Extracting empirically: A ground’s-eye view of small-scale mining in Colombia

Social analyses have often conceptualized small-scale mining as a poverty-pushed economy that offers a social safety net to downtrodden populations. While not discarding the importance of this proposition, I argue that the commonplace notion of "poverty-driven" mining draws attention away from the socio-cultural and material particularities that inform resource extraction in specific times and places. In an attempt to foreground these particularities, I examine ethnographically the not-quite-economic factors that enable small-scale gold mining in the Colombian region of Chocó. Inspired by the conversations I held with chocoano miners, I approach small-scale mining through the notion of "empirical work." When miners described to me their labor and knowledge as "empirical," they alluded to the fact that their mining skills and sensibilities had resulted from practice—from their own long-term engagement with the goldfields. With "empirical work," thus, we may think of a form of mining labor that is intrinsically grounded in environmental experience and originates from miners' enmeshment in particular social and cultural lifeworlds. Although emergent within wider structures of inequality, the notion of empirical work draws explicit attention to the spatial, temporal, and social situatedness of mining. Accordingly, it highlights that gold extraction in Chocó, while most certainly taking place in a regional context of poverty, also constitutes an intrinsically moral economy that is articulated through narratives of luck, danger, environmental destruction, and community.