Paper short abstract:

As forgotten actors in South America's extractive landscape, the perspectives of small-scale gold miners are often overlooked or derided. This paper explores their stories of animist and nonhuman encounters as central to their emerging economic subjectivities.

Paper long abstract:

The forests of Amazonia have always been exploited, and in the past few decades increasingly by bands of prospectors seeking the valuable resources therein. Despite the destruction and contamination that often ensues, these remote extractive activities have continued largely unrecognised, particularly by global media outlets and researchers. Only more recently - since the election of Bolsonaro and the catastrophic forest fires of last year - have prospectors been thrust into the limelight and denounced for their myopic greed. But who are these people? How do they make sense of their activities in relation to broader economic and environmental concerns? Providing narratives from small-scale gold miners in Peru, this paper challenges traditional tropes of exploitation and economic motivations that have emerged from geographical and anthropological research on extraction. Far from seeing the forest as an alienated realm of inert 'nature' ready for the taking, prospectors (predominantly Andean migrants) find themselves entwined (and indeed trapped) in a mysterious and formidable animist cosmos - full of devils, dangerous beings and supernatural events - that they must learn to navigate as part of their emerging new subjectivities. Descriptions of this other-worldly context are interwoven with their evaluations of economic forces beyond their known world, rumours of environmental disaster and their own personal transformations brought about by these new activities. Ethnographic descriptions thus reveal the little-recounted viewpoints of the miners themselves, accounts that uncover the multifaceted motivations and imaginaries that make up contemporary extractive frontiers.