Shifting Livelihoods: Gold Mining and Subsistence in the Chocó, Colombia (Culture, Place, and Nature) - Hardcover

Tubb, Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0295747528 ISBN 13: 9780295747521

Publisher: University of Washington Press, 2020

Synopsis

Honorable Mention for the Society for the Anthropology of Work (SAW) Book Prize The many dimensions of gold in a shadow economy People employ various methods to extract gold in the rainforests of the Chocó, in northwest Colombia: Rural Afro-Colombian artisanal miners work hillsides with hand tools or dredge mud from river bottoms. Migrant miners level the landscape with excavators, then trap gold with mercury. Canadian mining companies prospect for open-pit mega-mines. Drug traffickers launder cocaine profits by smuggling gold into Colombia and claiming it came from fictitious small-scale mines. Through an ethnography of gold that examines the movement of people, commodities, and capital, Shifting Livelihoods investigates how resource extraction reshapes a place. In the Chocó, gold enables forms of “shift” (rebusque)—a metaphor for the fluid livelihood strategy adopted by forest dwellers and migrant gold miners alike as they seek informal work amid a drug war. Mining’s effects on rural people, corporations, and politics are on view in this fine-grained account of daily life in a regional economy dominated by gold and cocaine.

About this title

About the Authors

Daniel Tubb is associate professor of anthropology at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton. He received his PhD in anthropology with a specialization in political economy from Carleton University in 2014. This is his first book.

Kalyanakrishnan "Shivi" Sivaramakrishnan is Dinakar Singh Professor of India and South Asia Studies, professor of anthropology, professor of forestry and environmental studies, and codirector of the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0295747528
• ISBN 13: 9780295747521
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 250