Gilded Space-Time: Economic subjectivities in a boom-and-bust economy
| Dates: | 20 February 2023 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 18:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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Dr Amy Penfield
Gilded Space-Time: Economic subjectivities in a boom-and-bust economy
This paper explores moral reflections in encounters with gold and the activity of prospector mining in the Amazon rainforest, with narratives presented from lowland indigenous peoples in Venezuela and Andean migrants in Peru. Ethnography from these sites reveals a complex terrain of temporal and spatial immediacy that defines the lived experience of boom-and-bust resource economies. In the Venezuelan context, gold elicits a particular form of static time arising from the urgency of desire that traps miners in an inescapable cycle of rapacity in which hopeful prospectors always ends up where they started. Among Quechua-speaking miners in Peru, mine sites in the lowland forests are described not as scenes of temporal evacuation, but as locations imbued with a hollowed-out sense of nearness. Something dangerous, though they know not what, prowls just beyond the fringes of their makeshift encampments. However indecipherable, these forces beyond their known world define their experiences in remote extractive frontiers. This paper will consider how and why gold is experienced as an emptying of adjacent space and time, and what this might reveal about economic subjectivities in small-scale extractive economies, and about the varying forms that space-time take in different economic contexts more broadly.
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