Gilded Time: Boom-bust subjectivities in informal gold mining economies

This paper explores encounters with gold and activities of prospector mining in the Amazon rainforest, with narratives presented from lowland indigenous peoples in Venezuela and Andean migrants in Peru. Ethnography from these two sites reveals a complex terrain of temporal immediacy and cyclical repetition that defines the lived experience of boom-and-bust resource economies and broader capitalist timescapes of speculation. In the two field sites, mine sites are described as sites of perceived limitlessness, mysterious spirit entities and scenes of curtailed abundance that emerge from a tension between an obligation to share and a desire to conceal wealth.

The paper considers what these extractive timescapes might reveal about economic subjectivities in small-scale extractive economies, particularly in relation to the speeding and slowing of time in connection with the vagaries of the commodities market.

Biography

Amy Penfield is an Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Bristol. Her research explores economic livelihoods in remote regions of Amazonia, whether in the form of animist environmental ecologies, informal wildcat mining, everyday experiences of oil economies, or struggles to access energy sources.