Vulnerabilities and uncertainties between the development and the Good Living: Social risk in an oil production zone

Abstract

From a perspective of the anthropology of risk and disasters, we investigate the production and consolidation of successive vulnerabilities that occur during the social construction of risk through industrial pollution in the northern oilfields of the province of Neuquén in Argentine Patagonia. The case of the Mapuce community of Nehuen Kura provides the line of analysis which integrates in a historical manner the different life aspects of communities in environments degraded, at times, to a condition of a "sacrificial area". We describe the direct effects of extractive intrusions on the natural and constructed environment, as well as the effects of State directives that derive from prevailing models of development and access to common goods by aboriginal communities and extractive industries. We develop a critical ethnography and employ multiple methodological strategies to reveal the forms of control -or its absence- in the face of the slow and steady generation of a disaster, and expose the cultural expressions of suffering caused by the effects of disaster and risk. This allows us to detect qualitative variables and indicators that permit the integration of subjectivity through a category of "sacrifice" which accompanies local adaptive strategies. In this way, we contribute to the discussion on the definition and uses of social vulnerability as it relates to the disaster risk associated with development projects.