C Bonelli
Biographic Data
| ID | 27852 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Bonelli |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Bonelli |
| SIGNATURE | BONELLI C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8109-0789 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 76 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Mining matters: Coloniality and the politics of the sustainable energy transition
Contemporary talk of sustainable energy transitions, green technologies, or green energy evokes environmentally friendly, benign and forward-looking policy and practice. Typically, such imaginations of a greener energy future avoid mention of the raw mineral realities of mining. To question these dominant policy framings, we use the analytical lens of coloniality to examine continuities, ruptures and expansions of extractive practices on differen…
A Reserve of Light: Photography, Ethnography, and Lucid Memory in Contemporary Chile
This article takes shape as a shared inquiry between an ethnographer and a photographer, in continuity with the photographic archive of Luis Poirot. Through sustained encounters with his images and archival practices, the text does not position itself outside the archive that motivates it, but unfolds from within it . At its center is what Poirot calls lucid memory . It is not a theoretical category, but a fragile and demanding practice of persis…
White Mining’s Green Dream: Entropy and the mirage of sustainability in Northern Chile
Introduces the concept of entropic omissions in lithium extractivism. • Analyzes how sustainability discourses conceal systemic extractive damage. • Ethnographic cases show entropy is acknowledged yet rendered unthinkable. • Critiques degrowth for overlooking epistemic and colonial extractive logics. • Calls for regenerative practices beyond green extractivist imaginaries. This article critically examines the "green dream" of lithium mining in no…
Sonambulismo verde: Minería, entropía y los límites de la sostenibilidad en el norte de Chile
In a global context defined by climate urgency, the energy transition is presented as an unavoidable solution to the ecological crisis. This article critically examines that promise, revealing how it reproduces industrial logics and epistemic colonialities that constrain the imagination of alternatives. We ask how, in situated ways, political and epistemic forms of automation that accompany green energy transitions are configured and resisted. We…
Metaquímicas del litio: Ciencia e interdisciplina desde Salares Andinos a laboratorios de materiales
En un planeta en calentamiento, el uso de baterías de iones de litio para almacenar energía eléctrica está en auge: los salares andinos son testigos de un número creciente de proyectos de extracción de litio, mientras que en laboratorios de química de todo el mundo se trabaja para generar materiales más eficientes que mejoren las actuales tecnologías. En este contexto, y fruto de una alianza entre un antropólogo chileno y una química argentina, b…
Underground Roots for Ancestral Futures: Exploring Lithium Through an Experimental Alliance between Chemistry and Anthropology
Amid the push for decarbonization and the rise of lithium-ion batteries, global demand for lithium urges an examination of its materiality. Drawing on Barry's chemical geography, which gathers various concerns related to the study of chemicals in the field, and Bachelard's meta-chemical proposal, which challenges a substantialist understanding of chemicals, we propose an experimental alliance between a chemist and an anthropologist concerned with…
Cenizas del Antropoceno: Omisiones de carbón y estratigrafía tóxica en Tocopilla (Chile)
Este artículo ofrece una crítica transdiciplinaria a la abstracción capitalista de la "carbono-neutralidad" a partir de un análisis situado de la producción de energía para la gran minería de cobre y, recientemente, también de litio en la ciudad de Tocopilla (norte de Chile). Al examinar las transformaciones sociales y materiales gatilladas por la producción de energía para la gran minería durante el siglo XX, este trabajo problematiza dicha neut…
On People, Sensorial Perception, and Potential Affinity in Southern Chile
Theorizing Relations in Indigenous South America: Edited by Marcelo González Gálvez, Piergiogio Di Giminiani and Giovanna Bacchiddu
Whether invented, discovered, implicit, or directly addressed, relations remain the main focus of most anthropological inquiries. These relations, once conceptualized in ethnographic fieldwork as self-evident connections between discrete social units, have been increasingly explored through local ontological theories. This collected volume explores how ethnographies of indigenous South America have helped to inspire this analytic shift, demonstra…
Interruptions: Imagining an analytical otherwise for disaster studies in Latin America
