciation of the agency exercised by Indigenous peoples in dealing with the sustained expansion of extractive activity on their territories, and a more nuanced understanding of negotiated agreements between Indigenous peoples and mining corporations and between Indigenous people and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thinking with Marind and the "plant turn", Chao casts plants as full agents, possessing the capacity to enact their own trajectories. While some Marind may pity oil palm as a capitalist actor and tool, others like Chao's friend Darius deny its moral personhood; it is a being with "no kin". Uncomfortably for some, in the epilogue, Chao provides an account of her own dream of being mutilated by an Indonesian plantation field manager as he mutilated a sago tree. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses a book titled "Water Lore: Practice, Place, Poetics" which explores the symbolic and narrative aspects of fresh and sea water and their potential for generating new imaginaries. The book includes diverse contributions that examine water categories, emplacement, and sounds in Australia and beyond. The chapters cover a range of topics, including the containerization of the seas in capitalist imagination, the reenchantment of Western imaginations through popular culture, the crisis of imagination in the Anthropocene, and the destruction of waters in different countries. The book also includes reflections on water's capacity to participate in human practice and emphasizes the importance of local thinking. Overall, the book offers a variety of perspectives on water and its significance in different contexts. [Extracted from the article]

This article reflects on ten years of ethnographic work investigating concerns about mining industry-produced environmental and social change in hyperarid territories experiencing long-term drought. The ecological and social effects of groundwater extraction by the copper and lithium mining industry in the southern Salar de Atacama are not immediately detectable, since water, the saltpan, and the desert provide few clues, and the political and economic conditions of water in Chile render it fractured between surface and subsurface, fresh and salt. In public accounts, water belongs to a radical present: there are few environmental reports of water's past before groundwater was profoundly subject to mining, and ecological impacts from aquifer extraction are apparent only after exhaustion has occurred. This article takes a narrative approach that reflects on what may be achieved by "slow resistance" and discerned from accumulated ethnographic witnessing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The March edition of Oceania features two articles that provide valuable insights into Australian culture. The first article, written by Samuel Curkpatrick and co-authored by Wilfred Daniel, explores the connection between singing, conversation, and teaching, drawing on the Yolŋu concept of 'wata' (wind) as a unifying force. This article also offers a critical examination of anthropological representation. The second article, by Alana Brekelmans and Richard Martin, delves into the narratives of 'the frontier' in Outback Queensland, as told by pastoralists and settler-descendant farmers, and analyzes how these stories shape their presence in Outback Australia. These articles can be read alongside other contributions from Oceania's previous issue on 'Water Futures in Australia'. Additionally, the editorial committee of Oceania has recently welcomed two new members, Dr. Sophie Chao and Dr. Jenny Munro. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Mineral extraction landscapes are infamous for their histories of spectacular ecological destruction and corporate-Indigenous community conflict. In contrast, until recently mining company activity and Indigenous community responses in the Salar de Atacama, northern Chile, have been marked by a somewhat mundane political and environmental dynamic characterised by invisible, shifting and short-term benefits for locals and unspectacular contests. However, the effects of extractive industries are cumulative and complex. In this paper, I examine the operation of relatively new Chilean regulation relating to environmental and social impact of mining that includes obligatory consultation between proponents and Indigenous peoples. Relying on new regulation, Indigenous people have expanded their repertoire of response to mining, refusing extractive development's proffered benefits and entering negotiation with powerful outsiders on better terms, but there are also social costs. Using the critical terms of community leaders who protested about the "overburden" of new projects mounting up in consultation with proponents, I examine the structural and temporal problems generated by new regulatory process. Through ethnographic material derived from engaged anthropology, I show how community administrative and political labour to respond to the technical processes of consultation is at once mundane and exhausting. I argue that community work to consider and respond to proposed extractivist projects "exceeds" the progressive politics of recognition and new Chilean regulatory frameworks of consultation and left unaddressed, generates additional negative effects. I suggest that regulatory processes regarding the social impact of extractive industry should take seriously the implications of overburden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Latin American governments are neoextractivist: they promote exploitation of natural resources as central to economic development while acting to mitigate some of the excesses of extractive activity. In the space left open by the neoliberal state in the Salar de Atacama in northern Chile, the mining industry creates its own regulatory mechanisms