Paper short abstract:

Examining local resistance to lithium mining, this paper reveals how communitarian practices challenge extractivist norms. Emphasizing women's pivotal role, it uncovers their crucial contribution to resistance and nurturing intimate connections between people and their more-than-human worlds.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the local resistance against Western Europe’s largest open-pit lithium mining project, owned by the British multinational Savannah Resources, and projected for the villages of Covas do Barroso, Muro and Romainho. These villages are in the mountainous region of Barroso, classified as World Agricultural Heritage by the UN. Drawing on extensive and collaborative fieldwork conducted in these rural villages, this paper will explore how communitarian, ancestral and place-based practices are challenging the hegemonic extractivist grammar of/on the territory, imposed by the State and by extractivist industries, in the name of the so-called “energy transition”. Focusing on the "baldios" (communal lands) and the "torna da água do povo" (an ancestral water-sharing system), this paper unveils how these embodied practices, deeply rooted in the territory, represent a unique form of rural organization that transcends Western dualist ontologies and challenges capitalist individualistic structures. In Barroso, the co-creation and reproduction of this complex system of practices, values, and knowledges are mostly undertaken by women, who play a central role in leading the resistance against mining and maintaining the daily care practices for land, water, animals, and the elderly. This paper illuminates how women, through their embodied actions, weave intimate relationships between social and economic activities and their environmental and ecological realities. I argue that these practices - and the subsistence agricultural model they are part of - create intimate relationships between people and their more-than-human worlds, strengthening their autonomy and land sovereignty, thus reinforcing the resistance against extractivist incursions.