Ever since I was a child, I have been fascinated by work and the ways that it organizes the rest of life. Mining is one of those activities that brings together economics, politics, gender, class, kinship, and cosmology in especially tight proximity. I am also fascinated by Latin America, a region where mining has been important for thousands of years. These interests led me to become an anthropologist specializing in mining in Mexico and Colombia. It has been my privilege to work in this area for over twenty-five years now, making lifelong friends, learning about their lives and struggles, and sharing that knowledge with students and readers.
I wrote...
Not Ours Alone: Patrimony, Value, and Collectivity in Contemporary Mexico
I first read this book while I was conducting anthropological fieldwork in the mines of Guanajuato, Mexico. Even though the conditions in the mines I visited were somewhat better, and even though I was in silver and gold mines and not coal mines, I was amazed by the continuity in mining practices and the kinds of conflicts that emerge, such as the danger caused when miners are paid by the amount produced since they don’t want to take the time needed to support the tunnels with wooden timbering.
I also love that it includes descriptions of women and girls as mineworkers, which very few books about mining do.
Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolise the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted 'Germinal! Germinal!'. The central figure, Etienne Lantier, is an outsider who enters the community and eventually leads his fellow-miners in a strike protesting against pay-cuts - a strike which becomes a losing battle against starvation, repression, and sabotage. Yet despite all the violence and disillusion which rock the mining community to its foundations,…
This was one of my favorite books as a child and probably one reason I became an anthropologist of mining.
Though I wouldn’t have put it this way at the time, I found it fascinating that in a place where everything is doing the same job, especially a highly dangerous and damaging job, other aspects of culture coalesce around that job and its meanings—things like religion, kinship, gender, leisure, ecology, etcetera. I was deeply moved by the description of the vast slag heap that slowly came to tower over the town, eventually engulfing the narrator’s small house.
All six episodes of the BBC adaptation of Richard Llewellyn's classic novel set in a Welsh mining community at the turn of the century. Gwilym (Stanley Baker) and Beth Morgan (Siân Phillips) work their hardest to provide for their children, but these are the years before the unions improved the miner's lot, and times are very hard indeed. However, the community in which the Morgans live is a close-knit one, and they are grateful for all the help they receive, especially from the Rev. Gruffydd (Gareth Thomas).
I love this book’s restrained, atmospheric description of the experiences of a North American couple re-opening an abandoned copper mine in Mexico in the middle of the 20th century. It is Doerr’s first book, which she wrote in her mid-70s, based on experiences with her husband earlier in her life.
Her spare, evocative writing style gives a vivid sense of place and of human relationships between the foreign managers and the villagers, creating a sense of tenuous but real connection across wide divisions of language, race, class, education, and religion.
Winner of the National Book Award for First Work of Fiction
"A very good novel indeed, with echoes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Katherine Anne Porter, and even Graham Greene."--The New York Times
Richard and Sara Everton, just over and just under forty, have come to the small Mexican village of Ibarra to reopen a copper mine abandoned by Richard's grandfather fifty years before. They have mortgaged, sold, borrowed, left friends and country, to settle in this remote spot; their plan is to live out their lives here, connected to the place and to each other.
This is not only a great ethnography (a book based on long-term anthropological fieldwork) giving a splendidly detailed and deeply humane account of the lives of Bolivian tin miners and their families in the 1970s, but also one of the most effective case studies within the framework of “dependency theory.”
The title, which comes from one of the author’s interviews with a miner, captures the violence and misery of tin mining, but I also love the way the book portrays its protagonists as ordinary people living and giving meaning to their lives as best they can.
In this powerful anthropological study of a Bolivian tin mining town, Nash explores the influence of modern industrialization on the traditional culture of Quechua-and-Aymara-speaking Indians.
I was simultaneously horrified and riveted by this painstaking, searing account of a mine fire that took place in the Mexican mining center of Pachuca in 1920 and the subsequent coverup by the government and media.
The underground fire that burns even as those on the surface go about their business is both historical fast and a metaphor for the “silent fury” of many Mexicans over the inhumanity of corporations operating in their country, and over the conditions of impunity created by legal and political institutions.
This fury continues to burn in the 2020s, Herrera suggests, just as it did in the 1920s.
On March 10, 1920, in Pachuca, Mexico, the Compania de Santa Gertrudis - the largest employer in the region, and a subsidiary of the United States Smelting, Refining and Mining Company - may have committed murder.
The alert was first raised at six in the morning: a fire was tearing through the El Bordo mine. After a brief evacuation, the mouths of the shafts were sealed. Company representatives hastened to assert that "no more than ten" men remained inside the mineshafts, and that all ten were most certainly dead. Yet when the mine was opened six days later, the death…
Based on research done in the 1990s, this book explores how members of the Santa Fe silver mining cooperative in Guanajuato, Mexico, gave meaning to their labor in an era of rampant globalization. The book analyzes the cooperative's practices and the importance of patrimonio (patrimony) in their understanding of work, tradition, and community.
Patrimonio, a belief that certain resources are inalienable possessions of a local collective passed down to subsequent generations, brings together nationalist, universalist, and familial ideas of belonging and property that shaped and sustained the cooperative's sense of identity. The book describes the practices and beliefs of silver miners and also provides a case study of a pivotal moment in Mexican history.
Tourists and local residents of St. Augustine will enjoy reading about the secret wonders of their ancient city that are right under their noses. Of course, that includes a few stray corpses and ghosts!
Secret St. Augustine: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure
It is no wonder the ancient city of St. Augustine is steeped in secrets.
St. Johns, the oldest continuously occupied county in America, celebrated its 450th birthday on September 4, 2015. More like a European enclave than an urban landscape, it is a place of cannon fire, street parties, historical reenactments, concerts, and more. From admiring replicas of fine art at Ripley’s Believe or Not, to hunting haunts in restaurants and museums, to eating ice cream from a recipe originated by World War II bombardiers, St. Augustine has it all from beaches, gourmet dining, festivals, and attractions.