Purpose Based on the research, the authors identify how four key concepts in disaster studies—agency, local scale, memory and vulnerability—are interrupted, and how these interruptions offer new perspectives for doing disaster research from and for the South. Design/methodology/approach Meta-analysis of case studies and revision of past and current collaborations of authors with communities across Chile. Findings The findings suggest that agency,…
Secretos de luz: Apuntes Para Una Antropología Expuesta
Título del número: Políticas de la evidencia : etnografía entre mundos unívocos y mundos múltiples. Sección: Documentos
Políticas de la evidencia: Entre Posverdad, Objetividad Y Etnografía
Título del número: Políticas de la evidencia : etnografía entre mundos unívocos y mundos múltiples. Sección: Meridianos
On People, Sensorial Perception, and Potential Affinity in Southern Chile
Through an ethnographic exploration of Pehuenche conceptualizations of doubles and of greeting and funerary practices in Southern Chile, this article considers the ontological relevance of sensorial perception as a main operator for stabilizing the tension between autonomy and dependence on otherness. The article aims to establish how relations between ‘real people’ or che, in Pehuenche daily life, do not precede mutual sensorial perception; inst…
Spectral forces, time, and excess in Southern Chile
This chapter sheds light on how embracing the world multiple requires careful ethnographic exploration of socio-material entanglements expressing “more than one” temporalities. In order to do so, and as a heuristic to ethnographically attend to the temporal socio-material singularities emerging within environments strongly affected by state terrorism, I mobilize a kind of politics I term “the politics of when.” By so doing, and through an ethnogr…
The roads of immanence: Infrastructural change in southern Chile
In southern Chile, the building of roads has triggered profound socio-material transformation in indigenous worlds. In this article, we attempt to comprehend and conceptualize the capacities of roads to reconstitute radically a relationally constituted world, a world that is therefore in itself contingent. We suggest that the material alteration of indigenous worlds produce uncertain results, including possibly its own destruction. The arguments …
Towards a Sociology of Equivocal Connections
This article contributes to the need for imagining forms of sociological thinking and doing beyond the univocity of disciplinary knowledge. In order to do so, we demonstrate how connections between different 'sensory worlds' involve equivocal understandings about what the 'social' entails. We begin by considering current anthropological reflections on the equivocal character of social relations as well as the equivocal ways in which western socio…
Qué hace un camino? Alteraciones infraestructurales en el Sur de Chile
In this article we offer an account of the socio-material transformation that has triggered the building of roads in the indigenous worlds in southern Chile. Taking our starting point from Bateson’s theory of the “immanent mind”, we attempt to comprehend and conceptualize the capacities of roads to reconstitute radically a relationally constituted world, a world that is therefore in itself contingent. By means of our ethnographic explorations, we…
Palabras de piedra, materiales proféticos y políticas del dónde
The following article is a reflection on ethnographic theory that is 'inspired' by three developments set forth in the field of Science and Technology Studies and particularly by Actor-Network Theory, namely, a) the decentering of humans and the focus on the capacity of things to do politics, b) the consideration of ethnographic objects as multiple objects and c) the destabilization of the division between theoretical and empirical domains. The e…
Eating drugs: Psychopharmaceutical pluralism in India
To see that which cannot be seen: Ontological differences and public health policies in Southern Chile
In this article, I explore different visual practices performed by Pehuenche Indigenous healers and state public health professionals in Southern Chile. While non-Indigenous health workers seek to make 'traditional' Pehuenche healing visible within or alongside their own 'modern' practices, Pehuenche people are concerned with making visible the evil spirits whose 'eating' of persons produces illness. Focusing in particular on different healing pr…
What Pehuenche blood does: Hemic feasting, intersubjective participation, and witchcraft in Southern Chile
Among the Pehuenche, blood is extracted from humans and animals and shared and eaten among people, offered as food to land spirits and deities, as well as devoured by evil spirits and witches. Through an ethnographic analysis of eating and feeding practices involving a variety of blood eaters, this article argues that blood (Ch. mollvün), as it functions in rural Pehuenche people's practices in Southern Chile, indexes the capacity to create relat…
Ontological disorders: Nightmares, psychotropic drugs and evil spirits in southern Chile
