The artisanal underground: gold, subsistence, and subsurface materiality in Colombia

Abstract

This article focuses on subsurface materiality to explore how small‐scale gold miners in Colombia navigate formal politics. In much critical research, the underground appears as a space of great developmentalist ambition, whose resources enable corporate expansion and bureaucratic rule. Here I take a slightly different route, as I demonstrate that subterranean matter makes possible ways of knowing and working that are anathema to a pro‐corporate legal regime. More specifically, I maintain that Colombian small‐scale miners experience the underground as invisible and unruly matter, and I show that this experience mediates their everyday criticism of, and resistance to, state governance.