I would like to thank Stuart Kirsch for his thoughtful review, which addresses many of the questions that come up when doing ethnographic research in places affected by the extractive industries. The extensive reach of mining operations demands new ways of doing fieldwork and requires that we expand our geographic focus while remaining attentive to local dynamics. Striking the right balance is one of the key challenges of doing fieldwork and writing about the reverberations of mining conflicts beyond specific communities.
For example, I debated whether or not to include the case of La Oroya (which could have taken up another book) and did so because it captures how corporations, mining politics, and activism have changed over the years (and what has remained the same). Pollution came to matter in ways that mobilized new forms of politics and influenced public debates on mining, but of course, the problems were felt as soon as the smelter started spewing its toxic emissions in the early 1920s. As I point out in the book, corporate managers recognized lead’s effects on the health of its workers, but the focus was on measuring, studying, and controlling pollutants in the workplace, not as part of a larger public health and environmental issue affecting the population at large. Contributing to the normalization of La Oroya’s toxic environment was the paternalism of the company and its various programs designed to show that it was looking out for workers and their families. This was a constant as the metallurgical complex went from private to public ownership, and it took the form of ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ once it was again privatized in the 1990s. As Kirsch points out, the ‘slow violence’ of the contamination has been part of life in La Oroya from the time of the smelter’s construction until today, embedded in the soil and in people’s bodies, even if the smelter has taken a break from its usual operations. The metallurgical complex has been paralyzed since 2009 and is currently up for sale. In August 2015, workers and town residents engaged in protests and roadblocks to pressure the government to find a buyer for the smelter and to be more flexible about the environmental standards mandated in the terms of sale. They feared that if the property went into liquidation, more than two thousand jobs would be definitively lost.
Whether in La Oroya or other sites of conflict, some people accept the risks of pollution due to a variety of reasons – dubious corporate science among them, but also the lack of employment opportunities and absence of a long-term government plan that envisions alternative economic activities. In such cases, the idea of false consciousness is problematic, since it does not take seriously people’s own analysis of the risks they face nor the priorities they set out for themselves, leaving it up to the anthropologist to define what is ‘true’ for them. I am not advocating a kind of moral relativism, but a deeper analysis that questions why workers sometimes side with corporations (but also oscillate in their support), how an Apu becomes a mobilizing force in some places (but not others), or why corporate science sometimes succeeds in obscuring environmental risks (and sometimes fails). I have tried to show the threats of modern mining and its effects on people’s everyday lives, without ignoring the diversity of views and experiences or the contradictions and inconsistencies of people’s positions.
Another challenge of doing research on conflicts over extractive activity is paying adequate attention to all of the participants involved, including consulting companies, international assessors, financial institutions, and the many parts that make up the state and the corporation. Even as we recognize the agency of corporate actors, we must also be careful not to treat the corporation as internally homogenous and cohesive, or as a single actor that operates with a single goal or intention. A closer look inside the corporation would have been desirable, but was not always possible given the tensions and polarization that characterize mining conflicts in Peru. This itself is a problem with both political and ethical ramifications.
Focusing on human or nonhuman actors need not be mutually exclusive, especially if we think about how they are co-constituted and the ways extractive activity is remaking the relationships among them. Nor does thinking about the central role of aquifers or Environmental Impact Assessments in recent conflicts preclude a consideration of power relations. Rather, paying attention to things that are not usually taken into account in conventional discussions of ‘politics’ can help us to see power dynamics that cannot be reduced to an antagonistic relationship between the corporation and communities. The potential problems and limitations of actor network theory have been extensively discussed elsewhere in the literature, and we must consider these limitations when dealing with the potentially infinite number of ‘actors’ that can be implicated in the topics we study.
Determining which actors to include in our analyses is a pragmatic decision, and also a political one. From the earliest stages of research, it was clear that water, irrigation canals, and other entities needed to be analyzed differently than they had been in both popular and academic accounts. Many will argue that these ‘things’ do not have agency; people do. Indeed, mining company representatives and their allies often make a similar argument in politically advantageous ways: they claim that protestors simply bring up pollution at the urging of environmentalists, or that water users complain about damages to irrigation canals to get more money from the company. In such cases, the corporation’s strategies to manipulate public discourse are part of the story, but do not explain how water came to play a central role in the conflicts or how people’s connections to the landscape mobilize them to act in defense of place and livelihoods.
The conflict over the Conga mining project currently playing out in the Cajamarca highlands is a case in point. In this conflict, Conga’s lagoons are not simply being incorporated into anti-mining discourse and public narratives. They are also part of people’s relationship to the land, irrigation canals, subsistence agriculture, and farming; at the same time, new associations emerge as people interact with scientists, environmentalists, NGOs, and the mining company. It is only once we take a closer look at these relationships that we can understand the actions that local people are taking to defend the lagoons and the profound challenge that their novel forms of activism pose to a hegemonic model of development based on extractive activity. The nonhuman is important for thinking about extractive economies generally, allowing us to see, for example, how the material properties of gold, lead, water, or waste products facilitate or obstruct the privatization of resources, the making of markets, and efforts to contest extractive activity and its deleterious effects. What I hope my book shows is that how we address the role of water and other nonhuman elements of the environment has profound political consequences for how we understand mining conflicts, including whose knowledge counts and what experiences and ways of life matter.