The Australian Journal of Anthropology (2016) 27, 84–103 doi:10.1111/taja.

12139

Contested value and an ethics of resources:

Water, mining and indigenous people in the
Atacama Desert, Chile
Sally Babidge
The University of Queensland

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 Atacam-
a, 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.

Keywords: Atacame~
no people, mining, water, ethnography, ethics, value

INTRODUCTION
Anthropological works concerned with the environmental, social, and political value
of water in a world of increasing and seemingly endless commodification of natural
resources, have argued that the value of water for indigenous peoples may be better
conceptualised in legal and cultural terms as ‘native water’ (Barros 2011) and in envi-
ronmental management terms as ‘cultural flows’ within indigenous waterscapes (Jack-
son 2005; Toussaint et al. 2005). In other research, it is cast as a form of ‘natural
capital’ for indigenous groups (Lansing et al. 1998), and in ways that locate the (cul-
tural) organisation of water as central to the religious and political, as well as being
enmeshed in cultural economics (for example, Trawick 2001; Gelles 2002). Water, as
Orlove and Caton (2010) argue, might be considered a Maussian ‘total social fact’,
unable to be analysed in one ‘domain of social life’ without figuring connectivity to
other ‘domains’, and defined by essential materiality and concomitant social construc-
tions of quality and quantity (see also Strang 2004). They position value as one of four
key themes by which to understand ‘waterworlds’ (Orlove and Caton 2010, p. 403),
with rights to emplaced water as well as imputed resource properties conceived to
produce its value. I contribute to these works by examining contests over water value

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 Contested value and an ethics of resources

and values between Indigenous peoples, the state and miners, as well as critically
describing social practice that gives rise to particular water values.
Recent anthropological research with a methodological focus on ethics as perfor-
mative is used here to show how ‘everyday’ features of social practice articulate values
(Faubion 2011; Lambek 2011a,b), and some critical reference is also made to Robbin’s
work on morality, in which concepts of value are understood to organise culture and
thus value contests characterise situations of cultural change (2007). Attention to ethi-
cal practice and performance is used to argue about what gives rise to water’s value
(as ‘the degree to which an object is desired’) and water values (the socio-political
sense of ‘what is good, proper and desirable’) (Graeber 2001, p. 1). Concern with these
matters is brought to bear on questions of an ethic of resources that are part of the
global context of mining and indigenous peoples. This paper is part of a larger project
examining engagement between indigenous (Atacame~ no) peoples and mining compa-
nies in the Antofagasta region (Region II) of Chile.1 Ethnographic research into this
context of social change included discussions and interviews with representatives and
leaders of Atacame~ no groups in the region, particularly from the six rural oases which
border the Salar de Atacama, Chilean government department representatives, work-
ers in different mines of the region, and staff of social performance team of BHP Billi-
ton and Minera Escondida, a copper mining company with offices in the major towns
and cities of Region II. In Peine, the oasis village at the far southern end of the Salar
de Atacama, I participated in the work associated with irrigation activities and
observed more than 30 community meetings among locals and between them and dif-
ferent mining company representatives and state officials. In conversation, in meetings
and interviews, discussions always seemed to turn to water matters, indeed if it did
not start there. Everything is about water, not only due to the fact of environmental
scarcity (the Atacama Desert is a profoundly dry place), but the shifting political cir-
cumstances that are of particular concern in this article. Mining companies are
increasingly restricted in their access and extractive activities, and are having to turn
to expensive technologies such as desalination (Mining Council (Chile) 2013). They
are also facing increasing pressure to consult with recognised indigenous groups. The
Chilean state, whose free market approach to water resources is (in)famous (Bauer
2004a,b), has in recent years introduced regulations, protections and restrictions on
capitalist ‘freedoms’ to extract. Atacame~ no peoples take action to resist those who
extract water from their territories and alongside this they engage in forms of water
commodification that envisage development of infrastructure for their communities
through traditional communal labour practice joined to financial partnerships with
corporations. Thus apparently contradictory values for water are characteristic of this
context. The complex ‘waterscapes’ I describe lead me to argue that rights based, or
normative claims to an ‘indigenous value’ of water fall short of representing Ata-
came~ no values for these resources, and that changes may also be detected in broader
water values in Chile. I find that in the process of decision-making at the community
level and in broader engagements between community, state, and (global corporate)
mining interests, ethical judgement can be observed through examining water.