and provides infrastructure and “improvement” projects to indigenous communities. While these projects gain a degree of consent to water extraction and the value of water for development, indigenous people also resist the neoextractivist project. The contradictions of extractivism-as-development are evident in everyday life and articulated in ritual and cultural practice. We take the example of a ritual and work event, the limpia de canales (canal cleaning), to narrate something of local responses to neoextractivist conditions.Los gobiernos latinoamericanos son neoextractivistas: promueven la explotación de los recursos naturales como elemento central del desarrollo económico y al mismo tiempo actúan para mitigar algunos de los excesos de la actividad extractiva. En el espacio abandonado por el estado neoliberal en el Salar de Atacama en el norte de Chile, la industria minera crea sus propios mecanismos regulatorios y proporciona infraestructura y proyectos de “mejora” a las comunidades indígenas. Si bien estos proyectos obtienen un grado de consentimiento para la extracción de agua y el valor del agua para el desarrollo, los pueblos indígenas también se resisten al proyecto neoextractivista. Las contradicciones del extractivismo como desarrollo son evidentes en la vida cotidiana y se articulan en la práctica ritual y cultural. Tomamos el ejemplo de un evento ritual y laboral, la limpia de canales, para narrar algo de las respuestas locales a las condiciones neoextractivistas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberalism’s failings as a social order are a commonplace in the critical social sciences, and lately such critique has even been ventured from within the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. How has such a problematic form of capitalism both sustained criticism and flourished? Chilean neoliberalism might tell us something of how neoliberal forms weather critique to sustain elite power and significant social inequality, that is, how neoliberalism ‘fails forward’? We examine a case study in the Chilean mining city of Calama where a series of communal strikes and the authorities’ response demonstrate the resilience of neoliberalism and its significant failures that citizens experience as abandonment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of value is fundamental to contexts of resource scarcity given that contest over use and distribution of scarce resources centres on judgments about rights, interests and access. In mining processes, the use and extraction of water in great volumes commodifies and threatens supplies of what others understand to be a substance essential to all forms of life. In the Atacama, while industrial extraction and commodification by the mining industry are the basis for indigenous people's contestations over water resources, an analysis of everyday water practice and performance (as 'ordinary ethics') demonstrates that an indigenous ethics of resources includes commodity values under certain conditions. This paper examines a field of competing actors engaging in extraction and use of scarce waters in order to make an argument for the importance of considering the complexities and dynamics of ethical practice and water value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subterranean waters in the mineral-rich and water-poor Atacama desert, northern Chile, are subject to contest between resource-extracting companies and mostly indigenous residents. In complying with global Corporate Social Responsibility standards and local agreements, and in an effort to reduce opposition from indigenous groups, some mining companies have begun to undertake 'transparency' reporting regarding the impact of their subterranean water extraction activities. These engagements present a moral interface between two streams of global discourse: the CSR principle of 'transparency' on impacts of water extraction and the rights of indigenous peoples to 'native waters.' An ethnographic study of a set of such engagements shows indigenous community rejection of the truths that transparency purports to reveal. However, the apparent intractability of moral contest in such globally comparative and locally specific contexts in terms of distrust of the mining companies is tempered by a proposition for the ethics of engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Latin American & Caribbean Anthropology is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this article we examine the concept of 'indigenous knowledge' as it is currently used in resource management discourse. In the process of engaging with government agents and researchers in the bureaucracy of resource management, indigenous knowledge is a powerful concept in the legitimization of local indigenous practice as well as the recognition of resource and socio-environmental management aspirations. Our use of the phrase 'management speak' frames our analysis of these bureaucratic engagements as process (management) and dialogue, rather than a 'space'. We do so in order to gain insights into the politics and practice of these engagements that might go beyond recognition of indigenous interests and toward more practical approaches. Our discussion draws on research conducted at Yarrabah Aboriginal Community in northern Queensland in relation to marine resource management in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how funeral practices of Australian aborigines in North Queensland revitalize their kinship relations. The family takes control when an Australian aborigine passes away. Family kinship is manifested by the support that kins provide the family of the deceased, such as traveling great distances to attend the wake and funeral. The ties that created the sociality of the deceased are re-created among those who are present, and even those absent, in the funeral.