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<p>“Those who were hired before are those who are hiring now”. In March 2022, a man from the town of Almonte explained to me the transformation of labour relations following the emergence of intensive irrigated agriculture. In this town of southern Andalusia<b>,</b> at the border of Doñana National Park, a state irrigation plan launched in the 1980s led to the expansion of red fruit greenhouses, supposedly offering former day labourers the chance to become entrepreneurs. Today, this agriculture depends on extracting groundwater and exploiting a largely immigrant workforce. Despite the promise of access to land and water for all, these are now in the hands of a handful of “winners” of the liberalised market. Based on a 16-month ethnography in Almonte, this article examines how this extractive economy, arising from the promise of a reversal of relations of exploitation, has paradoxically become the guarantee of its reproduction under global capitalism. Looking back at the institutional formation of extractive and exploitative conducts towards natural resources and free wage labour, I explore the frictions between capitalist accumulation and governmentality processes. I then explore the reproduction of relations of exploitation at transnational scales. Finally, I argue that the social reproduction of extractive economies is guaranteed by their integration into affects and kinship, producing new “structures of feeling”.</p>

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The appropriation of water as a “way of life”: formation and affective reproduction of an extractivist agriculture in Andalusia

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2025年7月28日

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  • Marguerite Maclouf

摘要

“Those who were hired before are those who are hiring now”. In March 2022, a man from the town of Almonte explained to me the transformation of labour relations following the emergence of intensive irrigated agriculture. In this town of southern Andalusia, at the border of Doñana National Park, a state irrigation plan launched in the 1980s led to the expansion of red fruit greenhouses, supposedly offering former day labourers the chance to become entrepreneurs. Today, this agriculture depends on extracting groundwater and exploiting a largely immigrant workforce. Despite the promise of access to land and water for all, these are now in the hands of a handful of “winners” of the liberalised market. Based on a 16-month ethnography in Almonte, this article examines how this extractive economy, arising from the promise of a reversal of relations of exploitation, has paradoxically become the guarantee of its reproduction under global capitalism. Looking back at the institutional formation of extractive and exploitative conducts towards natural resources and free wage labour, I explore the frictions between capitalist accumulation and governmentality processes. I then explore the reproduction of relations of exploitation at transnational scales. Finally, I argue that the social reproduction of extractive economies is guaranteed by their integration into affects and kinship, producing new “structures of feeling”.