This article explores several equivocations in the relationship between state healthcare workers and the Pehuenche population in southern Chile. In particular, it focuses on radical differences in understanding the body, personhood, sleeping and dreaming. In Alto Bío Bío, Chile, while healthcare workers diagnose their Pehuenche patients with 'sleep disorders' and prescribe them sleep-inducing psychotropic drugs, some Pehuenche persons fear that b…
Ontological disorders: Nightmares, psychotropic drugs and evil spirits in southern Chile
This article explores several equivocations in the relationship between state healthcare workers and the Pehuenche population in southern Chile. In particular, it focuses on radical differences in understanding the body, personhood, sleeping and dreaming. In Alto Bío Bío, Chile, while healthcare workers diagnose their Pehuenche patients with 'sleep disorders' and prescribe them sleep-inducing psychotropic drugs, some Pehuenche persons fear that b…
To see that which cannot be seen: Ontological differences and public health policies in Southern Chile
In this article, I explore different visual practices performed by Pehuenche Indigenous healers and state public health professionals in Southern Chile. While non-Indigenous health workers seek to make 'traditional' Pehuenche healing visible within or alongside their own 'modern' practices, Pehuenche people are concerned with making visible the evil spirits whose 'eating' of persons produces illness. Focusing in particular on different healing pr…
What Pehuenche blood does: Hemic feasting, intersubjective participation, and witchcraft in Southern Chile
Among the Pehuenche, blood is extracted from humans and animals and shared and eaten among people, offered as food to land spirits and deities, as well as devoured by evil spirits and witches. Through an ethnographic analysis of eating and feeding practices involving a variety of blood eaters, this article argues that blood (Ch. mollvün), as it functions in rural Pehuenche people's practices in Southern Chile, indexes the capacity to create relat…
The roads of immanence: Infrastructural change in southern Chile
In southern Chile, the building of roads has triggered profound socio-material transformation in indigenous worlds. In this article, we attempt to comprehend and conceptualize the capacities of roads to reconstitute radically a relationally constituted world, a world that is therefore in itself contingent. We suggest that the material alteration of indigenous worlds produce uncertain results, including possibly its own destruction. The arguments …
Palabras de piedra, materiales proféticos y políticas del dónde
The following article is a reflection on ethnographic theory that is 'inspired' by three developments set forth in the field of Science and Technology Studies and particularly by Actor-Network Theory, namely, a) the decentering of humans and the focus on the capacity of things to do politics, b) the consideration of ethnographic objects as multiple objects and c) the destabilization of the division between theoretical and empirical domains. The e…
Políticas de la evidencia: Entre Posverdad, Objetividad Y Etnografía
Título del número: Políticas de la evidencia : etnografía entre mundos unívocos y mundos múltiples. Sección: Meridianos
Towards a Sociology of Equivocal Connections
This article contributes to the need for imagining forms of sociological thinking and doing beyond the univocity of disciplinary knowledge. In order to do so, we demonstrate how connections between different 'sensory worlds' involve equivocal understandings about what the 'social' entails. We begin by considering current anthropological reflections on the equivocal character of social relations as well as the equivocal ways in which western socio…
Metaquímicas del litio: Ciencia e interdisciplina desde Salares Andinos a laboratorios de materiales
En un planeta en calentamiento, el uso de baterías de iones de litio para almacenar energía eléctrica está en auge: los salares andinos son testigos de un número creciente de proyectos de extracción de litio, mientras que en laboratorios de química de todo el mundo se trabaja para generar materiales más eficientes que mejoren las actuales tecnologías. En este contexto, y fruto de una alianza entre un antropólogo chileno y una química argentina, b…
Cenizas del Antropoceno: Omisiones de carbón y estratigrafía tóxica en Tocopilla (Chile)
Este artículo ofrece una crítica transdiciplinaria a la abstracción capitalista de la "carbono-neutralidad" a partir de un análisis situado de la producción de energía para la gran minería de cobre y, recientemente, también de litio en la ciudad de Tocopilla (norte de Chile). Al examinar las transformaciones sociales y materiales gatilladas por la producción de energía para la gran minería durante el siglo XX, este trabajo problematiza dicha neut…
Secretos de luz: Apuntes Para Una Antropología Expuesta
Título del número: Políticas de la evidencia : etnografía entre mundos unívocos y mundos múltiples. Sección: Documentos
Ontological disorders: Nightmares, psychotropic drugs and evil spirits in southern Chile
