Alonso Barros van Hövell

Lawyer (PUCCh) and PhD (University of Cambridge) with two decades of work in advocacy and anthropology involving resource projects affecting indigenous peoples and their territories. My published work focuses on law in society in Latin America, the Mixe of Oaxaca (Mexico) and Atacameño, Aymara, Diaguita and Quechua communities and peoples across the Argentinean, Bolivian and Chilean highlands. I advise indigenous peoples in different territorial, legal and contractual settings -public & private, with an eye on socio-environmental due diligence processes and standards. This has translated into a longue durée historical ethnography of desert and highland peoples, mining cycles and property regimes (booms and busts), that assesses the conflicting historicities involved -time and memory politics. I am interested in the cyclical (de- and re) territorialization of 'vertical'​ regimes of truth and domains of objects as expressed in property relations and commodity fetishism.

CONICYT Principal Investigator (2006-2009) "Discrimination, identity and inequality in periods of crisis: juridical and political ethnohistory of San Pedro de Atacama and Chiu-Chiu (XIX - XXI C.)"​

Co-director (2011-2012) London School of Economics'​ MSc in Law Anthropology and Society.

Chaire "Région Pays de la Loire"​ Institut d'Études Avancées of Nantes (2012).

Since early 2013, I've concentrated on my work as a litigation lawyer on behalf of Atacameño, Aymara, Diaguita and Quechua peoples and communities involved with the extractive industry in Chile's Atacama desert. I publish on related Law in Society issues, with a particular fascination for the agentive potential of law and when invited, undertake research-led teaching on the sociology of law, property relations and corruption.

(2018) British Academy Award recipient IC3\100226, Royal College of Arts, Co-Investigator "Tackling the UK's International Challenges 2018" "The Scale of Justice: Energy Transition, Rights and Indigenous Title".

(2020) Visiting Professor, Royal College of Art, UK

Education

• Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) University of Cambridge (1997 — 2004)
• M.Phil University of Cambridge (1997 — 1998)
• Licenciate Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (1988 — 1993)