Of Flesh and Ore: Material Histories and Embodied Geologies

Abstract

This article explores the constitution of subterranean space in a Bolivian tin mine through an analysis of the discursive practices that materialize differentially valued people and differentially valued rocks. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, I examine the processes through which tin miners are formed as socially stratified subjects and tin is mattered in its multiple forms—as mineral, as commodity, and as symbolic metal of modernity. Through this analysis, I develop a conceptual–methodological approach that integrates insights from feminist materialisms with commitments recuperated from “old” materialist geographies; I call this approach material history. Using this analytic, I argue that nonliving matters (1) are always historied before becoming materially entangled with human bodies, (2) are unevenly distributed and unevenly valued across volumetric space, and (3) contribute to the social stratification of the humans who labor with them. In the tin mine, racialized and gendered differences manifest in spatial association with differences in ore quality, ore exhaustion, and technologies of extraction. These arguments show how apparently inanimate matters can be counterintuitively influential in shaping human bodies and human social worlds, where subjects and objects are relationally formed, sorted, and ranked. : .