Risk Negotiations in the Mines of Potosí: Implications for Rethinking Current Health and Safety Approaches

Abstract

It is generally agreed that knowledge of the causes and consequences of a particular risk influences how people prepare for and respond to it. Ethnographic research in Potosí (Bolivia) shows however a more complex scenario, in which miners simultaneously face a number of physical and socio-economic risks and uncertainties that must be carefully weighed against each other. Miners often have little or no control over most of these risks that affect them, and health and safety risks are only a small group of concerns. Prone to take health risks at work as a strategy to manage other risks that simultaneously affect them, the Potosí’s miners are well aware of the potential losses of taking these risks, but also of the potential gains of their decisions.