To Revive an Abundant Life: Catholic Science and Neoextractivist Politics in Peru’s Mantaro Valley

Abstract

Since the turn of the twenty‐first century, the rapid growth of Peru's extractive industries has unleashed diverse forms of political resistance to an economic system dependent on ecological destruction and human harm. In the central highlands of Peru, a Catholic scientific project based out of the Archdiocese of Huancayo undertook six years of research on heavy‐metal contamination in the Mantaro Valley. This included lead‐exposure studies in the notoriously polluted city of La Oroya, home to the country's largest polymetallic smelter. How did the Catholic Church become an apt institution for the production of science in this region? Drawing on fieldwork with the Revive the Mantaro Project, this article conceptualizes the integration of religious and scientific practitioners and practices and the political landscape that necessitated, shaped, and limited them. Technocratic governance and anti‐leftist sentiments made science a suitable political idiom for the Catholic Church to enact its ethos of abundance and demand the legitimacy of life beyond bare life. A state of endemic corruption and epistemic mistrust also obliged Catholic accompaniment to scientific practices to generate trust for the researchers and to provide ethical credibility as their knowledge entered the fray of national mining politics. Ultimately contending with entrenched systems of power, the Revive the Mantaro Project's significance extended beyond political efficacy; its practices enacted a world of democracy, rights, and legal protections not yet of this world.

Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017

“…For example, in a Cultural Anthropology Openings and Retrospectives section on “Chemo‐Ethnography,” Nicholas Shapiro and Eben Kirksey (), Michelle Murphy (), and Elizabeth Povinelli () urge us to think with the forms of sociality and care that emerge out of chemical exposures; in the same issue, Elizabeth Roberts's () essay, discussed above, engages similar questions and concerns. Elsewhere Stefanie Graeter () takes up a related task: her chemo‐ethnography, to extend the term used by Shapiro and Kirksey (), considers how a project that tests lead contamination that is run by the Catholic Church in Peru calls a form of biological citizenship into being by acting as though rights that are not (yet) there will be in the future, provided they can produce the expertise and evidence that might materialize them. In another approach to the political urgency of more‐than‐human relations, Angela Lederach () considers the work of a peace and reconciliation movement in Columbia.…”

Mining

“…Other actors may be involved in these epistemic processes. The Catholic Church has lent its imprimatur to scientists' attempts to document lead pollution in Peru, creating an unexpected juxtaposition of science and faith which nonetheless creates facts which can become 'politically actionable' (Graeter 2017 amongst college students, which can be conceptualised as 'scarce' (Ferry & Limbert 2008).…”

Chemo-Ethnography: An Introduction

“…The success of environmentalism in Europe and North America has led to the export of industries connected to toxic extraction and disposal to places like Botswana, where cancer wards are reserved for the postcolonial elite who alone can afford to treat the ills of development capitalism (Livingston ). In Peruvian mines, toxicological monitoring and remediation projects necessitated the integration of Catholic and secular scientific practices, where believers hope to move beyond godless occidental science (Graeter ).…”

“…Roberts ). Chemo‐ethnographers are starting to conduct research on economic, personal, political, and sentimental relationships that have emerged with modern chemistry (e.g., Chen ; Agard‐Jones ; Graeter ; Feser, forthcoming).…”