Subterranean governance: The political work of artisanal miners in the northern Peruvian Andes

Since the first half of the 2000s, residents of Algamarca—a rural village located in the northern Peruvian Andes—have been informally extracting minerals within the concession of a foreign mining company. This dissertation examines the political work of this group of artisanal miners to secure and sustain their livelihoods in a context marked by state initiatives aimed at regulating their informal activities. Based on eleven months of ethnographic research, it unpacks four key sociopolitical arrangements that have allowed them to prolong their activity over time. First, the dissertation examines their local donations as forms of social responsivity that, unlike the corporate social responsibility of industrial mining, are more pragmatic, meaningful and adaptable to the vulnerable contexts from which they emerge. Second, it shows how the mining network becomes embedded in local power structures by forming a subterranean state, which refers to actors and institutions that, while publicly operating under a state-like guise, critically depend on revenues from informal mining to fulfill their functions. Third, it reveals the constitution of frontier companies: local mining ventures that partially reproduce organizational structures, symbols, and techniques associated with corporate mining, while coexisting with informal and legally ambiguous practices. Finally, the research analyzes the in-depth arrangements between artisanal miners and state authorities, which are extraofficial agreements that seek to refashion state formalization design by incorporating a vertical and tridimensional orientation for the governance of underground space. These arrangements allow us to understand the political work of artisanal miners as an assemblage practice that articulates different projects, organizational forms, normative regimes, and, crucially, the materiality of the mineral resource they extract. By making these assemblages visible, the dissertation reveals a ‘people’s extractivism’ that enriches and complicates conventional interpretations of artisanal and small-scale mining. In doing so, it broadens our understanding of artisanal miners’ politics by situating them beyond their usual portrayal as anti-state and disruptive actors; it reimagines artisanal mining not merely only as an extracting and predatory activity, but also as an authentic giving force; and it illuminates the constitutive role of resource materiality in mining arrangements and in the possibilities of formalization.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph D

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Anthropology

Grantor dc:publisher

The University of Western Ontario

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Melendez, Luis

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Clark, Kim

• Artisanal mining
• political work
• informality
• mineral resources
• materiality
• Peru

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution 4.0 International

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14721/38830

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:uwo.scholaris.ca:20.500.14721/38830