Abstract: In an era of increased state involvement in natural resource governance, members of Bolivia’s “mining cooperatives” are commonly described as thieves of national wealth. Nevertheless, these small-scale miners won significant influence in Bolivia’s radically restructured Plurinational State, in which the rights of both Indigenous peoples and Pachamama (Earth Mother) have been constitutionally enshrined since 2009. In this talk, which draws on my forthcoming book, cooperative miners are unorthodox guides to the tense coexistence of resource nationalism and plurinationalism in Bolivia – a coexistence made possible, I argue, by the vertical partition of land from subsoil. Drawing on ethnographic work with tin mining cooperatives in the Bolivian highlands, I trace the history of this partition and explore its contemporary influence. Centering labor as a site of analysis, I use the concept of “material history” to theorize connections between historical materialism and new materialities, and specifically to examine how the meanings historically sedimented underground shape cooperative miners’ individual bodies and their body politic, which is internally stratified along lines of race and gender. These intimate processes have national ramifications when cooperative miners take to the streets and run for political offices. Through this work, I demonstrate not only how cooperative miners help maintain Bolivia’s extractivist economy, but also how the inseparably meaningful and material qualities of natural resources shape political subjectivities and political economic processes.
Bio: Andrea Marston is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her research examines the political economy and cultural politics of natural resources and energy systems. She is author of Subterranean Matters: Cooperative Mining and Resource Nationalism in Plurinational Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2024), co-editor for the book series Critical Geographies of Latin America and the Caribbean (University of Florida Press), and the inaugural recipient of the Margaret FitzSimmons Early Career Award in Political Ecology. Her research has appeared in journals such as Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Environmental Humanities, Journal of Peasant Studies, and Environment and Planning A, among others.
This is hybrid event hosted in Geog room 229 and on zoom.
