Publication Date

Spring 5-13-2023

Abstract

ABSTRACT

Through an ethnographic analysis of the lithium industry this dissertation recounts the complex way lithium industrialization has interacted with Bolivia’s democratic and cultural revolution, officially known as the proceso de cambio, and with localized social forms and structures, which the national-level revolution seeks to reconstitute. I will argue that it is important to examine the implications of lithium industrialization’s intersection with local experiences of revolutionary politics. The dissertation’s main contention is that the industrialization of lithium in Bolivia has been conceptualized as an insurgent tool of political change and social transformation by the Morales-Linera regime and as such it has penetrated deep into local social forms, such as the very constitution of state power, personhood, time, and cosmology. In this context, the regime’s self-proclaimed revolution as it has intersected with lithium industrialization has been embedded in both secular and nonsecular beliefs. Thus, ideologically, lithium industrialization has transcended the temporal limits of the Marxist stress on a future horizon as a time of radical change. This tendency has strongly affected how the industrialization of lithium has been experienced and contested within the lithium industry.

Keywords

ontology, cosmology, ethnology

Document Type

Dissertation

Language

English

Degree Name

Ethnology

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

Anthropology

First Committee Member (Chair)

Dr. Les Field

Second Committee Member

Dr. Suzanne Oakdale

Third Committee Member

Dr. David Dinwoodie

Fourth Committee Member

Dr. Lindsay Smith

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