Lithium scale-making and extractivist counter-futurities in Bolivia

Abstract

This article uses the ethnography of the prelives of lithium industrialization in Bolivia to contribute to wider debates – in anthropology and beyond – about the essentially contested nature of the green energy transition. Based on research conducted between 2019 and 2023, the article examines the topographies of production and sociopolitical mobilization that are entangled with Bolivia’s state-controlled lithium project but which resist the various pressures to reorient social and productive worlds around arguably the most important ‘critical’ mineral for climate policy-making. The article develops a theoretical framework for understanding these localized counter-futurities, one in which the image of scale-making takes on both vertical and horizontal dimensions. An anthropology of energy, climate justice, and resource imaginaries that is critically attuned to these inter-scalar frictions is one that must also be able to project itself through the kaleidoscope of competing energy narratives as a form of both demystification and ethnographic truth-telling.