Since the mid-twentieth century, Latin American rural territories have undergone significant transformations. One of the leading causes is the expansion of large-scale operations that exploit natural resources for world market exportation with low processing. In this paper, we study the changes in agricultural activities, livestock, and land use in the Calama oasis (the Atacama Desert, northern Chile) in relation to the growth of large-scale copper mining and other chained processes (urbanization and increased demand for water resources); based on a mixed methodology combining descriptive statistics, archival and bibliographic review, ethnography, and spatial analysis. We present the results through a historical reconstruction of the analyzed dimensions and their relationships, accounting for contradictory dynamics in time and space. We identify how mining and urban growth promote some agricultural and livestock activities under certain economic and political conditions, while in other contexts, these activities have been severely weakened, seeing increasing urbanization of rural land, rural-urban pluriactivity, and a growing deagrarianization.
Extractivism has marked the history of Latin America whose operations are in rural territories inhabited mainly by indigenous populations. Mining has had a remarkable expansion in rural territories of the Andes. Critical studies of these processes have focused on the disruptive aspects and conflict between companies, local populations, and States. However, mining has also been intertwined with the territories based on contradictory relationships at different timescales. To examine this issue, we carried out a historical reconstruction of the productive practices of the Caspana community indigenous (northern Chile) and their different forms of connection with mining development. We combine diverse data sources and methodological approaches: oral histories obtained from ethnography, censuses, explorers’ records, and academic literature. We identify different types of relationships over time, according to the different forms of indigenous participation in the extractive markets and the deployment and rearrangement of diverse economic strategies by the indigenous population.
This paper shows the current status of companies in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector in Santiago, Chile. It presents the results of interviews with 13 ICT companies, reviewing structural elements that determine the development of the sector. For this purpose, a qualitative analysis of that interviewed group is carried out to identify their different linkages and work dynamics. This sector has a great capacity for stimulating innovative development throughout the national economy, a key element in the paradigmatic change that the so-called fourth industrial revolution imposes on us.
El presente artículo es una reflexión teórico-metodológica sobre las potencialidades de la vinculación entre el método comparativo y la antropología, expresada en el análisis de sistema-mundo. A partir de esta mixtura, proponemos, desde nuestra experiencia etnográfica, una tipología para comprender el impacto de la expansión del capitalismo en su fase neoliberal sobre asentamientos rurales en Chile. Exponemos la posibilidad de utilizar el método comparativo para comprenderlas de manera simultánea como entes constitutivos de este sistema. Así, asumimos para la reflexión, que dichas agrupaciones participan de manera interconectada en un sistema histórico basado en la apropiación y acumulación capitalista mundialmente integrada, que propicia la configuración de conflictos contemporáneos de diferentes orígenes y características, cuyo estudio es de suma importancia para el conocimiento de dichas poblaciones.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.