The question of value is fundamental to contexts of resource scarcity given that contest over use and distribution of scarce resources centres on judgments about rights, interests and access. In mining processes, the use and extraction of water in great volumes commodifies and threatens supplies of what others understand to be a substance essential to all forms of life. In the Atacama, while industrial extraction and commodification by the mining industry are the basis for indigenous people's contestations over water resources, an analysis of everyday water practice and performance (as 'ordinary ethics') demonstrates that an indigenous ethics of resources includes commodity values under certain conditions. This paper examines a field of competing actors engaging in extraction and use of scarce waters in order to make an argument for the importance of considering the complexities and dynamics of ethical practice and water value.

The extraction of groundwater and the regulation of its use in many parts of the world have been found to present a particular kind of problem. A contest involving mining companies, an ‘impacted’ community, and the state arising from groundwater and its extraction in the Salar de Atacama, northern Chile, provides a stark example. What marks the case are the many uncertainties about underground water and the quantities extracted. This article argues that uncertainty characterizes conditions of ‘late industrialism’ and that corporate practice that sustains ignorance is a form of powerful agency that in turn maintains the conditions for potentially harmful extractive activity. Critically engaging with the proposition that water may act in the relational process of unknowing contributes to the analysis of how corporate practice may sustain ignorance. This also suggests that alternative political responses to uncertainty are possible.

Latin American governments are neoextractivist: they promote exploitation of natural resources as central to economic development while acting to mitigate some of the excesses of extractive activity. In the space left open by the neoliberal state in the Salar de Atacama in northern Chile, the mining industry creates its own regulatory mechanisms and provides infrastructure and “improvement” projects to indigenous communities. While these projects gain a degree of consent to water extraction and the value of water for development, indigenous people also resist the neoextractivist project. The contradictions of extractivism-as-development are evident in everyday life and articulated in ritual and cultural practice. We take the example of a ritual and work event, the limpia de canales (canal cleaning), to narrate something of local responses to neoextractivist conditions. Los gobiernos latinoamericanos son neoextractivistas: promueven la explotación de los recursos naturales como elemento central del desarrollo económico y al mismo tiempo actúan para mitigar algunos de los excesos de la actividad extractiva. En el espacio abandonado por el estado neoliberal en el Salar de Atacama en el norte de Chile, la industria minera crea sus propios mecanismos regulatorios y proporciona infraestructura y proyectos de “mejora” a las comunidades indígenas. Si bien estos proyectos obtienen un grado de consentimiento para la extracción de agua y el valor del agua para el desarrollo, los pueblos indígenas también se resisten al proyecto neoextractivista. Las contradicciones del extractivismo como desarrollo son evidentes en la vida cotidiana y se articulan en la práctica ritual y cultural. Tomamos el ejemplo de un evento ritual y laboral, la limpia de canales, para narrar algo de las respuestas locales a las condiciones neoextractivistas.

R e s u m e nEn 2007, una comunidad atacameña del norte de Chile y una empresa multinacional minera de cobre renovaron un trato de diez años con respecto al uso del territorio por parte de la empresa y el impacto causado debido a la extracción de recursos de agua subterránea. Las negociaciones entre la comunidad atacameña y la empresa minera están influenciadas por la presencia de un estado remoto o incluso ausente, lo que ha marcado la historia de la industria minera, y un discurso hegemónico internacional sobre los beneficios de las asociaciones de acuerdo a la Responsabilidad Social Corporativa. Los valores morales implícitos en la idea de "socio" sirven y a la vez restringen una relación que a primera vista pareciera caracterizarse por la hegemonía del neoliberalismo, pero narrativas locales de autosuficiencia y patronazgo histórico revelan ambigüedades y raíces más profundas. Este análisis etnográfico del compromiso comunidad-empresa suscita una crítica de las condiciones de ser socios y lo enmarca en términos de controvertidas interpretaciones sobre la moralidad de las relaciones sociales y económicas. [Responsabilidad Social Corporativa, etnografía, indígena, Chile, moralidad, socios, neoliberalismo] A b s t r a c tIn 2007 in northern Chile, an Atacamanian community and a multinational copper mining company renewed a ten-year deal relating to the company's use of territory and the impact of their extraction of subterranean water resources. Atacamanian dealings with the mining company are informed by their experience of an already remote or absent state, a history alongside the mining industry, and global neoliberal discourseThe Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 274-293. ISSN 1935-4932, online ISSN 1935-4940. C 2013 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/jlca.12020 274J o u r n a l o f L a t i n A m e r i c a n a n d C a r i b b e a n A n t h r o p o l o g y on the benefits of "partnerships" made under the banner of corporate social responsibility. The moral values embedded in the notion of "socio" both serve and constrain a relationship that on the surface seems to be characterized by the hegemony of neoliberalism, but local narratives of self-reliance and historical patronage reveal deeper roots and ambiguities. This ethnographic examination of community-company engagement elicits a critique of the conditions of being "socios" and frames it in terms of contested understandings of the morality of social and economic relationships.

Multiple dynamics produce the ecological present. For the past 30 years or more, in the southern Atacama salt pan (Salar) in northern Chile, extractive industries have been accumulating minerals and water in exhaustive quantities, taking ever more than may be regenerated. However, the exhaustion of the Salar de Atacama involves a more complex set of symptoms than demonstrable environmental depletion. Fragmented scientific knowledge of the salt pan due to the privatization of water and under-regulation of mining provides a partial explanation for this complexity. In this article, we discuss these political conditions of environmental knowledge and, using a range of methodologies, we show that the scale of resource extraction threatens social and environmental harm and exhaustion may manifest in unexpected ways. We used remote sensing data to elaborate maps that reflect environmental change (1985-2017), relative to the intensification of extractive activity for copper and lithium salts in the area. Using these data, we undertook ethnographic and participatory mapping work to discuss with people from the Peine Indigenous community how they have experienced ecological change related to mineral and water extraction in the southern Salar. A review of the historical and archaeological material helps us to show the depth of Indigenous people's relationships to and knowledge of the salt pan and surrounds, and how social memory may be ecological. Combining the different results of our research, we argue that ecological exhaustion emerges from social, environmental and political conditions driven by both tangible and uncertain impacts of industrial extraction. Revealing these conditions of exhaustion raises key questions about the complexity of the effects of extraction.Keywords: Indigenous peoples; Salar de Atacama; participatory mapping; mining; water rights