Machinery, memories, matter: The techno-geological worlds of small-scale miners in Bolivia

• In Event: STS Underground: Fieldnotes from the Pre-conference Workshop

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with small-scale tin miners in the highland Bolivia, this paper explores subject formation in underground spaces with an attention to the interactions of geological materiality, extractive technologies, and labor. Deep inside a mountain that was once the most productive tin mine on earth, small-scale miners use a combination of manual and semi-industrial tools - many inherited from the now-shuttered state mining corporation - to follow veins of tin no thicker than a fingernail. For Bolivian experts, including political economists and mining engineers, small scale miners' methods, tools, and (lack of) future visions render them evidence of temporal regression, a "return" to colonial times. For the miners themselves, however, the meanings attached to the rusty machines, underground work, and the metal itself make them privileged national actors - more "Bolivian" than others. Contrasting these perspectives, this paper shows how the miners, composing a truly "geosocial" formation, are shaped in relation to technology and the geological worlds in which they labor.

Author

• Andrea Marston, University of California, Berkeley