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
 
 

STANDD presents
EXTRACTIVE ENTREPRENEURS: ARTISANAL MINING AS A TECHNOLOGY OF RESISTANCE? 
Eric Hirsch McGill University

How are Andean families reconfiguring small-scale mineral extraction as something “sustainable”? This talk addresses the current state of entrepreneurship in the Colca Valley, a site of twenty connected highland villages in Andean Peru’s 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 “Collaguas” 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’s Buenaventura company have begun to buy land and obtain concessions near the Flores’ property, I argue that the family’s interest in starting a mine was also a means of resistance, of claiming what they see as their rightful share of Peru’s 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 
Time: 12:30 pm 
Location: Peterson Hall, 3460 McTavish Street, H3A 0E6, Room 116 
*Due to construction, use the left side entrance Refreshments will be served.
Centre for Society, Technology, and Development (STandD)
standd [dot] anthro [at] mcgill [dot] ca