Struggles on the constitution of environmental territories in the Paraná River Delta (Buenos Aires, Argentina)

PATRICIO HERNÁN STRACCIA; LAURA AZUL DAYAN

Salt Lake City, UT

Jornada; SfAA 82nd Annual Meeting; 2022

Society for Applied Anthropology

In the last few decades, the environment emerged as a domain that requiredgovernmental regulation and management. Even though Michel Foucault did notexplicitly applied concepts such as governmentality (the ?conduct of conducts?) to thefield of environmental studies, several scholars further developed his conceptualizationsto do it (Agrawal, 2005; Arnauld de Sartre, Castro, Dufour, & Oszwald, 2014; Cepek,2011; Cortes-Vazquez & Ruiz-Ballesteros, 2018; Fletcher, 2010, 2017; Forsyth &Walker, 2014; Raycraft, 2020) . According to Agrawal (2005) , environmentality is aspecific type of governmentality and refers to ?the knowledges, politics, institutions,and subjectivities that come to be linked together with the emergence of theenvironment as a domain that requires regulation and protection? (p. 320). As per Ulloa(2011) , it refers to all the environmental politics, discourses, knowledges,representations, and practices that interact in order to conduct social actors to think andact in particular ways, with specific environmental goals such as sustainabledevelopment or biodiversity conservation, amongst others.Environmentality is, simultaneously, about the constitution of environmental subjectsand the constitution of environmental territories (Del Cairo & Montenegro-Perini,2015) . However, it is not a conflict-free process: it is a deeply political one, and socialactors may resist it. In the 2021 SfAA Annual Meeting, I analyzed the constitution ofsubjectivities in a specific area of the Paraná River Delta, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.This year, our aim is to analyze the struggles on the constitution of an environmentalterritory in the same region. Through a long-term fieldwork and ethnographictechniques, we will show how it has been environmentalized and became the wetlands.However, there are overlapping territorialities (Agnew & Oslender, 2010) . Therefore,we will also show how local inhabitants (who refer to their place as the island) contest itthrough both explicit and hidden forms of resistance.