Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the creation of borderland spaces of gold extraction and notions of the environment in the Guianas— the territory between contemporary Guyana, Venezuela, and Brazil. It centers on the imbrication of shamanic time and the legal construction of a disputed borderland territory.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers the creation of borderland spaces of gold extraction and notions of the environment in the Guianas— the territory between contemporary Guyana, Venezuela, and Brazil. It centers on the imbrication of shamanic time and the legal construction of a disputed borderland territory. An ex-miner turned vehicle operator and speculator reflected once that ‘gold is a jumbie’ —where jumbie is the Creole term for a malevolent spirit and corresponds to Karinya (Carib), Lokono (Arawak), and Warau notions of spirit entities. His explanation that such spirits live deep within the earth and need to be summoned with the appropriate offerings—women’s bodies, alcohol, and blood—provides an important way of conceptualizing the environment and the ethics of borderland extraction. Making life in these borderland spaces seems to necessitate operating fluidly across three time-scapes—negotiating the Amerindian, African, and European material past of a trafficking frontier, the shamanic past and astral planes of the otherworld, and the geological past of mineral deposits. Methodologically, the paper places indigenous and diasporic cosmologies around minerals and their presence in this region in relation to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European discussions of “terra nullius” and the specific regional history of the discovery and expansion of gold mining. By privileging the vision and worldviews of those who dwell in these lands, the paper also reflects on how local borderland ecological thinking impacts the broader international economic, legal, and environmental struggles around mineral resource extraction in the region today.