"Defending what is ours" Resisting and re-existing in Covas do Barroso. An ethnography of a place-based struggle over a prospective lithium mine

This dissertation is an ethnographic account of the place-based struggle which emerged in response to the arrival and expansion of an open-pit lithium mining project in Covas do Barroso, an agricultural village in northern Portugal. Grounded in a yearlong ethnographic fieldwork and sustained engagement with this region for five years, this thesis examines how mining intersects with and reshapes everyday practices and senses of belonging, and how inhabitants – Barrosões – experience, conceptualise, and contest these transformations. Inspired by the political ontology framework, this dissertation shows how mining is part of longer histories of marginalisation, dispossession, and the ontological devaluation of rural lifeworlds. It is experienced not merely as a political, economic, or environmental threat, but as an existential disruption which unsettles socioecological, territorial, temporal, and affective relations. At the same time, however, the disruptions brought by the mining project triggered a renewed connection to this place and inaugurated a process of territorial reappropriation expressed through the politicization of inhabitants’ place-based modo de vida (way of life). This process is conceptualised as “re-existence:” a form of resistance grounded in defending place as ontologically inseparable from one’s existence. Resisting is also an affirmation of who inhabitants are and a claim to guardianship over the place themselves and their antigos (elders) have sustained over generations, and which sustains them. By mobilising political ontology in a European context, this dissertation argues that the struggle in Covas do Barroso challenges the colonial inevitability of green extractivism and opens possibilities for pluriversal politics.