The book’s strength lies in situating today’s mining conflicts in a longer history of socioenvironmental change and rural-to-urban displacement. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the Atacama, mining communities, and environmental destruction.

American Anthropologist

In Embracing the Anaconda, Anita Carrasco offers a clearly written and personal ethnography about people, mining, and water in the high desert of northern Chile. Carrasco is a Chilean anthropologist whose father was a mining geologist and who spent part of her childhood in a Chilean mining town. In this book she describes her Ph.D. dissertation research in another Chilean mining region farther north: the world-famous Chuquicamata copper mine and city of Calama. Her focus is on communities of indigenous people called Atacameños (although the meaning of the term is disputed), who had to adapt their agricultural and pastoral ways of life and uses of water to the impacts of large-scale industrial mining development from the early 1900s....She introduces and weaves in theoretical concepts and debates in anthropology and related fields, but she has a light touch and keeps those passages brief.

Water Alternatives

Embracing the Anaconda is the work of a passionate writer who draws on long-term ethnographic experience to tell the stories of those who live with the ‘slow violence’ of copper mining and water extraction in the Atacama Desert. In a conversational style, with humor and scholarly detail, Anita Carrasco shows us how the bodies of men and women, Indigenous peoples and geologists, and mules and llamas are connected into the multidimensional industrial and ecological histories of the region. This book is a deeply personal account of the professional insights that come from connections with place, associations with people, and surprising finds in archival collections. Compelling as a series of character-filled stories, it is also a strong contribution to the social scientific understanding of extractive realities of the past and present.

Sally Babidge, Anthropologist, The University of Queensland, Australia