El Chocó, Colombia, deserves this book. The region, on the Pacific coast of Colombia, is as important to the gold economy of the country as it is missing from the literature in English. Tubb has done English-speaking publics a true service in this ethnography of the varieties of small miners who make a living digging gold out of the rainforest. Like all good ethnographies, this one goes deep into the daily lives of subjects involved in the study, documenting how they go about making a living under difficult circumstances. The author goes to great lengths to explain how the anthropologist's gaze, if you will, is located in a place of privilege not shared by the small, independent, artisanal miners of El Chocó, whose lives are precarious and thus require maximum creativity to make ends meet. He presents the worldviews of the people he studied in some detail, with care and empathy, even if these may differ from those of the anthropologist to one degree or another.
Mining in El Chocó is not dominated by ‘Big Mining,’ that is, the transnational mining consortia that have created much unrest throughout Latin America. They are there, but their presence in situ is minor. They are further elsewhere on the commodity chain, blocked from establishing themselves locally due to political decisions made in Bogotá rather than El Chocó. This makes for interesting local mining politics. This is not the case of small miners versus the evil mining companies from abroad. This is indigenous, Afro-Colombian, and mestizo peoples utilizing mining as their main but not their only survival strategy, which includes subsistence farming, hunting, small-time commerce, and whatever other employment opportunities may come their way.
The term used in El Chocó to encompass this multifaceted family and community economy is rebusque, which has no easy translation. In fact, the author spends some time trying to define the term in such a way that it encompasses the breadth of activity and attitude it involves. He ends up with the awkward but functional “shifting” label to describe the dynamics of making a living in the rainforest. Tubb convincingly argues that gold-mining allows the families he studied to stay in the forest and avoid proletarianization and wage slavery in the cities. Thus, the downsides of gold-mining certainly seem to be justified, at least in the eyes of the community.
The drawbacks of small or artisanal mining are many. The ecological damage of excavating and using mercury without control are perhaps the worst. There is also deforestation, erosion, and other environmental effects that affect the landscape and the health of local communities as well. Conflicts over land rights, access to machinery to make mining faster and more productive, and contracting with large mining companies are added dimensions on the negative side. Tubbs argues the process is largely “not violent” (87), but that observation is not convincing. In comparison to the violence that has wracked Colombia for decades, of course, but in relationship to more nuanced forms of violence addressed by other scholars like Seth Holmes and Rob Nixon, I think the author missed an opportunity to contribute to this important work of theorizing.
The author does a nice job of organizing the book around three principles: production, accumulation, and transformation. Thus Tubb links local activities of subsistence—as gold production is to the people of El Chocó—to the global economy, where gold is anything but subsistence. Therein lies the implied heartbreak of this ethnography. Although la gran minería may not be physically present in this part of El Chocó, it is the ghost that looms over the entire enterprise and turns these “shifting” livelihoods into fodder for global exploitation.