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VALUE AND ETHICS

The value of water is clearly revealed in the pitch and history of contest over scarce
resources, especially when subject to high levels of commodification and extraction by
industries such as mining. Given that the contest exposes the terms in which water is
most valued by invested actors, the nature and terms of conflict over water are impor-
tant to the production of water value and to configuring its governance (Budds and
Hinojosa 2012). Common oppositions in such contests are the value of water
resources for Indigenous and local peoples as ‘essence of life and livelihood’ against
the value of water for industry in terms of marketable commodity. Where the con-
trasting terms are cast as ‘indigenous versus commodity’ value, absolutes are produced
such that political (rights) values clash unswervingly with economic (resource) values.
Ongoing contest among political actors (Indigenous peoples, mining corporations,
and the state) over specific basins, volumes, bodies, or flows of water may often be
characterised by such intractability. Political rhetoric using such essentialism has
power in struggles between indigenous peoples who seek to remain owners and users
of lands and waters, as against mining corporations’ demands for these same resources
as extracted volumes (Sawyer and Gomez 2012), but complex matters of value pro-
duction and value creation by different groups in relation to water are greatly simpli-
fied in such representations.
Annette Weiner’s (1992) concept of ‘inalienable possessions’ conceptualises some
things, especially those things with very high value, in terms of their intrinsic not-to-
be-givenness. This idea draws the concept of things and value away from the gift/com-
modity distinction (applied to both things and their societies), and gives us a third
regime of value which relates both to the thing that is intrinsically related to a person
(not to be given) and a category of value that relates to the sacred. Water may be con-
sidered to have such a value, and this might be argued as central to the value of water
as relational, as in the value of water as ‘native waters’ or a recognition of rights to
water within the framework of indigenous rights. The exchange of terms, gifts, and
commodities has been conceived to ‘animate different systems of value’ (Tsing 2013,
p. 22) and a distinction has at times been made between societies that value commodi-
ties (things themselves) and those in which exchange produces and creates relation-
ships (rather than more things). But the former perspective allows value and meaning
to be extracted from activity associated with things while not necessarily associated
with an exchange or gifting activity. As such, the question of the value of water as
inalienable, exchangeable or tradeable indicates that particular kinds of activity can be
examined for the value they produce. As I discuss here, there is consistent contestation
over the value of water among Atacame~ no people and between them and others. Dif-
ferent values for water compete for prominence in Atacame~ no social worlds, such that
Tsing’s (2013) reminder about the exchange of things animating different systems of
value might be used to think about the ways in which value arises in contexts of social
change. In Robbins’ (2007) argument that cultures are ‘organised by values’, he out-
lines the idea that the social experience of morality may be one of comfort where

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values are stable, or one of moral concern, where values are more contested and less
stable. Likewise, cultural instability concerns Zigon (2008), who argues that ‘[e]
thics. . .is a kind of reflective and reflexive stepping away from the embodied moral
habitus or moral discourse. It is brought about by a moral breakdown. . .’ (p. 18). The
emphasis in these authors’ work is on morality as stability, with ethics being a distanc-
ing ‘from embodied dispositions. . .seemingly naturally’ formed over time (Zigon
2008, p. 164). My analysis moves away from such theories of morality, since the mat-
ter of contestation over water values in the Atacama involves people’s ongoing reflec-
tion on practice, regulation, and use of these resources: contested water values are part
of the everyday matters of existence and thus not solely characteristic of social or cul-
tural rupture.
A notion of the ethical as ‘ordinary’, for Lambek (2011a,b, pp. 1–4), considers
human speech and action as intrinsically ethical, embedding it in specific acts (ren-
dered ‘performance’) and action more generally (‘practice’). Lambek’s emphasis is on
the ambivalence and multiplicity anthropologists discern in the ethical judgements of
those we encounter and about whom we write. Like other recent anthropological
efforts in this direction (for example, Faubion 2011), his ‘ordinary ethics’ frames an
analytics of ethics in terms of the relations among cultural subjects, and sets this
against an understanding of the ethical as located in the self-regulating moral actor.
Ordinary ethics, Lambek argues, may be understood as social, since the social is about
‘(Aristotelian) activity, practice, and judgement rather than (Kantian/Durkheimian)
rule or obligation’ (2011, p. 28). Ethics is ‘ordinary’ because it is not ‘rarified’, not
abstracted, but is insinuated in judgements that are made in everyday ways, even
where they are performed. The ordinariness stems from tacit agreement rather than
rules, and from practice rather than a set of knowledge or beliefs. Particular events
where explicit values of water are articulated are explored, as well as the everyday prac-
tice of water in which I find some of the ambiguities associated with values; both of
these demonstrate a resource ethics. The methodological distinction Lambek makes
between practice and performance, where the latter speaks of events that ‘disrupt’ the
everyday, making the ethical explicit (2011, p. 19). It is in the articulation or ‘balance’
of such things – the tacit and explicit, between continuity and innovation, criterial
application and recognition of the limits – he asserts, that we may ‘find’ the ethical
(2011, p. 28). The elaboration of values or rules in particular ways is already an
abstraction of an ordinary and practical ethics and ‘risks literalising ethical insight and
rendering it static’ (2011, p. 14). Where the tacit becomes explicit is in the event of
severance or breach of agreement, where the implicit is contested, or articulated
through renewal or education; but both reflective and tacit forms may be understood
as ordinary ethics. This conceptualisation of the ethical invites us to consider ambiva-
lence and variation, since the focus is on actions of and relations among people rather
than enclosed structures, and so it is particularly useful in theorising values in ongoing
social change.
The performative aspects of an ethics of water demonstrate values that arise out of
contested social contexts and the practical draws on everyday actions in relation to

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water. Both will highlight the centrality of particular kinds of labour to ‘ordinary eth-
ics’ of water, and through this, articulate aspects of water values. First, a discussion of
the political economy of water in northern Chile provides a basis for understanding
the terms of social change in which contested values arise. I recount the case of one
mining company’s thwarted efforts to extract water and use this to discuss the increas-
ingly worn but important point regarding the political power of essentialist arguments
underlying the recognition of indigenous rights to waters (Sawyer and Gomez 2012).
Lastly I discuss rights-based and commodity-based understandings of water value to
provide an analysis linking multiple values for water to a ‘practical ethics’ of resources
that underlie claims to ‘indigenous rights’ of conservation and protection, and also to
the value of water that includes forms of commodification.

