An ethnography of the gasoline era in post-colonial landscapes

Objectif

Feral Engines explores the rapid and weakly regulated spread of fossil-fuel motorization in peripheral, extractive territories of South America. While industrialized countries move toward decarbonization, regions like the Gran Chaco, Bolivian Amazon, and Southern Andes are experiencing a combustion-driven boom. The project focusFeral Engines explores the rapid and weakly regulated spread of fossil-fuel motorization in peripheral, extractive territories of South America. While industrialized countries move toward decarbonization, regions like the Gran Chaco, Bolivian Amazon, and Southern Andes are experiencing a combustion-driven boom. The project focuses on the life and afterlife of motorcycles, chainsaws, outboard engines, and mining or agricultural machines in postcolonial contexts marked by infrastructural fragmentation, fuel informality, and multispecies entanglements. Combining ethnographic fieldwork, historical research, and digital modeling, Feral Engines examines how engines circulate, adapt, and reshape social, ecological, and political landscapes. The project investigates their assemblages with humans, animals, fuels, territories, and institutions, and documents forms of mechanical ferality that emerge beyond formal technical and infrastructural systems. The project articulates four analytical axes: material trajectories of machines, techno-ecological configurations, unequal energy regimes, and post-fossil scenarios. Grounded in three regional case studies, the project is carried out by an interdisciplinary team (PI, postdocs, PhD students, associated researchers) and supported by a digital research platform. The project outputs include a systematic corpus, an open-access comparative gallery, and reusable analytical tools. Feral Engines contributes to global debates on energy transitions, technological circulation, and material infrastructures, while developing a replicable methodology for studying contemporary technical materialities in the Global South.