EXTRACTIVE ENTREPRENEURS: ARTISANAL MINING AS A TECHNOLOGY OF RESISTANCE?
STANDD Talk This Friday, Nov. 4 - Eric Hirsch, Andean Artisanal Mining
Society, Technology and Development, Centre for
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STANDD presents
EXTRACTIVE ENTREPRENEURS: ARTISANAL MINING AS A TECHNOLOGY OF RESISTANCE?听
Eric Hirsch 黑料不打烊 University
How are Andean families reconfiguring small-scale mineral extraction as something 鈥渟ustainable鈥�? This talk addresses the current state of entrepreneurship in the Colca Valley, a site of twenty connected highland villages in Andean Peru鈥檚 Arequipa region. There, the latest turn of the century meant a number of important changes. Among them was the end of many forms of service provision, as welfare states shrunk around the world. This gave way to a supposedly leaner genre of project-based development intervention: the small-scale cultivation, by NGOs and state projects, of indigenous entrepreneurs capable of deploying their local knowledge and ecological expertise in a way that simultaneously rescues economy, culture, and environment. But after those projects, too, came to their end in Colca by 2014, the Flores family in a Colca community I call 鈥淐ollaguas鈥� deployed the entrepreneurship and other financial strategies they learned for prior businesses that failed to start a small mine on their property. Given that large mining enterprises like Peru鈥檚 Buenaventura company have begun to buy land and obtain concessions near the Flores鈥� property, I argue that the family鈥檚 interest in starting a mine was also a means of resistance, of claiming what they see as their rightful share of Peru鈥檚 mineral abundance. In this talk, I tease out the links between seemingly sustainable development and apparently unsustainable development. Doing so, I consider what artisanal mining can tell us about an apparently out-of-the-way place suspended between the weak grasp of the state and the looming presence of powerful private interests.
Date: Friday, November 4th, 2016听
Time: 12:30 pm听
Location: Peterson Hall, 3460 McTavish Street, H3A 0E6, Room 116听
*Due to construction, use the left side entrance Refreshments will be served.
Centre for Society, Technology, and Development (STandD)
standd.anthro [at] mcgill.ca