TY - JOUR
T1 - A different kind of formal
T2 - Bottom-up state-making in small-scale gold mining regions in Chocó, Colombia
AU - Jonkman, Jesse
PY - 2019/11/5
Y1 - 2019/11/5
N2 - Scholarship on small-scale gold extraction has often understood mining regions to be ‘informal’ spaces that suffer from ‘failed,’ ‘weak,’ or ‘absent’ statehood. Such insistence on the institutional absences of gold-producing zones (of formality, of law, of the state) has dovetailed with a lack of academic attention to the actual processes of state-making taking place there. Speaking up against this scholarly silence, this article sets out the practices of state formation that lie dormant in the Colombian gold mining department of Chocó. Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the article illustrates how Chocó’s gold miners, far from being outside or at the mere receiving end of state governance, actively influence how the state and formal law crystallize in their gold fields by way of their recalcitrant engagements with legislation. Their bottom-up law-making consists, for one, of appropriating state documentation in ways that transgress its official functions and, for another, of accumulating proof of ersatz legality in severely illegalized mining sites. The article shows, moreover, that miners’ on-the-ground enactment of law, while existing in contradiction with official legislation, partly emerges from, and is formative of, the governance schemes of the Colombian state apparatus.
AB - Scholarship on small-scale gold extraction has often understood mining regions to be ‘informal’ spaces that suffer from ‘failed,’ ‘weak,’ or ‘absent’ statehood. Such insistence on the institutional absences of gold-producing zones (of formality, of law, of the state) has dovetailed with a lack of academic attention to the actual processes of state-making taking place there. Speaking up against this scholarly silence, this article sets out the practices of state formation that lie dormant in the Colombian gold mining department of Chocó. Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the article illustrates how Chocó’s gold miners, far from being outside or at the mere receiving end of state governance, actively influence how the state and formal law crystallize in their gold fields by way of their recalcitrant engagements with legislation. Their bottom-up law-making consists, for one, of appropriating state documentation in ways that transgress its official functions and, for another, of accumulating proof of ersatz legality in severely illegalized mining sites. The article shows, moreover, that miners’ on-the-ground enactment of law, while existing in contradiction with official legislation, partly emerges from, and is formative of, the governance schemes of the Colombian state apparatus.
KW - Accumulative legality
KW - Colombia
KW - Extractive governance
KW - Small-scale gold mining
KW - State formation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85075340624&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85075340624&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.exis.2019.10.014
DO - 10.1016/j.exis.2019.10.014
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85075340624
SN - 2214-790X
VL - 6
SP - 1184
EP - 1194
JO - The Extractive Industries and Society
JF - The Extractive Industries and Society
IS - 4
ER -