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Dr. C.R. (Cristobal) Bonelli

Associate Professor, Principal Investigator ERC Starting Grant "Worlds of Lithium"
Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences
Programme group: Anthropology of Health, Care and the Body
Area of expertise: Interdisciplinary experimentations on planetary transformations, ecological and cultural imagination, decolonial thought, and the aesthetics of sustainability.

Visiting address
  • Nieuwe Achtergracht 166
Postal address
Contact details
Social media
  • Profile

    Cristóbal Bonelli is Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam, where he leads teaching and research on sustainability, ecological transformation, and the politics of planetary coexistence. His work explores how diverse practices of world-making—Indigenous, scientific, and artistic—reshape what a livable Earth might become in times of planetary crisis. Drawing on intersections between anthropology, philosophy, and the arts, his research approaches sustainability as a field of experimentation and imagination, examining how practices of attention, composition, and care can sustain life across entangled and often incommensurable worlds.

    These concerns emerge from more than a decade of ethnographic work in Chile, where Bonelli has explored how ecological, technological, and affective transformations unsettle the boundaries between knowledge, materiality, and coexistence. His long-term research in Mapuche-Pewenche territories in the south examined how vision, healing, and personhood are shaped through relations that exceed the limits of multicultural recognition, revealing how illness and shamanic practices emerge within distinct yet entangled planes of visibility. Across these inquiries, Bonelli approaches culture not as a stable domain of representation but as a critical and shifting ontological terrain—one where relations, materials, and affects intertwine in ways that render coexistence perceptible and thinkable. In the Atacameño Desert, his research follows the layered materialities of nitrate, copper, and lithium, tracing how extractive histories have turned this landscape into a standing-reserve in the making—while ancestral and microbial worlds continue to unsettle that reduction, reminding us that the desert still exceeds the logic of utility, where other measures of worth—ethical, ecological, and fragile—come to the fore.

    In parallel to these ethnographic inquiries, Bonelli has pursued a line of writing born from an existential need to engage with the political and affective intensities of Chile’s recent history. His work moves between the streets of the 2019 social uprising and the photographic archives that span half a century of Chile’s contemporary life, exploring how gestures, voices, and images become fragile sites of exposure—where memory and matter intertwine as unfinished forms of accompaniment and renewal.

    Current teaching:

     

  • Research

    Bonelli has held two major European research grants — a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship and a European Research Council (ERC) project — both examining how ecological and technological transformations reshape contemporary forms of coexistence.
    His Marie Curie project, Invisible Waters, studied groundwater practices in the Atacama Desert, the driest desert on Earth, revealing how mining, dryness, and desert ecologies complicate conventional understandings of decarbonisation and environmental knowledge.
    Building on this foundation, his ERC project, Worlds of Lithium (WOL), investigates the societal and ecological implications of lithium extraction and battery technologies across Chile, China, and Norway, showing how energy transitions expose new relations between materials, technologies, and planetary ethics.

    Together, these projects form a long-term inquiry into the material conditions of thought, exploring how energy, matter, and ecology open new spaces for philosophical, aesthetic, and anthropological experimentation.

    Bonelli’s current research unfolds once again in the Atacama Desert — the driest place on Earth and the region with the highest solar radiation — where he studies stratigraphies of light: the entanglements of the photovoltaic, the photosynthetic, and the photosensitive regimes. In collaboration with Indigenous communities, artists, archaeologists, astronomers, and microbiologists, the project explores how technological, cosmo-technical, and image-making practices of light — from solar panels to microbial photosensitivity — generate shifting fields of luminosity and shadow through which the material and imaginative conditions of life are composed.

  • Teaching

    At the University of Amsterdam, Bonelli teaches from within the crossings of anthropology, ecology, and the arts, where learning becomes a practice of attention, composition, and care. His courses—Worlds in Transition, Multispecies Ecologies and Planetary Matter, and Thinking with the Planet—invite students to engage with the shifting continuities between the living and the non-living, rethinking sustainability beyond the confines of management or preservation. Through collaborative discussions and creative assignments, his teaching approaches sustainability as an experimental practice, where ethnography becomes a way to think and feel with the material, ecological, and multispecies entanglements of the present. Students are encouraged to debate and experiment with different ways of dramatizing the nonhuman—whether in Indigenous cosmopolitics, the new materialisms, or scientific imaginaries of agency and matter—cultivating natureculture sensibilities that attend to the fragile co-presence of matter, image, and life, and imagine forms of coexistence that exceed both human mastery and technical control.

