Agustin Diz (Edinburgh): After Abundance: Guaraní Settlements and the Making of the Gran Chaco’s Extractive Frontier
| Dates: | 10 December 2025 |
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| Times: | 17:00 - 18:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Speaker: | Agustin Diz |
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This talk is part of the seminar series of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
Wed 10 Dec 2025, 5pm (UK time). This event will be in person, in Samuel Alexander Building, room A214. It can be followed online here: https://zoom.us/j/95860231166
Abstract: The natural resources taken from the hills and semi-arid plains that make up the Gran Chaco have shaped nation-states and fed into global circuits of finance, they have redefined the possibilities of welfare and transformed governance approaches. Global investors and international financial institutions, nation states and political parties, workers and ‘indigenous communities’ converge in the Chaco as they seek to manage, survive and mobilize resource extraction. This paper traces the ambiguities and tensions that characterise indigenous Guaraní lives as they transpire alongside the roads, government agencies, oil wells, and welfare offices that make up the political and economic infrastructures of extraction in Northwest Argentina. By focusing on the successive resource booms and busts that have been central to the regional and global economy (maize, sugar, oil and gas, and soy) since the 19th century, I show that Guaraní experiences of the Chaco’s frontier economy have fostered a particular social and political attentiveness towards extractive wealth and inequality; an attentiveness that endures despite the apparent decline of the Chaco’s commodity frontier. Combining a historical awareness of extractive histories with contemporary ethnography, this paper furthers our understanding of the Gran Chaco as a commodity frontier: a place where local lives are made through the extraction of natural resources, but also a site within which global economies expand, unfold and become possible.
Agustin Diz is Lecturer in Anthropology of Development at the University of Edinburgh
Speaker
Agustin Diz
Role: Lecturer in Anthropology of Development
Organisation: University of Edinburgh
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
A214
Samuel Alexander Building
Manchester
