Unearthing Conflict: Corporate Mining, Activism, and Expertise in Peru, by Fabiana Li

How do things come to matter? When is smoke from a smelter recognized as pollution? How does the identification of a mountain as a sacred being galvanize political opposition to mining? How are political debates shaped by documents like environmental impact assessments? These are some of the important questions raised by Fabiana Li in her novel and provocative account of nonhuman agency in the mining conflicts that have troubled Peru during the last two decades.

Li begins with the example of a controversial smelter in La Oroya that has been in operation for nearly a century. The people working there and living nearby have become accustomed to the smoke it produces, which burns their throats and irritates their eyes. They regard the plumes from the smelter as an acceptable trade-off for the economic opportunities provided by the company. After all, Li recalls an informant asking rhetorically, what place is not polluted? (39). Only in recent years has the smoke from the smelter become identified as a pollutant and the accompanying health risks made visible. Li examines how ‘the language of environmental science and transnational activism turned “pollution” into a new object of national and global concern’ (4). She also argues that we need to take seriously the roles played by ‘environmental actors themselves’, including plumes of smoke, nearby mountains, and the atmosphere, in shaping these interactions (56).

The town of La Oroya has an interesting history. Initially, the mining company found it difficult to recruit local peasants as wage laborers. Li describes what Heraclio Bonilla refers to as a ‘curious mechanism of proletarianization’: acid rain caused by emissions from the smelter scorched the surrounding hills and fields, making it impossible to farm, and the deposition of heavy metals, including arsenic and antimony, poisoned their livestock, leaving the people living nearby with little choice but to move to town and seek employment with the mining company (42). Like the historical enclosure of the commons, the operation of the smelter resulted in the removal of peasants from the land, forcing them to sell their labor under circumstances not of their own choosing. Problems caused by pollution also led to the establishment of a buffer zone around the site when the company was forced to purchase degraded land from hacienda owners.

However, the people who settled in La Oroya came to appreciate the higher standard of living and amenities of urban life. They objected when disclosure of the environmental and health problems caused by the smelter threatened to shut down the project. They preferred the interventions of the company, which offers local women instructions on how to keep their houses clean and their children safe from the lead dust that settles on the pavement where they play. The company even transports children with elevated levels of lead in their blood to a special school in the mountains, where they are able to breathe fresh air for eight hours a day. The people living in La Oroya were offended by its characterization as a ‘sick town’ (65) and the stigma associated with lead poisoning, and they consequently supported the company's campaign against the environmental NGOs critical of the project.

Through these examples, Li explains how and why pollution came to matter, for whom, and when it did not. I am not entirely persuaded, however, that because smoke from the smelter did not receive public attention for decades, it did not matter. The effects of pollution on the people living in La Oroya and the surrounding area were materialized in embodied forms even if its consequences for human health and disease went unrecognized. These impacts are examples of what Nixon (2011) refers to as ‘slow violence’, which disproportionately affects the poor. Li convincingly accounts for how pollution in La Oroya went from being taken for granted to the identification of the town as one of the world's 10 most polluted places. But it is equally important to recognize the work that previously went into normalizing these conditions, including the acts of disavowal leading to their acceptance.¹

Li also writes about disputes over water at the Yanacocha gold mine near Cajamarca, protests against the expansion of that project into Cerro Quilish (Mount Quilish), and the conflict over the proposed $5 billion Conga mine 75 km to the north. She describes how these projects bring humans and nonhumans into new relationships with each other. For example, identification of Cerro Quilish as an apu, or sacred being, enrolled thousands of protestors against the proposed expansion of the mine. However, Li tells us that the people living nearby refer to Cerro Quilish using the Quechua orqo, which simply means mountain, rather than apu. The image of the mountain as a sacred being also differs from local folktales and beliefs about malevolent beings said to inhabit nearby springs, which have the capacity to bring misfortune to the unwary. Li explains that people familiar with these tales generally learned about them from their grandparents and that the stories no longer play a significant role in their daily lives.

The claim that the mountain was an apu was promoted by a dynamic Catholic priest from the area, whose political commitments fueled his romantic vision of the Quechua ‘cosmovision’. Although the religious dimensions of this perspective were explicitly rejected by the evangelical minority and largely ignored by the Catholic majority, it nonetheless captivated the imagination of thousands of Peruvians who protested against the proposed mine. Li refrains from questioning the authenticity of the movement, much like her earlier refusal to critique local supporters of the smelter in La Oroya. Here she draws on both Tsing's (2005) work on forest movements in Indonesia and de la Cadena's (2010) account of ‘pluriversal’ politics in Peru, which takes the rights of nature into account. Like de la Cadena, Li focuses on the public invocation of these narratives rather than the backstage conversations in which people negotiate competing perspectives on development and conservation.

