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Shifting livelihoods : gold mining and subsistence in the Chocó, Colombia /

"People employ various methods to extract gold in the rainforests of the Chocó, in northwest Colombia: Rural Afro-Colombian artisanal miners work hillsides with hand tools or dredge mud from river bottoms. Migrant miners level the landscape with excavators, then trap gold with mercury. Canadia...

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Bibliographic Details
Call Number:Libro Electrónico
Main Author: Tubb, Daniel (Author)
Format: Electronic eBook
Language:Inglés
Published: Seattle : University of Washington Press, [2020]
Series:Culture, place, and nature.
Subjects:
Online Access:Texto completo
Description
Summary:"People employ various methods to extract gold in the rainforests of the Chocó, in northwest Colombia: Rural Afro-Colombian artisanal miners work hillsides with hand tools or dredge mud from river bottoms. Migrant miners level the landscape with excavators, then trap gold with mercury. Canadian mining companies prospect for open-pit mega-mines. Drug traffickers launder cocaine profits by smuggling gold into Colombia and claiming it came from fictitious small-scale mines. Through an ethnography of gold that examines the movement of people, commodities, and capital, Shifting Livelihoods investigates how resource extraction reshapes a place. In the Chocó, gold enables forms of "shift" (Colombian: rebusque)-a metaphor for the fluid livelihood strategy adopted by forest dwellers and migrant gold miners alike as they seek informal work amid a drug war. Mining's effects on rural people, corporations, and politics are on view in this fine-grained account of daily life in a regional economy dominated by gold and cocaine"--
Physical Description:1 online resource (xxviii, 217 pages) : illustrations, maps.
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN:9780295747545
0295747544