La velocidad en los mundos lentos. Accidentes, máquinas y sociedades en América del Sur

One of the most striking transformations in the peripheral landscapes of South America is the ongoing construction of roads, highways, bridges, ports and airports. This evolution of infrastructures materializes what we could call a mechanical colonization: i.e., the increasingly massive presence of large machines (ships, railroads, airplanes, trucks, bulldozers) and, at the same time, the massification or democratization of other minor machines such as motorcycles, cars, chainsaws, motor-generators. The mechanical dissemination not only modifies social rhythms and flows but also impacts significantly on the environment and human, plant and animal lives, by introducing new forms of acceleration that, from many points of view, become disruptive, problematic and even often quite violent. However, the historiography of the deserts, jungles and mountains of South America tends to naturalize the process by describing the sustained and unfailing advance of functioning machines. Machines only come to attention through breakdown, dysfunction or collapse, and thus begin to be the object of reflection due to the very accidents they produce. In this way, the accident becomes a paradigmatic instance whose very materiality embodies in the crudest and most immediate way the multiple dilemmas of colonization. By compiling studies by anthropologists, historians and geographers, this multidisciplinary volume aims to analyze accidents (railroad incidents, road and motorcycle accidents, shipwrecks, road-kills, or mining explosions) as critical, dense, diagnostic milestones that reveal novel agencies, assemblages and relationships between machines, territories and societies. Indeed, the possibility of rethinking the accident beyond the fatality of a random event allows to understand it as a generative, analytically productive process, that reveals, exposes or brings to light a range of latent principles and tensions. By doing so, it also brings to light a relational field that associates diverse human groups, non-human beings, animal species, territories, objects, machines and even other accidents. And, furthermore, at a more abstract level it also fosters reflections on the very definition of what constitutes —or not— an accident, and on the concepts of agency, event, responsibility and causality.