"Extractivores" as Prophesied Predators: Indigenous Diagnostics of Anticipatory Haunting and Anti-Extractive Methods

Indigenous communities globally have produced a precise but unstudied diagnostic figure: a human outsider who extracts vital substance from invaded communities and commodifies it through transcontinental networks. This paper proposes the term extractivore—extraneous, excessive extraction and consumption—as the analytic capable of including the myriad historical iterations of this figure while excluding its common conflations with supernatural or chthonic beings. Following a Derridean pharmakon approach to the social sciences, religious studies uniquely enable this analysis by taking seriously what secular-scientific commitments foreclose: the prophetic traditions that diagnosed extractivorism before colonial contact materialized it, transmitting ancestral warnings as memory-work and future-work alike. Reviewing key cases from Central Africa, the Andes-Amazon region, and Native North America through this lens reveals that extractivorism haunted colonial futures before they arrived—spectral presences named in advance of their necropolitical embodiment—and that the countermeasures these traditions prescribed constitute the most rigorous antiextractive methodology available to contemporary scholars.