CONTESTED AND CHANGING VALUES: WATER MARKETS AND WATER

RIGHTS
Like Chile’s Mining Code, the Water Code was a legislative measure designed by the
Pinochet regime (1973–1990) to expedite extraction of Chile’s resources by global
business in the interests of higher national economic growth. Chile is renowned for its
early experiment in creating a ‘free market’ for water and for the imposition of a far
reaching and early neoliberal model for the nation’s economy. The Codigo de Agua
1981 (Water Code) is a key aspect of this model, establishing mechanisms that deregu-
lated use and extraction and privatising water wherever it is found. Under the code,
water is ‘freely bought, sold, mortgaged and transferred’ (Bauer 1997, p. 641). The
broad-reaching neoliberal experiment in Chile, in which the Water Code is significant,
was hailed by some as an exemplary case in the role of the private sector in allocating
and making best use of resources for national development (Briscoe et al. 1998; see
also Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade 1992). A gov-
ernment body, the Direccion General de Aguas (Directorate of Water, DGA) was made
responsible under the Code for granting requests for rights to water wherever water is
available, to register the rights to extract waters at certain rates and to undertake water
administration. Water rights are not generally granted to entire water bodies, but are
rights to extract or use water from particular sources in volumes measured at litres
per second. For example, Region II currently accommodates 14 large mines operating
in its nine ‘comunas’ (subregions) and the mining industry depends on water extrac-
tion for processing rich deposits of copper, gold, and lithium salts. The industry is cal-
culated to use more than 70% of all water consumed in the region as a whole (Yan ~ez
and Molina 2011).2 All of the operations must extract, import or otherwise manufac-
ture (for example by desalination) massive quantities of water for their normal pro-
cessing operations, for managing dust around their operations, and for the thousands
of workers and contractors to consume and bathe in. In Region II, the Chuquicamata
copper mine, near the town of Calama, was the biggest copper mine in the world,
operated by CODELCO (the national copper company). But it has been superseded in
production of copper by Minera Escondida Ltd (MEL, operated by BHP Billiton),

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located about 100km to the southeast of the Atacama Salt Pan (el Salar de Atacama).
MEL reports that it extracted over 50,000,000 cubic metres of subterranean water
from its mine in 2011 and 2012 (Minera Escondida Limitada 2013). As a result of the
state’s facilitation of corporate water extraction by CODELCO, MEL and others, and
alongside the championing of the copper industry for Chile’s economy, there have
been numerous cases of exhaustion and pollution of aquifers by miners, to the detri-
ment of agricultural and other use and thus the exacerbation of significant social and
political inequalities in the means of life (Oyarz un and Oyarz un 2011; Camacho
2012). A handful of researchers have told the story of the failings of the Water Code in
social and environmental terms for people in the north of Chile (Hendriks 1998; Galaz
2004; Yan~ez and Molina 2011) and environmental economist, Carl Bauer (1997a,b,
1998, 2004a,b) and geographer, Jessica Budds (2004, 2009), have shown that there is a
persistent lack of empirical evidence for the benefits of water markets in Chile and
elsewhere (see also Larrain et al. 2010).
In 1992, the first of the post-Dictatorship, democratic governments in Chile modi-
fied the ‘free market’ mechanism of the Water Code to limit exploration and exploita-
tion of subterranean water in certain parts of the northern desert regions, especially
those aquifers that feed the ecologically fragile wetlands that are central to traditional
Andean agro-pastoral life. At that time they also introduced environmental legislation
(Law 19.300 of 1994) and the Ley Indigena (No. 19.253 of 1993) or Indigenous Law,
which included the provision for recognition of waters as owned in the name of titled
indigenous communities where these waters appear on the surface and such waters
are inalienable (Ministerio De Justicia Republica De Chile 2008; Latta and Cid Aguayo
2012). As the recognised Indigenous Peoples of Region II, the water provisions were
particularly relevant for Atacame~ no people (or Likan antay) and Aymara peoples, also
of the arid north. Communities were to register the waters coexistent with their recog-
nised traditional lands. For example, the Indigenous Community of Peine has
65.6 litres per second and their neighbours the Indigenous Community of Socaire,
135 litres per second in rights to water, drawn from the numerous springs that each
channels into irrigation ditches (Yan ~ez and Molina 2011, p. 59). In 1997, the DGA
and the National Indigenous Development Corporation (CONADI) signed an agree-
ment to ‘protect, constitute and re-establish’ water rights for indigenous groups in the
northern desert regions (Castro-Lucic 2002, p. 198). Such regulatory changes seem to
have signalled the beginning of moves to recognise the rights value over commodity
values of national water resources. However, the waters registered with Atacame~ no
owners in their villages represent only the resources directly related to agricultural
activity and that sustain daily life. It has proven much more difficult for Atacame~ nos
to gain legal recognition of ownership over water sources in the expansive indigenous
territories associated with customary pastoral movement (Barros 1997, 2011).
Until about the 1970s, Atacame~ no people lived predominantly as transhumant
pastoralists, moving their herds to highland pastures in the summer and lower altitude
wetlands associated with their focal village during the winter months. In Region II, all
waters are derived from subterranean sources and ice melt, with watersheds that are

