School of Social and Political Science

Background

Agustin is a political and economic anthropologist who specialises in Latin America and has conducted research among indigenous Guaraní settlements in Argentina's Gran Chaco region. His research focuses on labour and unemployment, energy and extractive industries, welfare policies and democratisation among indigenous populations in Latin America.

His first book project, After Abundance: Indigeneity, Democracy and the Making of the Gran Chaco’s Extractive Frontier, develops an alternative understanding of how extractive capitalism generates it social force. Moving beyond narratives of dispossession and scarcity, the book shows how the wealth that sugar cane plantations, logging, or hydrocarbons generate can be both materially and socially generative for people on the ground. It argues that the temporalities and scales of extractive capitalism – with their cycles of boom and bust, and political ramifications – create expectations of abundance and forms of marginalisation that endure even after resources have been depleted.

Agustin has also worked with coal mining communities in Spain and explored possibilities for alternative economies with community energy organisations in Scotland - read more about that here.  Building on previous work climate change adaptation policy and water management, he is now designing a new research project that will employ anthropological insights and methods to explore the political and economic interconnections that vast aquifer systems in South America generate.

Selected publications

2022. Against the Run of Play: Masculine Fantasies and the Game of Football in the Gran Chaco. Social Analysis 66(1): 1-20.

2022. Wages, Patronage and Welfare: Thrift and its Limits in the Argentine Gran Chaco.  In C. Alexander & D. Sosna (eds.) Thrift and its Paradoxes: From Domestic to Political Economy. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

2021. Construir comunicación en una radio indígena del norte argentino. Tram[p]as De La Comunicación Y La Cultura, (86), e046. (with S. Hirsch)

2020. ‘Healing the Institution’: Conflict and Democratic Sovereignty in an Indigenous Community of the Argentine Chaco. Geoforum 117: 173-182.

2020. ‘We Could Be Rich’: Unemployment, Roadblocks and the Rhythms of Hydrocarbon Extraction among the Guaraní of the Argentine Chaco. Bulletin of Latin American Research 39(3): 319-333.

2018. Money from Above: Cash Transfers, Moral Desert and Enfranchisement among Guaraní Households of the Argentine Chaco. In E.M. Balén & M. Fotta (eds.) Money from the government in Latin America: Conditional Cash Transfer Programmes and Rural Lives. London: Routledge