Nelson Soto Santibáñez

I am an anthropologist (UC Temuco), photographer and cultural manager. I am Associate Researcher of the “White Landscapes” Project, coordinated by Dr. Andrés Zarankin in the Laboratório de Estudos Antárticos em Ciências Humanas – LEACH of UFMG (Brazil).

Seeking to understand the sociocultural strategies that human beings (mainly scientific and military) use to inhabit and colonize Antarctica, I did ethnographic work with PRONTAR (Brazil) in camps, ships and Ferraz Station, in the South Shetlands Islands for six months between 2011 and 2012. In parallel (2009 and 2012), I developed ethnographic and historical research in the gateway cities of Punta Arenas, Ushuaia and Christchurch, the city where I did a research internship at Gateway Antarctica at the University of Canterbury. I wrote “Human Tentacles to Ice” (2011), Master’s Thesis in Anthropology (UCN-UTA) about the history, connections, flows and Antarctic qualities of Punta Arenas. I am a member of the Antarctic Social Sciences Working Group of APECS, as well as a partner and editor of APECS Chile. Today, I make talks (diffusion) about Antarctic themes in academic and school spaces.

• Research projects / interests:
  • Antarctic and Polar Anthropology
  • Human-environmental relations
  • Science, technology and Society
  • Strategies of human colonization of Antarctica
  • Door-port cities (or gateway cities)
  • Education & antarctic awareness
  • The blind and blindness
  • Practices of rural football (Sports Studies)
• For publications see:
  • Soto, Nelson. 2008, Problematización antropológica de la presencia humana y sus procesos adaptativo-culturales en Antártica. Libro de resúmenes del IV Simposio Latinoamericano sobre Investigaciones Antárticas y VII Reunión Chilena de Investigación Antártica, (ISBN)-13: 978-956-7046-03-4, págs. 524-528 http://marcopolo.inach.cl/datos/mon/libro/txt/061_1480.pdf
  • Soto, Nelson. 2011, La emergencia de las ciudades puerto-puerta en la actividad y dinámica antártica. El caso de Punta Arenas, Chile. Vestígios: revista Latino-Americana de Arqueología Histórica, ISSN 1981-5875, Vol. 5, Nº. 1, págs. 61-93  dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo
  • Soto, Nelson. 2011, Latin-American Social Sciences References on Antarctic. ipy-education-outreach-and-engagement-10-years-on

Keywords: Colonization of the Antarctic; Antarctic settlements & population; Antarctic people; Antarctic culture; Gateways cities; Anthropology; Ethnography; STS.