Contemporary Ethnography- Underground Politics

In the Chocó rainforests of Colombia, miners turn to gold to get by, whilst worrying about the declining richness of subsoils, state troops, and paramilitaries. Underground Politics follows the everyday sociopolitical life of this lawless gold frontier, revealing how miners navigate state power in a context of political neglect. How Colombian mining communities navigate state power in a context of criminalization and political neglect In the Chocó rainforests of Colombia, local and settler miners turn to gold as a means to get by and get ahead on the margins of capitalism. They eke out livelihoods while worrying about the declining richness of subsoils, their heightened persecution by state troops, the stigmatizing language of politicians, and the extortion of paramilitaries and guerrillas. Underground Politics follows the everyday sociopolitical life of this supposedly lawless gold frontier, revealing how gold-mining communities in Chocó navigate state power in a context of criminalization and political neglect. Drawing on ethnographic encounters and conversations in mining regions, Jesse Jonkman traces how miners and their surrounding communities reappropriate the state's legal and bureaucratic tools for their own ends. Far from being outside of state governance, or only on the receiving end of it, mining stakeholders involve legal categories and representatives of the state in their daily organizational practices, rendering mundane and lawful a livelihood that official discourses deem destructive and illegal. In so doing, they bring about another kind of state presence in their gold frontier, through what Jonkman calls "underground politics"—the process by which those ostensibly working outside of state structures are nonetheless active participants in bottom-up…