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spoken of as hydrologically ‘closed’ (that is, underground) (Yan ~ez and Molina 2011,
p. 47). Water from the Andean mountain range flows to high altitude wetland pas-
tures as well as to Atacame~ no villages’ registered springs and irrigation canals (Vil-
lagran and Castro 1997). The Salar de Punta Negra was one such pastoral area, as well
as a breeding ground for Andean flamingos (from which eggs and feathers were har-
vested) and other native animals. Since the late 1980s the copper miner, MEL, has
extracted water from underground sources that flow to the Salar de Punta Negra, and
as a result of these and other company’s extractions in the past, that Salar and its
lagoons were dried out (Contreras 2002). In 2005, higher levels of environmental reg-
ulation were introduced and subterranean water exploration (especially that related to
mineral exploration) was prohibited in the northern arid regions of Chile, unless
undertaken with authorisation from the DGA (Ministerio de Justicia Republica de
Chile 2008).3 Following the 2005 environmental laws, MEL has been directed to rectify
environmental damage to the Salar de Punta Negra, and it pumps water into certain
areas of the Salar in an attempt to regenerate the wetlands (Minera Escondida Limit-
ada 2012). These actions broadly reflect a shift in government that recognises certain
kinds of indigenous and environmental value for waters. Nonetheless MEL is allowed
to continue to extract water from the area, since their registered water rights predate
environmental legislation. The company retains legally registered rights to extract
water at 1,600 litres per second from the area and in 2012 reported that 81% of their
total consumption of water for the copper mine would come from extraction of
groundwater in that sector (Minera Escondida Limitada 2012). The value of water has
been thus articulated by different actors as many kinds of ‘rights’ and ‘resources’
which are indirectly and directly contested, as well as being contradictory and
inconsistent.
Direct contest in the region over water occurred in 2007, when MEL sought to
extract from the mountains above the Salar de Atacama in a project named ‘Pampa
Colorada’. The area identified by the project is located at 4000 metres above sea level,
in the mountains close to and, importantly, higher than, the five Atacame~ no villages
that surround the eastern edge of the Salar de Atacama. In ‘Pampa Colorada’ an antic-
ipated investment of USD300 million would go into the construction of 25 wells,
190 kilometres of pipelines, a transmission line and a minor hydroelectric plant that
would serve as an alternative energy supply for extractive operations (Gobierno De
Chile 2007). The area proposed for water extraction included wetland pastures used
traditionally by people from the Atacame~ no villages of Sociare and Peine, environ-
mentally protected sites such as the National Flamingo Reserve, including the high-
land freshwater lakes of Me~ nique and Miscanti and other similar places in which scant
waters provide environmental value, tourist attractions, and subsistence sources. In
the proposal, MEL’s plans to mitigate effects of water extraction on the wetlands by
creating surrogate flows to these areas, just as they have been allowed to do in Punta
Negra, were only one basis of Atacame~ no people’s dissatisfaction (Gobierno de Chile
2007; Bolados 2014).

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The Consejo de Pueblos Atacame~ nos (a region-wide ‘Peoples Council’ concerned

with political and social development) organised street rallies in Antofagasta, Calama,
and San Pedro de Atacama and media coverage reported on the conflict (for example,
a segment on the popular 24 Horas (Tvn) 2007). Residents flew black banners on their
houses and refused to speak with mining company representatives seeking community
consultation. National and regional NGOs (such as the Observatorio de Derechos Ciu-
dadanos, Chile Sustentable and Observatorio Latinoamericano de Conflictos Ambien-
tales) also joined with indigenous groups to raise awareness through online campaigns
and in petitioning government. Aware of the negative public opinion on the project,
on October 9, 2007, 16 National parliamentarians signed a draft agreement (No. 473),
‘Rejection of Environmental Impact Study Pampa Colorada Water Supply’. Later that
month, the Regional Environmental Commission of Antofagasta (COREMA), includ-
ing members of the DGA, unanimously rejected the environmental impact assessment
presented by MEL for their Pampa Colorada project. In the face of this broad level of
community and national rejection and heightened regulation of extractive activities,
MEL have made public statements asserting their conformity with legal definitions of
acceptable water extraction and renewed efforts to work ‘in partnership’ with local
communities (Babidge 2013). MEL are building a desalination plant to support
expansion of operations at Escondida, but desalination currently offer less than 10%
of total needed for their operation (MEL 2011).
While extractive activity is thus now more regulated by Chilean government
bodies, publically contested and indeed halted by appeals to indigenous rights and
environmental concerns than in the past, in other examples the value of water as a
resource for the mining industry in this region triumphs over rights claims. Laws pro-
tecting subterranean rivers, basins, and reserves in the highlands do not apply to the
other sectors of Atacame~ no peoples’ territory, such as the internally differentiated
zones of the Salar de Atacama that each of the Indigenous Communities on its eastern
edge claims as traditional lands and waters. Partly this is because rights to extract
water were granted to corporate actors before enactment of measures protecting envi-
ronmental and indigenous values. It is also because state recognition of Atacame~ no
territorial claims has not for the most part been extended to the Salar itself. Water
extraction operations on the Salar, with the most voluminous being the lithium salts
mine owned and operated by the company Sociedad Quimica y Minera (SQM), are
undertaken without any legal need for consultation with Atacame~ no peoples. While
SQM assert that their operations are regularised, legal, and ‘environmentally sustain-
able’ (see Sociedad Quimica Y Minera (Sqm) 2012, and interview 5/12/2013 with
SQM Manager of Sustainability) indigenous leaders claim that SQM’s extractions
impinge on their traditional rights to the area (interviews with leaders of Camar 3/1/
2013, 17/12/2012 and Talabre 8/1/2013, 8/12/2013). Finally, recent legal judgements
have recognised coexisting rights to all resources within mining concessions (most sig-
nificantly including water), thus indirectly opening the way to new extractions by the
mining industry.4

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Research findings critical of the commodification of water have focussed on the

assumption that markets impose an apolitical face on what can be demonstrated as
inherently cultural and political issues of water control, access, scarcity, management,
and rights (Mehta 2006; Ahlers 2009; Achterhuis et al. 2010). Atacame~ no and, eventu-
ally, government opposition to the Pampa Colorada water extraction project showed
that in Chile certain waters would be recognised to have ‘rights’ values attached that
go beyond the commodity value enshrined in the Water Code and accounted for in
extractors’ models of marketable resources. However, a resource ethics revealed in the
dynamics of Atacame~ no practice relating to water demonstrates that particular kinds
of commodification are also active and present. The following discussion outlines the
basis on which we might understand water’s ‘indigenous value’ as a complex of socio-
cultural factors, including the spiritual, economic and political, and to detect the
resource ethics that demonstrate the dynamics and changes in water values.

