Responsabilidad Social Empresarial, ritual y extractivismo

Lithium mining has engaged in different types of relations with Indigenous communities since arriving in the Salar de Atacama between the 1980s and 1990s. One such relations strategy, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), was deployed in several regions worldwide in the 1990s as a joint effort by the mining industry to improve its image and focus on the episteme of ‘sustainable mining.’ This research looks at Ayllu Wine and the Toconao Harvest Festival, organized by the winemakers’ cooperative and SQM, to analyze CSR in relation to the concepts of extractivism and ritual. On the basis of qualitative research using ethnographies, interviews, press archive reviews and secondary sources, this paper concludes that, in the midst of the current lithium boom, the Harvest Festival is, in spatial and temporal terms, a SQM governability strategy that produces tension in the community. Behind the festivity, discourse and iconography of ‘responsible mining’ lies booming extractivist production.