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