THE VALUE OF INDIGENOUS WATER

Water characterises much of the social organisation in Atacame~ no society, as it does
with other agricultural communities of people who irrigate the mountainous arid
lands of the Andes (Sherbondy 1992; Pourrut and Nu~ nez 1995). Atacame~ nos assert
that, ‘agua es un ser’ (water is a being) and acknowledge water’s presence in particular
places (especially those places such as springs, where it appears from aquifers deep
below the desert surface) as well as more generally within traditional territories associ-
ated with each named peak of the Andes mountain range. Acknowledgement preva-
lent in contemporary Atacame~ no ritual performance includes ‘feeding’ the earth,
common to arid and highland Andean cosmological belief and practice (Gelles 2002;
Castro and Aldunate 2003; De La Cadena 2010). Everyday rituals associated with a
prime Andean earth being, the Pachamama, such as tipping a little liquor on the
ground before drinking (see also Nash 1979, pp. 134–5) may be considered alongside
more elaborate rituals performed to the mountains and water on specific occasions.
These rituals celebrate a spiritual presence within the landscape of which water is part
and, as a being and part of the being of the Pachamama, water is a moral indicator,
valued in terms of its capacity to provide or to withhold.
Communal work characterises most elements of Atacame~ no ritual action. The
annual Limpia de Canales (cleaning of the irrigation ditches) is held in each village
around the Salar de Atacama in slightly different modes and on different dates, but
always in spring and at the beginning of the planting season. In Peine the cleaning of
the canals takes three days. Work parties are formed at named and prescribed sections
of the agricultural fields and a roll is called of all who own land in that sector and who
must work in the cleaning or pay a fine. The work party is made up of landowners,
individuals who work for an absent or non-able bodied landowner (referred to as ‘peo-
nes’ if they receive pay), and in the last twenty years some guests (such as visiting
researchers). Men and women clean the irrigation channels from bottom to top and
scrub the irrigation tanks of algae and debris. Throughout, minor offerings to the

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Pachamama of liquor and coca leaf are made onto the ground or into the canal by
each worker each time they consume these, and the head of the work party and ritual
leader similarly make offerings as they make their way uphill. The closing ceremony is
held at the location at the top of the village known as the nascimiento (source, origin
or birth) where the town’s water appears from the rock. The closing ceremonies
include songs that name each of the springs in the locality and their relationship with
named cerros (mountains and volcanoes) (Mostny 1954; Bustos and Blanco 2003; Ca-
beza 2006; Jofre 2007).
The Atacame~ no pago (or payment) at Andean New Year (1st August) is also
important in its reference to water. At a pago a ritual mouth is opened by digging a
small hole in the ground and offerings are placed on a mesa or table (properly an
aguayo cloth on the ground beside the ‘mouth’), consisting of bottles and cans of
alcohol, coca leaf and lit cigarettes. A mixture commonly consisting of harina tos-
tada (a traditional staple food), coca leaf and alcohol is also placed in a bowl on the
mesa (this mixture known as chuyapacha), and a medicinal plant (referred to as cha-
cha) is placed atop hot coals so that its fragrant smoke ‘carries the payment’ to the
cerros, to the broader territory and to other people. All present make offerings of
the chuyapacha, alcohol, and coca leaf in their turn, guided by the cantal (master of
ceremonies) who also makes oblations to the Pachamama, telling her to consume
and enjoy their offerings and to be generous in return. The Peine Indigenous Com-
munity performs an annual pago at a location in the mountains about five kilome-
tres from their village. The location commemorates recent history of communal
labour and community efforts to acquire outside support and finance for their
acquisition of a new source of potable water. Rostered teams of men and women
from the village spent months digging trenches and laying pipes (bought with the
finance they raised) across 45 kms of high altitude and rugged Andean terrain (see
Babidge 2013, pp. 281–82). At the pago the Pachamama is reminded that, in the
year to come, ‘she’ should remember that the people worked hard and fed her, and,
in her turn, she might provide ample rain and water from the springs and protec-
tion for human life.
The pairing of action through ritual and communal labour is morally necessary in
Atacame~ no cosmology; the Pachamama is said to be satisfied with this pairing and will
continue to feed the springs and water flows. Both younger and older people conjec-
tured in this context that the long drought (since the late 1970s) might be due to a
decline in local practices honouring the cerros and the springs, a decline that nonethe-
less has coincided with the arrival of mining and greater economic prosperity for
some. The moral value of water can thus be interpreted in terms of essential forms of
indigenous identity with its basis in customary practice, ancestral belonging, and tra-
ditional forms of labour and subsistence. The waters reside in or emerge from place(s)
and humans and non-humans rely for the complex array of their existence on these
situated waters. It is this conceptualisation of water’s value that can be used to under-
line, and advocate the expansive understanding of ‘native waters’ (Barros 2011) and
for indigenous rights to water. Nonetheless, and as noted above, these

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S. Babidge

conceptualisations do not explain forms of commodification of water sources by Ata-

came~
nos that they cast as ethical practice.