    Current courses

    • Worlds in Transition: Rethinking Life in Times of Ecological Crisis (BA elective)

    • Multispecies Ecologies and Planetary Matter (Master’s course)

    • Thinking with the Planet: Crisis, Care and the Politics of Planetary Futures (Winter School for PhD/MA students and health professionals)

    • The Politics of Sustainability: Environments, Cultures, Materials (Master’s course)

    Previous courses

    • Environments, Alterities and the Anthropological Imagination (Undergraduate)

    • Practicing Ethnography (Undergraduate)

    • Ethnographies and Academic Writing (Undergraduate)

    Bonelli is also Supervisor at the Master on Cultural and Social Anthropology, at the  Research Master's in Social Sciences, at the  Master in International Development Studies and at the Master in Medical Anthropology and Sociology

  • Publications

    2025

    2024

    • Bonelli, C. R., & Gamba, M. (2024). Underground Roots for Ancestral Futures: Exploring Lithium Through an Experimental Alliance between Chemistry and Anthropology. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 1-27. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439241278377
    • Bonelli, C., Galaz-Mandakovic, D., Weinberg, M., Figueroa, V., & Hecht, G. (2024). Cenizas del Antropoceno: omisiones de carbón y estratigrafía tóxica en Tocopilla (Chile). Revista Colombiana de Antropologia , 60(3), Article e2710. https://doi.org/10.22380/2539472X.2710 [details]

    2023

    2022

    • Bonelli, C. (2022). On People, Sensorial Perception, and Potential Affinity in Southern Chile. In M. González Gálvez, P. Di Giminiani, & G. Bacchiddu (Eds.), Theorizing Relations in Indigenous South America (pp. 68-82). (Studies in Social Analysis; Vol. 13). Berghahn. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800733299, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781800733312-005 [details]
    • Tironi, M., Campos-Knothe, K., Acuña, V., Isola, E., Bonelli, C., Gonzalez Galvez, M., Kelly, S., Juzam, L., Molina, F., Pereira Covarrubias, A., Rivas, R., Undurraga, B., & Valdivieso, S. (2022). Interruptions: imagining an analytical otherwise for disaster studies in Latin America. Disaster Prevention and Management, 31(3), 243-259. https://doi.org/10.1108/DPM-03-2021-0102 [details]

    2021

    2020

    • Bonelli, C., & Poirot, L. (2020). Secretos de luz: apuntes para una antropología expuesta. Antípoda : Revista de Antropología y Arqueología, 41(1), 175-201. https://doi.org/10.7440/antipoda41.2020.08 [details]
    • Weinberg, M., González Gálvez, M., & Bonelli, C. (2020). Políticas de la evidencia: entre posverdad, objetividad y etnografía. Antípoda : Revista de Antropología y Arqueología, 41(1), 3-27. https://doi.org/10.7440/antipoda41.2020.01 [details]
    • Weinberg, M., González Gálvez, M., & Bonelli, C. R. (Eds.) (2020). Políticas de la evidencia: Etnografía entre mundos unívocos y mundos múltiples. Antípoda : Revista de Antropología y Arqueología, 41.

    2019

    2018

    2017

    2016

    2015

    • Bonelli Iglesias, C. (2015). Trastornos ontológicos: pesadillas, fármacos psicotrópicos y espíritus malignos en el Sur de Chile. In P. Di Giminiani, S. González Varela, M. Murray, & H. Risør (Eds.), Tecnologías en los márgenes: antropología, mundos materiales y téchnicas en América Latina (pp. 233-256). (Colección Heterotopías; No. 4). Bonilla Artigas. [details]
    • Bonelli, C. (2015). Eating one's worlds: on foods, metabolic writing and ethnographic humor. Subjectivity, 8(3), 181-200. https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2015.7 [details]
    • Bonelli, C. (2015). To see that which cannot be seen: ontological differences and public health policies in Southern Chile. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21(4), 872-891. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12292 [details]

    2014

    2012

    2016

    2018

    2015

    2008

    • Bonelli, C. R. (2008). I frattali e le identità plurali. Rivista Italiana no profit. Communitas.

    2006

    • Bonelli, C. R. (2006). Per una epistemologia del mistero. Rivista Italiana no profit. Communitas.
    • Bonelli, C. R., & Notarbartolo, C. (2006). L’epistemologia enattiva come pratica etico-politica, Rivista di Consulenza e ricerca sui sistemi umani. Connessioni, 17.

    2004

    • Bonelli, C. R. (2004). I Timbri conflittuali dell’identità: Riflessioni sull’ethnoscape in camminata. Animazione Sociale, 8/9.

    Talk / presentation

    Others

    • Bonelli, C. (participant) (4-8-2023). GT 48: Spoilage, extraction and destruction in Latin America: bodies, subjectivities and experiences in everyday life. Reflections on extractive processes, looting and destruction often pay attention to how, through the claim of rights, local populations and social (…) (participating in a conference, workshop, ...).
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  • Ancillary activities
    No ancillary activities