In this colloquium, Daniel Tubb will focus on the writing process involved in the publication of his new book Shifting Livelihoods: Gold Mining and Subsistence in the Chocó, Colombia. Dr. Tubb spent eighteen months learning how to mine gold with hand tools and techniques in the Colombian Pacific department of the Chocó, between 2010 and 2012.

He spent time working at artisanal and small-scale gold mines and living in an Afro-Colombian community, and then spent three years writing a book about life in a gold rush. The book describes the lives of people who employ various methods to extract gold in the rainforests of the Chocó: Rural Afro-Colombian artisanal miners work hillsides with hand tools or dredge mud from river bottoms. Migrant miners level the landscape with excavators, then trap gold with mercury. Canadian mining companies prospect for open-pit mega-mines. Drug traffickers launder cocaine profits by smuggling gold into Colombia and claiming it came from fictitious small-scale mines. Through an ethnography of gold that examines the movement of people, commodities, and capital, the book shows how resource extraction reshapes a place. Gold enables forms of a shifting livelihood (rebusque), a metaphor for the fluid livelihood strategy adopted by forest dwellers and migrant gold miners alike, as they seek informal work amid a drug war. Mining’s effects on rural people, corporations, and politics are on view in a fine-grained account of daily life in a regional economy dominated by gold and cocaine. What he didn’t plan on when he wrote the book was how much work it would take to write a readable, lyric, and accessible book, appropriate not only for researchers, but also undergraduates and broader publics. Dr. Tubb will reflect on crafting an ethnography that is evocative of life during a gold rush, replete with the complexity and contradiction that one finds during long term fieldwork.

Following Dr. Tubb’s presentation, Matthew Hawkins will discuss Daniel’s work.

Please contact soc-anthro@carleton.ca for the Zoom link.

This lecture is part of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology Colloquium Series.