We congratulate the winners of this year’s scholarships:
 

• Diego Galdo González: The Beautiful Archive: Gender, Class, and Queer History in the Beauty Salon (1950-2024)
   

• Mirko van Pampus: Depoliticisation and Repoliticisation of Socio-Environmental Conflict in Chilean Lithium Mining

 

The Beautiful Archive: Gender, Class, and Queer History in the Beauty Salon (1950-2024), by Diego Galdo González

The beauty salon is an establishment that fulfills a seemingly clear function in society. Hair grows, it falls, it changes in color, and it fades away. The salon acts as a space where hair gets cut, tinted, or otherwise cared for. The salon in Latin America, though, is no ordinary business. The salon constitutes a unique case of an institution that systematically employs queers or maricones, secures a degree of tolerance and respect that they are unlikely to find elsewhere, and grants them as a stable income, a daytime space of socialization, and regular contact with heterosexual female clients. Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel famously claimed that “behind every famous woman, there is always a couturier, a make-up artist or a hairdresser” practicing “the dance of the tarantula hands on her hair” (1995). The Beautiful Archive aims to observe, describe, and preserve the dance of the tarantula hands that countless maricones practiced in Lima’s beauty parlors between the 1950’s and the present by conducting oral history interviews with hairdressers and ethnographic fieldwork in salons, and placing both in an archive. Zooming into the space of the salon, this project asks: How do peluqueras represent, (re)produce, and epitomize the past and present of maricón culture in the beauty salons of Lima? Several sub-questions follow up from this inquiry: How did the peluquera and the salon change throughout the second half of the twentieth century? How do peluqueras give meaning to beauty salons? How does the salon operate as a living archive of maricón cultures and life trajectories in the present? This interdisciplinary project—situated at the intersection of history, anthropology, queer studies, and urban studies—addresses these questions by attending to the past and the present of the salon through the gaze of the hairdresser.

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Depoliticisation and Repoliticisation of Socio-Environmental Conflict in Chilean Lithium Mining, by Mirko van Pampus

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The global transition towards a decarbonised energy system has dramatically increased the demand for raw materials, as clean energy technologies require large amounts of metals. This resource intensity of the energy transition involves inherently political questions on access, decision making, distribution and impact, and will intensify environmental and social tensions in regions of extraction. With its large reserves of copper, graphite, nickel, rare earth elements and lithium, Latin America will play a central role in fuelling the energy transition of the 21st century. 

 

Chile finds itself in a central position in this modern day ‘gold rush’, as it possesses over half of the world’s lithium reserves. While the government, the lithium companies and investors aim to reap the benefits of the current lithium boom, others fear degradation of the fragile ecosystems of the region and the further marginalisation of its communities. Although the lithium companies stress that everything happens within the legal framework of extractive legislation and that environmental impact is limited, communities complain of ecological and social disruption due to the large-scale groundwater extraction that is needed to produce lithium.

 

This research project is part of a larger project that aims to analyse the underlying power dynamics behind the clash of narratives in the lithium debate. The central focus here are the processes of conflict neutralisation in this case, particularly by means of knowledge production around environmental impact and local social investment campaigns. Through a combination of documental research and interviews on location the strategies of and relations between different stakeholders are analysed. With this scholarship, I will go to Chile for a third visit and gather additional information for the publication of two articles of this research project.

 

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