Of Crystals and Semiotic Slippage: Lithium Mining, Energy Ambitions, and Resource Politics in Bolivia

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The salares, or salt flats, of Bolivia are the site of the world's largest proven reserves of lithium Although different proposals were initiated over the decades, it was during the thirteen years under the Movement to Socialism (MAS) governments of Evo Morales when the state-directed lithium project began in earnest. This is an ambitious project with a num ber of important dimensions, including evaporation mining in the region around Uyuni; the construction of an industrial plant where lithium salt is converted into "battery grade" lithium carbonate; the development of a battery research and production facility, which is producing—still at a pilot stage—lithium ion batteries" and proposals to produce electronic vehicles (EVs) in Bolivia, which would mean a form of vertical integration of the lithium resource chain. This article examines one key ethnographic dimension of Bolivia's still unfolding lithium project: the ways in which its different materialities—geological, industrial, extractive, environmental—are reframed within pre-existing semiotic categories, including a well established semiotics of resource extraction, as part of ongoing struggles for control over both the meaning and productive potential of a key resource at the center of the global "green" energy transition. The article argues that these semiotic struggles take place through illuminating slippages or "re-craftings," many of which cannot be reduced to the grand narratives within which lithium industrialization is conventionally studied and critiqued After using selected examples from ethnographic research in Bolivia to examine some of the more important semiotic struggles, the article concludes by drawing out the wider lessons of the study for the anthropology of energy and resource politics.