Frontiers: Commodification and territorialization

Despite images of empty space, frontiers always include the primitive, the savage, and the irrational, whose destruction is inevitable in order for the frontier to be conquered. Frontiers are about the unmaking of existing institutional arrangements and legitimate resource use, as well as the reconstitution and negotiation of new territorial orders. The chapter locates the understanding of frontier at the intersections between different approaches, each emphasizing a different perspective: history and conquest, representation, political economy, resistance and conjuncture. The case of Patagonia illustrates how recursive movements of resource extraction and intense imaginations of new, untapped, resources intertwine.