Exploraciones subterráneas

1. Why did you choose this topic?

In this book, I was interested in exploring from an ethnographic perspective the abandonment and re-emergence of "future technologies" in Latin America, specifically in Chile. In this regard, geothermal energy offers an interesting case to explore imagined futures, their abandonment, and reconfigurations.

2. What new perspectives does your book offer?

From the beginning of the twentieth century in the Atacama Desert, scientific groups started imagining transforming the heat of underground hot water reservoirs into electricity. However, the use of geothermal energy at a national scale has been an unfinished promise in Chilean. Inspired by emerging discussions in the anthropology of energy and infrastructures, this book inquires ethnographically into the promises of geothermal energy and its abandonment in the Chilean Andes.

3. What makes your topic relevant for current research debates?

This book offers an in-depth ethnographic look at the relationship between energy, society and the future in Chile. This country has been described as a natural laboratory for renewable energies. However, less attention has been paid to how technologies and their future are imagined from this region.

4. Your book summary in one sentence:

Ethnographic inquiry into the promises of geothermal energy in chilean Andes.