Earth Eaters and Energetic Excess: Ethnographic Notes from the Atacama Desert

Upcoming Invited Lectures — Cristóbal Bonelli

16 December 2025, University of Bayreuth, Germany
"Too Much to Digest: Energetic Gluttony at the Atacama Desert"
Part of the Anthropology Lecture Series (WiSe 2025–26).

This talk examines how overlapping fossil and renewable infrastructures in Chile’s Atacama Desert generate forms of excess that shape everyday tensions, pressures, and rearrangements in one of the most intervened landscapes of the world. Drawing on Bonelli’s long-term ethnographic work in the region, the lecture approaches the notion of “energetic gluttony” as a way to explore how large-scale transitions impose demands, rhythms, and forms of endurance upon the desert and those who inhabit and traverse it.

Engaging with Davi Kopenawa’s reflections on the earth eaters—those who consume the ground on which others depend—the talk considers how contemporary energy projects reproduce comparable forms of voracity, calling for new ways of sensing and narrating the effects of infrastructural excess. “Energetic gluttony” becomes an analytic motif to trace how extractive and renewable regimes alike transform experiences of place, relation, and possibility.

Rather than framing energy transition as a purely technological process, the lecture reflects on its situated consequences: the tensions it generates, the adjustments it requires, and the ways people, materials, and territories absorb and respond to these transformations. Bonelli proposes a set of motifs that help make sense of these changes from the ground up, attending closely to their relational and territorial dimensions.