The Ghost within the Forest: Campesino Settlers and Environmental Ruination in La Chiquitanía

Speaker: Frederik Andersen Tjalve

In this seminar, Frederik Andersen Tjalve discusses the entanglements between campesino and Chiquitano communities and extractivist-fueled environmental devastation in the rural landscapes of La Chiquitanía. He begins by relating the context of my fieldwork, and how the figure of the campesino ghost settler evoked in media and NGO representations of the causes of ecological devastation and land trafficking in La Chiquitanía brought me to the San Martin Colonies, a cluster of communities with whom he has conducted long-term ethnographic research on campesino and indigenous territorialities within landscapes undergoing rapid agrarian extractivist transformations amid the political, socio-ecological, and monetary crises of Bolivia. He describes how histories of migration within the Bolivian Lowlands shaped the image of the campesino settler and White-Mestizo Cruceño resistance toward these communities and the MAS government, framing settlers as ghosts through the use of remote sensing and environmental governance discourse. Zooming in on the San Martín Colonies, he then seeks to rearticulate campesinos and Chiquitanos as actors in their own right. Sketching out how relations to soil, commodities, fire, machines, and community, territory, and the state are evoked within campesino and Chiquitano communities, he draws these metabolic entanglements together within the landscape of La Chiquitanía. He sketches out how extractivist epistemologies, through technology, bureaucracy, and the interlocal connections of agrarian extractivist trajectories, come to shape ruination and exploitation as an anticipatory response of campesinos to environmental devastation.

Frederik Andersen Tjalve is a PhD candidate from the Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University, currently visiting the Department of Human Geography at Lund University.