Description

25 February - 15:00PM Central European Time // 8:00AM Chicago CST

Despite the fact that small-scale gold mining provides a livelihood for millions of people worldwide, it is no overstatement to say that it has a conflictive relationship with nature. When searching for gold, miners pour mercury into the earth, fell trees and forests unabashedly, and discard debris into rivers. Popular and scholarly accounts have extensively discussed these destructive ecological effects, often portraying miners as illegal wildcatters who make a quick buck at the expense of nature. This panel, organized by the ISC Lab (Institute for Societal Resilience, VU) and the Gold Matters Project, seeks to move beyond this focus on environmental degradation by drawing attention to how miners navigate practices and discourses of sustainability. Despite structural obstacles to sustainability, small-scale gold mining is undergoing processes of change that include new actors and technologies. While employing an ethnographic viewpoint, the panel examines recent mining developments and asks whether and how transformative alternatives in the sector can emerge. By teasing out the surprising ways that small-scale gold mining and sustainability interact, the panel explores several questions: Through which technological practices do miners seek to curb the ecological harms of their labor; and what is the role of the material environment in shaping these practices? How do miners reinforce, reconstruct, and reject environmental guidelines by national governments? How do miners reinforce, reconstruct, and reject environmental guidelines by national governments – and toward which ends? And can we invoke the notion of sustainability in regard to a forest-felling activity like wildcat mining?

Jesse Jonkman, Postdoctoral Researcher, Social & Cultural Anthropology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands 

Eleanor Fisher, Head of Research, Nordic Africa Institute, Sweden

Marjo De Theije, Professor, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Vrije Universiteit, Netherlands

Luciana Massaro, Postdoctoral Fellow, Social and Cultural Anthropology, UNICAMP/VRIJE UNIVERSITEIT AMSTERDAM, Netherlands

Sara Geenen, Assistant Professor, Institute of Development Policy (IOB), University of Antwerp, Belgium