AN EVERYDAY ETHICS OF RESOURCES

Irrigation channels that flow to Atacame~ nos fields were constructed before Incan
occupation (c1500) and in the last two decades people have built infrastructure
(such as that described above, as well as concrete channels and reservoirs) and
invested in town plumbing that pipes water from the springs above villages to house-
hold taps and flushing toilets. In the months when crops are being irrigated (all but
winter months), the juez or alcalde of water (both terms, ‘judge’ and ‘mayor’, may
be used to refer to the role) makes sure that the reservoirs fill up each night and that
the gates to the reservoir are opened at dawn. Agricultural plots and gardens at the
lower end of the village are watered first and carefully monitored for any potential
waste, with el juez and each garden plot owner present and ready to close and open
their ‘gates’ as the water comes their way. The following is an edited section from
my field notes constituting a description of the physical and social labour involved
in irrigation practice.
When I returned from an early morning walk Margarita was gulping down her breakfast.
‘I’m in a hurry’ she explained to me, ‘I watered in the closest garden [yesterday] and now
it is my turn to irrigate below as well’. I told her I would drive her to the far garden in my
jeep. Margarita gathered her cloth, sickle, and pouch of coca leaves and we drove down-
hill to the sector of fields nearest the Salar. Juana was there already as her fields are below
those of Margarita. We all stood for a moment watching the water flow into the plots.
Margarita announced she would make use of the time and cut some pasture and weeds
from the garden adjacent. Before she did so she carefully took out some coca leaf and dug
it into the dusty field near where the water enters her land, and placed some in her mouth
to chew. Juana told me: ‘when I would come here with my mother the gardens were all
clean and tidy, none of this maleza’ (weeds), as she indicated the scraggy grass and under-
growth around the edges of the plots. In the past all the fields were green and all were cul-
tivated, she told me. We watched as the water reached the far end of her fields. Judging
that she was finished, Juana changed the direction of water for her sister-in- law, swung
her cloth full of pasture and weeds onto her back and left us. A few minutes later, don
Bruno arrived. Margarita chatted with him as the water filled her fields. They talked
about where the water was flowing to and will be flowing across in the following days,
who needed to be present and which fields were not being sown. The water had soon
almost filled Margarita’s uppermost field and she said, ‘ya Bruno’. He made his way up
to the stone door in the irrigation channels that marked his plots, opening one and clos-
ing another, thereby allowing the water to flow into his field of metre high pasture.

Such sociality of water and management of scarcity (of both arable land and fresh
water) also speak to an ethic of communal work practice seen elsewhere.
The springs near some villages have water that is very high in mineral content,
making it less than ideal for human consumption and providing the impetus for

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 Contested value and an ethics of resources

seeking potable sources. For some the water from springs is ‘too salty’, meaning one
cannot get proper suds from detergent or good fruit from fruit trees. Some villages
rely on their irrigation canals to feed water into household use, but this can become
polluted and pipes blocked when there is rain or snow melt bringing detritus. I was
told by a community leader:
. . . today what most concerns the Community5 is, of course, to bring potable water. For
the community to not have problems with people who need water. And like, well, water
is life and so to have enough water you can have a good garden, a fruit tree as well. . .
(interview 20/12/2012)

In the past residents of most villages would have to carry water a distance from the
spring to their houses. The change to provision of water infrastructure in the houses
has been recent and significant, as I was told by a resident of Peine:
A truck used to come, from the company, from ‘el Litio’,6 they would put the water there
and every week, once a week, it was our turn to get water, the fresh water. . . People
would see how much they could carry and how much, how much they needed to carry.
And that would have to last a week. But just for the kitchen. We . . . already had salty
water [piped to] the kitchen. That was a change, a good change because it meant having
good water right in the house. . . (interview 19/12/2012)

Likewise, in neighbouring Camar, a local leader told me of their efforts to secure a

potable water source in recent years:
At first [we] tried using canals to bring water [to the town], by open cement canal. This
was about 20 years ago, more or less. But because when it rains here it rains with great
force, the canals were destroyed and the water never reached here. Later we managed to
get other resources for water pipes and with this, recently, the water reaches here, but it is
very little. (interview 3/1/2013)

Billboards in Indigenous Communities such as Peine and Camar and others around
the Salar (and in the broader region) announce that water is assured by the local gov-
ernment (municipal authorities) through joining with copper mining giants operating
in Region II, such as MEL. But Atacame~ nos insist that it is Atacame~
no labour and col-
lective organisation that sees the infrastructure realised. In most areas of Chile, includ-
ing in the city of Antofagasta (capital of Region II), water for people’s homes and
daily needs is managed and provided by the corporation, ESSEN. In contrast, each vil-
lage on the eastern side of the Salar has elected committees who manage town water
infrastructure (in different ways), and in most cases these committees are charged
with proposing, seeking, and organising investment in local works from government
and corporate interests. In most cases, villagers do not pay money for their water, and
in the past rights to water (the same water for both irrigation and household use) were
available for all people on the basis that everyone took part in communal labour.
While this water infrastructure in the small inland villages of the Salar is subject to
shortages and constant concern over impending maintenance projects, people say that
it is preferable for water to be ordered and managed by local committees and not by

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S. Babidge

corporations like in the cities. From 2012, following state attempts at increased regula-
tion of water quality and resources, some towns around the Salar, all of which had
previously enjoyed a kind of abandoned autonomy regarding their water supply, were
notified by representatives of the Direccion General de Agua that a utilities company
would be sent in to manage their water for them, even charging them for household
use. This is part of the broader government process of regularisation of domestic and
potable water supplies. In a meeting I attended in one town, socios (active adult
members) of the community decided by consensus that they would manage their
water resources and ‘not have professionals intrude on community business’. They
proceeded to elect and ratify a five-member council for water organisation and
began a system of water accounting that would charge all households a small fee for
their potable water, with funds used to improve and update local water infrastructure.
People thus distinguished between community labour and the activities of ‘profession-
als’, indicating that the nature of people’s work with and control of water was itself
valued.
My discussion has mostly indicated a value for water that may be argued to fall
along quite conventional lines of indigenous values, ecological values and social values
for water in distinction to its commodification. However, it has demonstrated the fact
that an Atacame~ no ethic of water is consistent with certain commodity values. This is
further illustrated in the following example. During my stay in the region in 2012, in a
conversation with two leaders of a community about their relations with different
mining companies in regard to water, they told me that they were selling a number of
truckloads of water to the smaller of two lithium mining operations on the Salar at a
small profit to the community:

SB: So is it a good business to sell water?

