From Herders to Wage Laborers and Back Again: Engaging with Capitalism in the Atacama Puna Region of Northern Chile
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From Herders to Wage Laborers and Back Again: Engaging with Capitalism in the Atacama Puna Region of Northern Chile Flora Vilches 1 & Héctor Morales 1
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016
Abstract Towards the end of the nineteenth century, indigenous Atacameño society transited from an agro-pastoralist to a more diversified capitalist-based economy due to a growing mining industry in northern Chile. The puna herders engaged in the new capitalist order as wage laborers in sulfur mines and llareta (Azorella compacta) exploitation companies. In this article we show how indigenous knowledge acted as cultural capital that enabled the herders to work as laborers. This operation led to horizontal treatment among the different agents in the taskscape that those Bherderlaborers^ inhabited, including those incorporated by industrial capitalism. Keywords Atacama Puna . Herders . Mining . Capitalism . Chile
Introduction In the late nineteenth century, the subsistence mode of Atacama indigenous societies shifted from an agro-pastoralist economy to a more diversified capitalist one (Gundermann 2004; Núñez 2007; Sanhueza and Gundermann 2007; Vilches et al. 2014a, b), a transformation that resulted from the expansion of the mining industry in Northern Chile in the context of a national modernization project that ushered the country fully into the industrial age. This process occurred in tandem with the War of the Pacific (1879–83), a conflict that resulted with a Chilean victory and the
* Flora Vilches [email protected] Héctor Morales [email protected]
1
Department of Anthropology, Universidad de Chile, Av. Ignacio Carrera Pinto, 1045 Santiago, Chile
Int J Histor Archaeol
incorporation of a large part of the Atacama Desert, formerly held by Peru and Bolivia, into its national territory. This modern-capitalist project sought to take advantage of Chile’s progress, economic success and increased efficiency to insert the country into the global context, on a par with its counterparts in the Northern Hemisphere. As part of that process, major mining centers began to appear in the Atacama Desert, first for nitrate and then for copper, bringing with them a variety of new technologies such as extensive railway networks, European-inspired architecture, and telecommunications systems, among other things (Garcés 1999). The mining camps attracted a growing workforce from around the country, including workers from the local indigenous population (González 2002). While some indigenous people stayed in their traditional territories—notably the herders of the Andean Puna (highlands)—they did not remain outside of the new capitalist order. In effect, industrialization also spread to the Atacama Puna through sulfur mining and llareta (Azorella compacta) extraction, which acted as subsidiary industries to large-scale nitrate and copper mining. While sulfur was used to process other minerals, llareta served as fuel for industrial operations, but above all was used as a heat source for the mining camps. The Puna herders, for
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