Abstract

The chapter by Ødegaard leaves the rural scenarios of this book for an urban one, focusing on smugglers of fuel operating in the frontier between Peru and Bolivia. She considers the labour of contrabandistas as a redirection of commodity flows from the official fuel distribution and as contributing to subsume wealth to particular modes of sociality, including contrabandistas’ relations with market colleagues, kin, and earth-beings. This redistribution entails a semiotic multiplication involving systems of meaning that exceed the capitalist system of commensuration: a hegemonic vision accompanying narratives of progress and extractivism in South America. When exploring contrabandistas’ relations to the powerful earth-beings, Ødegaard finds a particular relational understanding of wealth which reveals entanglements of locally embedded worldings and dominant extractive practices. Without dismissing the consequences of accumulation and inequality, she describes a set of strategies to mediate extractivism’s forces and wealth while paying attention to the relational and cosmological aspects of mediation; here termed accumulation by diversion.