•  
  •  
 

When Extractive Subjects Come Afloat: Capitalist Natures and Extractive Orientations from within Colombia's Oldest Copper Mine

Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7010-3297

Abstract / Resumen / Resumo

El Roble Mine at El Carmen de Atrato is Colombia's first copper mine. Inspired by the similarity between froth flotation—El Roble Mine's method for extracting copper concentrate—and corporate responses to residents' demands for accountability, this article introduces the concept of "coming afloat." Like the bubbles that make copper float and the gangue sink, this term evokes the social engineering techniques that enable capital and the state to manage dissent, forge compromises, and promote technological development in mineral extraction. Citizen participation events guide residents to normalize labor exploitation, tailings disposal, and the appropriation of nature. I argue that public hearings, mine visits, wage relations, and corporate social responsibility initiatives constitute extractive orientations, or structured modes of interacting with the extractive economy, which subject people and places to the power relations of mineral-intensive decarbonization. Through ethnographic tracing, I identify four subject positions (i.e., roles and identities enabled and constrained by norms and practices) that have emerged from these orientations: ad hoc overseers, technologically disciplined miners, subcontracted external workers, and institutionalized value scratchers. Coming afloat describes how copper production shapes subjects through material and discursive "sedimentations", such as tailings and policy frameworks, respectively, both of which are always open to contestation in the realm of cultural politics.

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS