MARCO DE ANTECEDENTES

The other participants who are mentioned by name in this thesis are: Carolina Arbelaez, a consultant with Barbosa Gold in Medellín, whose work involves the creation of subcontracts of formalisation for ASGM operators; Jairo Emilio Vélez, the general manager of the Mining Organisation Ltd. (Organización Minera Ltda.), a privately owned company that provides technical and legal services for ASGM; Ramiro Restrepo, the President of the Miners’ Association of the Bajo Cauca; Marco Antonio, the President of the Miners’ Association of Segovia; and Oseas García, who works for the USAID funded Bioredd. Both of the miners’ associations mentioned here are formalised organisations run by miners, with the purpose of advocating for miners’ rights and political interests. All of the names provided in this paragraph are real names, used with the participants’ explicit permission.

Conclusion

To approach the human face of the entanglement between miners and mercury, I have found interviews, non-purposive observation and deep hanging out effective tools for the scale of this thesis. These allowed me to consider how my participants connected mercury elimination to wider issues, showing how it was entangled throughout the industry. At the same time, there is room for improvements through interdisciplinary research to approach the entanglement from both human

61

and material faces, and for participant observation to better understand practices. By selecting participants from different parts of the ASGM industry and who were engaging with the changes occurring in the industry to varying extents, I was able to describe the meshwork through which mercury flows and to imagine this meshwork as being in a state of constant change. By allowing participants to connect mercury to other aspects of mining, I was able to understand how mercury was entangled throughout the industry. These methods which are the basis for the findings of this thesis were coproduced with my participants, with whom my ultimate ethical responsibility lies.

62

Chapter 5: Entanglements with Mercury

“When they told us that we couldn’t use mercury, I thought the mining was finished, because if we can’t use mercury, how could we extract gold?”

Carlos, a placer miner from Caucasia.

“To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the separate joining of entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair.”

Karen Barad (2007, p. ix).

This chapter is about mercury and its entanglement with gold miners that has given rise to the ASGM industry in Antioquia. It is here that I will provide the ‘thick description’ of the practices of mercury use. Temporally speaking, this chapter deals with relative continuity as mercury has been used in gold extraction for generations, although practices of mercury use have evolved over time. I will deal here with the question of ‘tradition’, which is a dominant trope in explaining mercury use in ASGM. As mercury use is decreasing in Antioquia, this chapter is somewhat retrospective. The following chapter deals with the changes currently occurring in the industry, but the significance of these changes cannot be explained without first understanding the strength of mercury’s entanglements.

In the introduction, I said that most attempts at defining ASGM are not made by giving fixed definitions, but rather by providing a list of common characteristics or essential qualities of ASGM. What I will argue here is that in Antioquia, these characteristics can be linked back to mercury, effectively meaning that mercury is co-constitutive of the particular local mode of ASGM. Miners, mercury and gold11 are entangled, existing and intra-acting through each other, and mercury is co- constitutive of an informal ASGM industry. To show the nature and depth of the

11

To say that gold is co-constitutive of ASGM is a truism, as it is the material being sought. However, discussing miners and mercury necessarily involves considering gold.

63

mercury-miner entanglement, I will be discussing a number of different aspects of mining, including the levels of investment, types of technology, mechanisms of establishing trust, and education, all culminating in the modes of approaching mining used by miners. Miners have historically acquired knowledge of mercury by

using it, and not by representing it, and their modes of approaching mining have been structured around this material. This chapter is structured around different types of mining, and these themes will be explored in relation to these different modes of mining. These points will be reinforced in the following chapter, which discusses the challenges associated with working without mercury.

In writing a thick description of mercury’s entanglements, I have had many inspirations, only some of which I will mention here. They include Primo Levi (1984), the Jewish-Italian chemist, and his book The Periodic Table, in which he writes the story of the periodic table and the story of his life simultaneously. Each chapter’s title is the name of an element, but the contents are not the elements’ physical properties, but the story of that element entangled with the story of his life. Another inspiration was Michael Taussig’s (2004) My Cocaine Museum, where he tells the gritty story of gold in the Chocó department of Colombia. The title is a reference to the famous Gold Museum in Bogotá, and it is the official and sanitised story of gold presented by the museum that Taussig wishes to counter. Marianne de Laet and Anne-Marie Mol’s (2000) The Zimbabwe Bush Pump was also on my mind as I wrote the chapter, but more as a contrast. The story of mercury is not a solitary story, but a collective story, shared with miners and gold, among others. While mercury is the central theme of this chapter, I have tried not to isolate mercury as de Laet and Mol (2000) did with the bush pump, but to allow the intersections of these other stories to remain visible.