DS: Not so good, but compared to nothing . . .
SB: And do they use the water for their plant or to drink?
DS: No! For showers, to bathe, for the worker’s dining halls . . . for the workers
accommodation.
DV: . . . not for the processing plant
DS: . . . the plant, no way, I don’t believe [they would use it for] the plant. . .
A certain number of truckloads are thus sold from their village reservoir to mining
camp operators for the purposes of human consumption and hygiene. The leaders
emphasised the small amounts sold and the fact that these would be used for the
workers’ comfort. In other villages and towns Atacame~ nos have sold per litre quanti-
ties of agricultural run-off to mining company contractors (for watering roads in the
management of dust). While this commodification of water goes against the legal rec-
ognition of indigenous rights to waters in terms of inalienability, the small-scale com-
modification of water does not threaten essential resources for village use and is

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 Contested value and an ethics of resources

broadly deemed ethical practice by leaders and others of the community. In these
cases, minimal contest arises between mining companies and residents in regard to
forms of commodification for human comfort and subsistence, since water is under-
stood by locals in terms of the value of human life, but also in these specific terms as
an economic resource with ‘market’ value at small volumes.
Other forms of water commodification are at the centre of contest among the
mining industry, government and Atacame~ nos, and also between Atacame~ no groups.
I have outlined above how the case of Pampa Colorada reached national attention.
Locally and more recently, a criticism by a number of Atacame~ no people I spoke to
was that Peine Community, which receives annual financial benefits intended for
‘community development’ from MEL as part of the company’s Corporate Social
Responsibility program, risks becoming ‘un pueblo de lujo, pero sin agua’ (a town
with luxuries but with no water). While the legal agreement the Peine community
has negotiated with the mining company does not specify that it is about direct
compensation for MEL’s water extraction from their territory, it is broadly under-
stood by Atacame~ nos that one is aimed at compensating the other. To understand
this, one must remember that the groundwater extracted by mining companies for
their plant operations is not legislatively recognised as belonging to Indigenous
Communities and it cannot be sold by them. However, Atacame~ nos conceive of all
waters connected to traditional territory necessarily their responsibility. Thus the
accusation indicated that some Atacame~ nos think that people of Peine have not ade-
quately resisted mining company extraction; they have encouraged the presence of
companies in their territory and gained financially as a result. Some thus imply they
have ‘sold their water’.

PRACTICALITY, UNCERTAINTY, AND SCALE

The value of water to Atacame~ nos is examined through a consideration of everyday
action directed at the productive value of water for agricultural and pastoral activities,
and management of potable and agricultural water resources, controlled at the village
level and associated with customary Atacame~ no practice. Agricultural work celebra-
tions, such as the cleaning of the irrigation canals and ditches and associated rituals,
are materialisations of customary beliefs relating to water as a being rather than a
thing and a being in need of human labour (ritual and economic) to reproduce it
(Gelles 2002; De La Cadena 2010). The practical and performative actions around
water demonstrate a resource ethic that hinges on the scarcity/abundance duality that
has been understood in terms of the management of risk and uncertainty in the harsh
Andean environment (G€ obel 2008). Such moves honour the relatedness of humans to
non-humans in ritual practice and performance in ways that ‘speak to’ and coax geo-
cosmic beings such as the Pachamama into providing abundance. The objectifying
properties of underground water flows (creating boundaries between peoples) and
their ability to make dusty land fertile (its potential) add to broader observations
relating to Atacame~ no values of water. The value of water is thus intrinsic to human

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S. Babidge

relations to nature, as well as arising from agricultural or pastoral labour and the
social relations that such labour reproduces. This value of water in Atacame~ no cus-
tomary life may be understood in terms of intrinsic or absolute value, a value that
embodies the relation of water to the places in which it materially exists, and to the
peoples who perform (ritual and economic) labour associated with its material, topo-
logical, and spiritual existence. This is an argument for recognition of the value of
water to indigenous peoples in terms of rights, and is connected inherently to the
moral framework of Atacame~ no society.
Contemporary Atacame~ no formulations of value and resource ethics draw on the
use of water for aspects of the agro-pastoral economy and new opportunities for
entering the market economy, as well as the moral interconnectedness of indigenous
bodies and that of ‘nature’. For those keen on reviving traditional practice or claiming
rights to waters, it is increasingly difficult to sustain a coherence of what are politically
conceived as ‘indigenous rights’, as many people put the subsistence economy of agri-
culture, and cultural activities that elaborate on it, second to remunerative benefits
associated with the mining industry and resulting cash incomes or financing of devel-
opment programs. In recognition of the essential nature of ‘surface waters’ for tradi-
tional subsistence and cultural practice in Atacame~ no villages, Chilean law provides
confidence in the sustained presence of waters through registration of specified vol-
umes with authorities (the DGA). Selling these surface waters is illegal and the very
basis for recognition of its indigenous value is inconsistent with commodity values.
However, as I have shown, Atacame~ nos do sell these waters where they judge them to
be used and valued in particular ways, and see this as consistent with other local forms
of water value. The example of truckloads sold for the purposes of sustaining human
lives and mine workers commodifies these waters according to an ethic of resources
that is small scale and labour related– a kind of reasoning that one may understand as
‘practical’.
Even where peoples’ and environment rights trump commodification like the
vetoed Pampa Colorada, government regulation of industrial extraction (where it is in
place, such as in the Salar de Punta Negra) displays a value for water that indigenous
peoples continue to contest. I have outlined various reasons for this contest of values
for water. One is in relation to scale. Extremes of volume, as reported, seem to con-
front resource practices relating to scarcity in this parched landscape, where the collec-
tive management of risk and uncertainty through communal labour are part of an
everyday ethic of resources (G€ obel 2008). Secondly, and as noted in some detail by
Budds (2009), there are unaccountable possible differences between water quantities
registered and regulated (at litres per second), extractive volumes reported, and actual
use and extraction. Actual quantities of water extracted by mining companies are
invisible to and out of reach of local people.7 Illegal water prospecting in this remote,
sparsely populated and supremely under regulated region, is rumoured to be rife and
no certainty exists in relation to volumes of aquifers or flows of underground chan-
nels. Speaking with Margarita in her kitchen one afternoon, she started her sentence
like that of many others: ‘Sabes (you know) Sally. . . mining companies have been

