From Material Concerns to Material Relations? Rethinking artisanal mining and the politics of being in Africa and Latin America

• In Event: Challenges of Rural Development

Abstract

Across both Latin America and Africa, artisanal mining has been both an emerging informal practice for large portions of the population and a growing academic subject in the social sciences. To date, a preponderance of the ‘ASM’ literature has been dedicated to explaining its rise and context, placing particular emphasis on material concerns (livelihoods and poverty alleviation). In such frameworks, minerals often enough amount to nothing more than a source of income. Yet, as recent debates in anthropology have attempted to show, minerals are more than simply natural objects to be extracted, but are often deeply politicized, imbued with social ideas and relations that outstrip their geological value and forms. Such discussions have much to add to our understandings and interpretations of artisanal mining throughout Africa and Latin America. This paper seeks to establish and use this emerging theoretical framework of ‘resource materialities’ to ask about and explore deeper relations between peoples and minerals across the two continents. Using various case studies of ASM, from the Amazon of Brazil to the Katanga mines of the DRC, the paper will probe beyond what gold, diamonds, and copper offer for one’s pocket, and instead elucidate what they offer to existential questions of being. In doing so, the paper will attempt to outline a new framework for interpreting the rise and realities of artisanal mining, and by such, a perspectival shift in understanding the complex and nuanced role that minerals come to play in the lives of those who search for them.

Author

• Kieran J Gilfoy, Simon Fraser University