Presentation short abstract

In this paper, I examine how gold miners understand the production of global commodity chains, their role in creating extractive frontiers, and how their stories from below have informed grassroots struggles and imaginaries in the Brazilian Amazon.

Presentation long abstract

In this paper, I examine how gold miners understand the production of global commodity chains, their role in creating extractive frontiers, and how their stories have informed grassroots struggles and imaginaries in the Brazilian Amazon. To illustrate this, I recount the life story of Pará, a former river trader and prospector who spent over forty years searching for gold in the Brazilian Amazon. I met him in 2021 when he was living in a goldfield in Serra Pelada, near the Carajás Mining Complex. As he recounted the emergence of the world’s largest iron ore mines while sifting through soil in search of gold, he connected his family’s history as river traders in Amazonia with his own non-linear trajectory. In doing so, he revealed the role of small-scale players in enabling large-scale extraction. Although gold miners are often dismissed in public debate, their stories and understanding of extraction have been crucial in informing the struggles of peasant and indigenous movements resisting the Carajás Mining Complex. For movements such as the Landless Workers’ Movement and the Movement for Popular Sovereignty in Mining in the Amazon, stories like Pará’s are not merely theoretical constructs. They are instead theory in motion, mobilised to confront extraction and dispossession, and to reimagine possible futures for the region. I argue that ethnographic storytelling and ‘stories from below’ are both analytical tools for understanding extraction across generations and cycles of resource exploitation as well as key sources of knowledge and insight for social movements currently resisting extraction.