The artisanal underground: gold, subsistence, and subsurface materiality in Colombia

Abstract

This article focuses on subsurface materiality to explore how small-scale gold miners in Colombia navigate formal politics. In much critical research, the underground appears as a space of great developmentalist ambition, whose resources enable corporate expansion and bureaucratic rule. Here I take a slightly different route, as I demonstrate that subterranean matter makes possible ways of knowing and working that are anathema to a pro-corporate legal regime. More specifically, I maintain that Colombian small-scale miners experience the underground as invisible and unruly matter, and I show that this experience mediates their everyday criticism of, and resistance to, state governance.