The chapter on the Yanacocha mine addresses the notion of equivalence, by which Li refers to the technologies and expertise required to quantify difference and thus render things comparable, as well as negotiation over what counts as authoritative knowledge. The specific example she discusses is the way corporate science renders unlike things commensurable, notably water from a spring that feeds an irrigation canal in contrast to water extracted by the mine for industrial use, which is released into the same canal after being chemically treated. When the mining company asserted their equivalence, its findings were challenged by the people using water from the canal for agriculture, who invoked evidence from visual inspections of the canals that revealed changes in water quality and flows, resulting in the payment of compensation by the mine. Li notes how the process of comparison can result in the proliferation of disputes rather than their resolution. In this case, compensation payments attracted other claimants, increasing the number of people who now make use of the limited water supply.

The chapter on the proposed expansion of the Yanacocha mine focuses on the agency of documents, and in particular the role of environmental impact assessments, which are generally required for new mining projects. Li examines how these documents shape perceptions. For example, they convey confidence in the ability of the mining company to mitigate potential environmental impacts, despite studies showing how environmental impact assessments systematically overestimate their capacity to do so (see Kuipers et al. 2006). Another dynamic is the equivalence purportedly established between participation in the review process and consent, which led protestors to boycott the meeting at which the results of the assessment were presented. They concluded that the only way to avoid being coopted by the review process was to remain external to it. I found Li's approach to environmental impact assessments to be especially valuable and perceptive, although I wondered what is excluded when agency is attributed to documents themselves rather than the other actors in these interactions – multilateral funders, states enforcing or waiving requirements, local supporters or opponents of the project, and corporations interested in minimizing expenditures by downplaying potential risks.

In conducting her research, Li travelled across Peru to report on various mining conflicts. The multi-sited nature of her project allows for valuable comparisons. Several of the chapters are also organized as travel narratives: in one, she follows a corporate tour of the Yanacocha mine; in another, she participates in a two-day inspection of an irrigation canal downstream from the same project. The result is less an ethnography of place than ethnography on the go. It covers a lot of ground, but relative to more conventional ethnographic work, it feels socially thin, a quality that is only partially offset by the presentation of well-rendered vignettes of the people she meets and interviews along the way, such as the peasant couple Wilmer and Herlinda living downstream from the Yanacocha mine. The lack of embeddedness in any single fieldwork context, in contrast to the kinds of political commitments associated with long-term social relationships, also seems commensurate with the author's neutral and even-handed approach to these conflicts.

An important question raised by this engaging project is whether a focus on distributed forms of agency necessarily limits recognition of power differences. Of all of the things to which Li attributes the capacity to make a difference, the corporation is perhaps the least agentive actor in this account. It is as though attention to these other forms of agency had a levelling or flattening effect on her consideration of power differences. This may be understandable given the author's primary objective, which is to enhance our understanding of how nonhuman agents and environmental actors influence events. However, it also limits attention to the role corporations play in these mining conflicts.

Like other scholars working in the tradition of actor-network theory, the author favors the use of passive verbs, which may conceal human agency. For example, the author describes the ‘emergence of activism’ (3) and discusses how ‘pollution comes to matter’ (30, 70). Her preference for passive sentence construction also seems to downplay capabilities like intentionality and strategic planning that nonhuman actors do not necessarily share with their human counterparts. When Li discusses the agency of artifacts created by humans – such as irrigation canals and documents – the focus on material things may distract our attention from the ways these objects are manipulated by others. There also seems to be a form of purification at work, leading the ethnographer to sidestep some of the most important political questions she raises, i.e. whether or not the defenders of La Oroya are laboring under false consciousness, whether people believe Cerro Quilish is an apu and therefore should not be mined, or whether the scientific assessments of the mining industry adequately account for environmental risks.

These observations are neither minor quibbles nor criticisms of the project's shortcomings. Rather, they point to the significance of the author's innovative application of ideas about the agency of things to mining conflicts in Peru. In doing so, Fabiana Li sheds new light on resource conflicts more generally, raising questions that merit further discussion and debate.

Notes

1 The history of La Oroya reminds me of the stories people tell about living in Pittsburgh during the 1960s, thinking nothing of having to sweep the black dust from the steel foundries off their cars in the morning, like cleaning the snow from their cars in the winter, or carrying white shirts in dry cleaner bags to change into at work, so they would not get smudged by air pollution during their commute.