Potosí and the emergences of Modern Water. On the origins of the hydric Capitalocene

Abstract

Correlatively to their absolutely essential character in the biophysical, geological and atmospheric processes of gestation and sustenance of life on Earth, water is an entity that, as it crosses the human being, acquires - together with its specific material uses - a vast complexity of semiotic, axiological, spiritual and religious configurations. An immeasurable diversity of values and modes of use, of meanings and symbolisms, characterise the different socio-hydrological historical-concrete systems that have emerged, accompanying and delineating the pluriversal trajectory of the human adventure on Earth.

Despite such diversity and complexity, we inhabit a time geologically and anthropologically marked by the burdensome hegemony of Modern Water; a time of systemic crisis and the emergence of the crudest symptomatology of the geosociometabolic upheavals of the Capitalocene. The current global water crisis is a result of the drowning of that vast pluriversal history of hydro-social systems by Modern Water.

In this context, the present text offers a genealogical exploration of the emergence of Modern Water. Drawing on Latin American environmental history and the resources of the political ecology of the South, we propose to investigate the Cerro Rico del Potosí as the hydro-geopolitical zone where the sources of the capitalocenic waters that today flood our time-space-of-crisis took place.

Keywords:
Hydric Capitalocene; MetalWater; Modern Water; Hydrogenocide; Skyfall.