Wind extraction? Gifts, reciprocity, and renewability in Colombia's energy frontier

Abstract

This article examines the circulation of gifts that binds dozens of indigenous Wayúu communities and Jemeiwaa Kai, a wind energy corporation that intends to build five wind farms in Colombia's coastal region of La Guajira. Drawing on long‐term fieldwork, I analyze how the intimate, reciprocal, and meaningful social exchanges that take place as part of the gift‐giving practices between Jemeiwaa Kai and Wayúu residents are critical for the renewability of wind energy itself, as they create and maintain the conditions for harnessing this resource without interruption. Since these exchanges acknowledge the power of Wayúu communities hosting future wind farms to disrupt their operations and infrastructures, they enable recipients to carve out a space of accountability by entangling the corporation in long‐term relationships of obligation and negotiating the ethical ways of harnessing wind in Wayúu land. The centrality of gift giving highlights that extraction, as a concept for theorizing wind energy in La Guajira, falls short of fully making sense of the variegated interactions, ethical predicaments, and forms of value production that take place on the ground, between those who have lived alongside the wind for centuries and the outsiders who now aspire to harness its force.