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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Shifting Livelihoods: Gold Mining and Subsistence in the Chocó, Colombia

Shifting Livelihoods: Gold Mining and Subsistence in the Chocó, Colombia

Tubb, Daniel
Sivaramakrishnan, K.
Sivaramakrishnan, K.

Paperback

Series: Culture, Place, and Nature

AnthropologyGeneral Political ScienceSouth American History

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0295747536
ISBN13: 9780295747538
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: Jun 30 2020
Pages: 250
Weight: 0.85
Height: 0.60 Width: 5.90 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

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.

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