Agenda

Elena Stecca, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia e Università di Padova

Mining the Desert for Water: Agriculture and Extractivism in a Southeastern Moroccan Dryland

Abstract
Recurring droughts, a fungus that kills palm trees and the spread of watermelon plantations: southeastern Moroccan drylands are undergoing radical processes of socio-ecological change that heavily impact their groundwater reserves. These changes entail a reframing of the desert as a utopian site of unexploited potential, and of the underground - with the water it holds - as an infrastructural frontier, the subterranean place where hope can be found amidst its above- ground fragility. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Drâa River Basin, one of the driest in the world, this seminar explores the agricultural, political, and ritual strategies dwellers of the Drâa Valley deploy in order to carry on living among ebbing waters. It offers an anthropological analysis of extractive economies that combines insights from the “vertical” and “nonhuman” turns in the discipline: we will discuss how, in the “Subterranean Anthropocene”, the shifting nexus between geology and society contributes to the making of new subjectivities and vegetal commodities.

Nota biografica
Elena Stecca is a Phd candidate in Environmental Anthropology at the University of Padua and at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She is interested in the intersections of ecology, agriculture, neoliberal reforms and extractivism in arid lands, with a specific focus on Morocco.

Partecipazione libera - Seminario valido per il tirocinio DEA/ACEL.
Coordinatrice: Franca Tamisari: tamisari@unive.it