Mario Orospe Hernández

Mario Orospe Hernández is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Philological Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). A Fulbright-García Robles scholar from Mexico City, he earned his PhD in Religious Studies at Arizona State University in 2025.

His research explores how distinctions between “religious” and “secular” took shape and how they influence the ways people understand nature, assign value to it, and use its resources. Drawing on fieldwork in Bolivia, his doctoral dissertation examines how Andean practices of relating to mountains and minerals as living beings persist within lithium extraction, questioning familiar boundaries between religion and technology. His current project, “From Living Matter to Raw Material,” traces how the concept of “raw material” emerged from theological and philosophical debates, with particular attention to mining in the colonial Andes.

He is the author of "Biopolítica y liberación: La noción de vida humana en Agamben y Dussel" (Prometeo, 2023).