This article explores several equivocations in the relationship between state healthcare workers and the Pehuenche population in southern Chile. In particular, it focuses on radical differences in understanding the body, personhood, sleeping and dreaming. In Alto Bío Bío, Chile, while healthcare workers diagnose their Pehuenche patients with 'sleep disorders' and prescribe them sleep-inducing psychotropic drugs, some Pehuenche persons fear that b…
What Pehuenche blood does: Hemic feasting, intersubjective participation, and witchcraft in Southern Chile
Among the Pehuenche, blood is extracted from humans and animals and shared and eaten among people, offered as food to land spirits and deities, as well as devoured by evil spirits and witches. Through an ethnographic analysis of eating and feeding practices involving a variety of blood eaters, this article argues that blood (Ch. mollvün), as it functions in rural Pehuenche people's practices in Southern Chile, indexes the capacity to create relat…
Eating drugs: Psychopharmaceutical pluralism in India
To see that which cannot be seen: Ontological differences and public health policies in Southern Chile
In this article, I explore different visual practices performed by Pehuenche Indigenous healers and state public health professionals in Southern Chile. While non-Indigenous health workers seek to make 'traditional' Pehuenche healing visible within or alongside their own 'modern' practices, Pehuenche people are concerned with making visible the evil spirits whose 'eating' of persons produces illness. Focusing in particular on different healing pr…
Qué hace un camino? Alteraciones infraestructurales en el Sur de Chile
In this article we offer an account of the socio-material transformation that has triggered the building of roads in the indigenous worlds in southern Chile. Taking our starting point from Bateson’s theory of the “immanent mind”, we attempt to comprehend and conceptualize the capacities of roads to reconstitute radically a relationally constituted world, a world that is therefore in itself contingent. By means of our ethnographic explorations, we…
Palabras de piedra, materiales proféticos y políticas del dónde
The following article is a reflection on ethnographic theory that is 'inspired' by three developments set forth in the field of Science and Technology Studies and particularly by Actor-Network Theory, namely, a) the decentering of humans and the focus on the capacity of things to do politics, b) the consideration of ethnographic objects as multiple objects and c) the destabilization of the division between theoretical and empirical domains. The e…
Towards a Sociology of Equivocal Connections
This article contributes to the need for imagining forms of sociological thinking and doing beyond the univocity of disciplinary knowledge. In order to do so, we demonstrate how connections between different 'sensory worlds' involve equivocal understandings about what the 'social' entails. We begin by considering current anthropological reflections on the equivocal character of social relations as well as the equivocal ways in which western socio…
Spectral forces, time, and excess in Southern Chile
This chapter sheds light on how embracing the world multiple requires careful ethnographic exploration of socio-material entanglements expressing “more than one” temporalities. In order to do so, and as a heuristic to ethnographically attend to the temporal socio-material singularities emerging within environments strongly affected by state terrorism, I mobilize a kind of politics I term “the politics of when.” By so doing, and through an ethnogr…
The roads of immanence: Infrastructural change in southern Chile
In southern Chile, the building of roads has triggered profound socio-material transformation in indigenous worlds. In this article, we attempt to comprehend and conceptualize the capacities of roads to reconstitute radically a relationally constituted world, a world that is therefore in itself contingent. We suggest that the material alteration of indigenous worlds produce uncertain results, including possibly its own destruction. The arguments …
On People, Sensorial Perception, and Potential Affinity in Southern Chile
Through an ethnographic exploration of Pehuenche conceptualizations of doubles and of greeting and funerary practices in Southern Chile, this article considers the ontological relevance of sensorial perception as a main operator for stabilizing the tension between autonomy and dependence on otherness. The article aims to establish how relations between ‘real people’ or che, in Pehuenche daily life, do not precede mutual sensorial perception; inst…
Secretos de luz: Apuntes Para Una Antropología Expuesta
Título del número: Políticas de la evidencia : etnografía entre mundos unívocos y mundos múltiples. Sección: Documentos
Políticas de la evidencia: Entre Posverdad, Objetividad Y Etnografía
Título del número: Políticas de la evidencia : etnografía entre mundos unívocos y mundos múltiples. Sección: Meridianos
Interruptions: Imagining an analytical otherwise for disaster studies in Latin America