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 Contested value and an ethics of resources

taking a lot of water from the south end of the Salar for I don’t know how many years
and it is all free. They get everything from here all free’. In some ways, Margarita was
indicating the injustice commonly perceived by people of those communities infa-
mous for the ‘resource curse’ (Bebbington et al. 2008). In another reading of her
observation, and drawing on my understanding of Margarita’s knowledge of the
worlds of water, I understand what she told me in terms of the ethic of resources: that
unlike Atacame~ nos, who labour together to ensure that water exists and who make
careful decisions about what to do with certain waters, mining companies seem to be
able simply to continue to take it.

CONCLUSION
The value of water may be partly understood in terms of human performance and
practice around ensuring water’s potential abundance despite scarcity. An ethic of
resources as practical judgement is not the exercise of rule (e.g. relating to the com-
modification of ‘native waters’), but the exercise of certain practice that indicates
water’s essential relationship to life. Thus ethics (as practical judgement) relates to
how things are done and parallels the formation of value. An analysis of the quality of
certain acts and the nature of practical judgement in certain situations can thus be
understood as ethical despite aspects of contradiction extant in situations of social
change and contest.
Resource scarcity is a question of value given that contests over how scarce
resources are to be used and distributed are contests over who may be judged to have
greater ‘right’, interest, or access. I have argued that the use and extraction of water in
mining processes commodifies what is otherwise an essential substance; and that com-
modification is less the object of contestation over its value than itself a subject of
complex value.
The fact of an environmental crisis occasioned by water scarcity in Chile is not in
contention: it is widely acknowledged that the free market mechanism of the Chilean
Water Code has not been a success in terms of ensuring that water will be available for
ongoing human and environmental survival. At the National scale, the Chilean Gov-
ernment has engaged consultants from the World Bank, for example, to try to deal
with the long term mishandling of the allocation of water resources through devolving
these duties to the free market. What continues to be in contention is that way in
which scarce water resources like those of the Salar de Atacama are managed, used,
and understood.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This study, on which this article is based, was funded by an ARC Discovery research
grant ‘the Atacama and Australian Mining companies’ (#DP1094069). I gratefully
acknowledge the Atacame~ no community members and leaders who participated in
the research and employees of MEL and BHP Billiton in Chile who were interviewed.

© 2015 Australian Anthropological Society 99

S. Babidge

Participants at the 2012, ‘Global Knowledge, Local Identities’ Collaborative Seminar

(The University of Queensland and the University of Western Australia), offered criti-
cal feedback on a much earlier draft. Thanks to other colleagues who read and offered
comments. The work and any errors are wholly my own.

Please send correspondence to Sally Babidge: s.babidge@uq.edu.au

NOTES
1 The article is part of a larger research project undertaken across eleven months fieldwork in six
visits to Chile from 2009 to 2013. All material appearing in this article has been translated where
necessary by the author, including interviews undertaken in Spanish.
2 See also the Mining Council (Chile) Annual report at http://www.consejominero.cl/wp-content/
uploads/2013/09/Reporte-Anual-CM-2012-2013.pdf (last accessed 22/8/2013).
3 Article 58 of the Water Code reads: ‘groundwater exploration must always be granted permis-
sion. . . [but] may operate on these grounds only in agreement with the owner of the property,
and [the Government Department of] National Property with the permissions of the [DGA].
Exploration cannot be effected in public or private lands that feed into areas of wetlands and those
called bofedales in the Tarapaca and Antofagasta Regions, without the authorisation founded in
the [DGA], which must identify and delimit said zones’. [My translation].
4 See ruling in Chile’s Supreme Court, 22 April 2013 (available at www.poderjudicial.cl). It was
found that it was not illegal for a mining company to freely extract groundwater from a conces-
sion granted under the Mining Code.
5 Here the interviewee was referring to the ‘Comunidad Indigena’, the organization that represents
the interests of the Indigenous people of this town, and not ‘the community’ in the more general
sense.
6 In Peine, people refer to the Lithium mining company now named Rockwood Ltd., but previously
‘Sociedad Chilena de Litio’, as simply ‘el Litio’. This company was one of the first to operate in
the area and there are men who have worked with the company (both Atacame~ no and other Chil-
eans) since early exploration for minerals on the Salar in the late 1970s. ‘El Litio’ has depended on
Peine for potable water for its camps of labourers and the company has in turn provided support-
ing infrastructure and some finances to Peine and other towns on the fringe of the Salar. Only
recently (2012) has the Community of Peine and Rockwood Ltd signed a legal contract setting the
terms of this relationship and other Communities speak of seeking such agreements.
7 Absolute quantities extracted, or flows existing, are also difficult to demonstrate beyond company
self-reporting.

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