Paper short abstract:

This paper will focus on the (re)production of social and environmental difference by new mining encounters in the peruvian Andes. Based on ethnographic and visual materials, it will argue that excavators, spirits and mountains have a lot to tell us about humans, and vice versa.

Paper long abstract:

The multiplication of large-scale open-pit mining operations deeply transform social and environmental at the local level. These transformations are not only a consequence of the physical and ecological modifications connected to mining : they are the product of new encounters between human and non-human beings - machines, spirits and resources - brought together by extractive activities.

This paper will focus on the (re)production of social and environmental difference by new mining encounters in the northern Peruvian region of Cajamarca. To do so, it will build on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2011 and 2013, as part of my PHD research on social change and political mobilisation in this new mining region. This ethnographic data will be complemented with an analysis of media images and discourses on Otherness and resistance to mining in the region, between 2014 and 2016.

I will show how mining development over the last three decades has transformed local social categories, producing new forms of social and ethnic boundaries while gradually erasing others. Mining development has also radically reconfigured relationships to the environment, leading to the domestication of certain places and spirits while "wilding" and "angering" others. Social and environmental change, I will argue, are also best understood where they overlap : social categories are generally represented as "natural", and the natural world is deeply "social". The interactions of excavators, spirits and mountains therefore has a lot to tell us about social relations between humans, and vice versa.