Purpose Based on the research, the authors identify how four key concepts in disaster studies—agency, local scale, memory and vulnerability—are interrupted, and how these interruptions offer new perspectives for doing disaster research from and for the South. Design/methodology/approach Meta-analysis of case studies and revision of past and current collaborations of authors with communities across Chile. Findings The findings suggest that agency,…
On People, Sensorial Perception, and Potential Affinity in Southern Chile
Theorizing Relations in Indigenous South America: Edited by Marcelo González Gálvez, Piergiogio Di Giminiani and Giovanna Bacchiddu
Whether invented, discovered, implicit, or directly addressed, relations remain the main focus of most anthropological inquiries. These relations, once conceptualized in ethnographic fieldwork as self-evident connections between discrete social units, have been increasingly explored through local ontological theories. This collected volume explores how ethnographies of indigenous South America have helped to inspire this analytic shift, demonstra…
Underground Roots for Ancestral Futures: Exploring Lithium Through an Experimental Alliance between Chemistry and Anthropology
Amid the push for decarbonization and the rise of lithium-ion batteries, global demand for lithium urges an examination of its materiality. Drawing on Barry's chemical geography, which gathers various concerns related to the study of chemicals in the field, and Bachelard's meta-chemical proposal, which challenges a substantialist understanding of chemicals, we propose an experimental alliance between a chemist and an anthropologist concerned with…
Cenizas del Antropoceno: Omisiones de carbón y estratigrafía tóxica en Tocopilla (Chile)
Este artículo ofrece una crítica transdiciplinaria a la abstracción capitalista de la "carbono-neutralidad" a partir de un análisis situado de la producción de energía para la gran minería de cobre y, recientemente, también de litio en la ciudad de Tocopilla (norte de Chile). Al examinar las transformaciones sociales y materiales gatilladas por la producción de energía para la gran minería durante el siglo XX, este trabajo problematiza dicha neut…
White Mining’s Green Dream: Entropy and the mirage of sustainability in Northern Chile
Introduces the concept of entropic omissions in lithium extractivism. • Analyzes how sustainability discourses conceal systemic extractive damage. • Ethnographic cases show entropy is acknowledged yet rendered unthinkable. • Critiques degrowth for overlooking epistemic and colonial extractive logics. • Calls for regenerative practices beyond green extractivist imaginaries. This article critically examines the "green dream" of lithium mining in no…
Sonambulismo verde: Minería, entropía y los límites de la sostenibilidad en el norte de Chile
In a global context defined by climate urgency, the energy transition is presented as an unavoidable solution to the ecological crisis. This article critically examines that promise, revealing how it reproduces industrial logics and epistemic colonialities that constrain the imagination of alternatives. We ask how, in situated ways, political and epistemic forms of automation that accompany green energy transitions are configured and resisted. We…
Metaquímicas del litio: Ciencia e interdisciplina desde Salares Andinos a laboratorios de materiales
En un planeta en calentamiento, el uso de baterías de iones de litio para almacenar energía eléctrica está en auge: los salares andinos son testigos de un número creciente de proyectos de extracción de litio, mientras que en laboratorios de química de todo el mundo se trabaja para generar materiales más eficientes que mejoren las actuales tecnologías. En este contexto, y fruto de una alianza entre un antropólogo chileno y una química argentina, b…
Mining matters: Coloniality and the politics of the sustainable energy transition
Contemporary talk of sustainable energy transitions, green technologies, or green energy evokes environmentally friendly, benign and forward-looking policy and practice. Typically, such imaginations of a greener energy future avoid mention of the raw mineral realities of mining. To question these dominant policy framings, we use the analytical lens of coloniality to examine continuities, ruptures and expansions of extractive practices on differen…
A Reserve of Light: Photography, Ethnography, and Lucid Memory in Contemporary Chile
This article takes shape as a shared inquiry between an ethnographer and a photographer, in continuity with the photographic archive of Luis Poirot. Through sustained encounters with his images and archival practices, the text does not position itself outside the archive that motivates it, but unfolds from within it . At its center is what Poirot calls lucid memory . It is not a theoretical category, but a fragile and demanding practice of persis…
Sociology (13 works) · Geography (11 works) · Political science (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Anthropology (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Ethnography (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (6 works) · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture (5 works)