Daniel Tubb on his book, Shifting Livelihoods: Gold Mining and Subsistence in the Chocó, Colombia [video]

Daniel Tubb discussed his book, Shifting Livelihoods: Gold Mining and Subsistence in the Chocó, Colombia, on November 6, 2020 by Zoom.

Daniel Tubb is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton and an Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University in Ottawa. Trained at Carleton University in the late 2000s as an anthropologist, he has written a book and academic articles on Colombia, on writing, on small-scale and artisanal mining, on violence and citizenship. He teaches widely in Anthropology, and considers himself a sociocultural and environmental anthropologist, but he also describes himself as an ethnographer and as a political economist working on Colombia and New Brunswick.

His most recent book, Shifting Livelihoods (University of Washington Press, 2020) is about gold mining in Colombia. It shows how people employ various methods to extract gold in the rainforests of the Chocó, in northwest Colombia. Through an ethnography of gold that examines the movement of people, commodities, and capital, Shifting Livelihoods investigates how resource extraction reshapes a place. In the Chocó, gold enables forms of “shift” (rebusque)—a metaphor for the fluid livelihood strategy adopted by forest dwellers and migrant gold miners alike as they seek informal work amid a drug war. Mining’s effects on rural people, corporations, and politics are on view in this fine-grained account of daily life in a regional economy dominated by gold and cocaine. He is working on a new book, as well as new research projects in Colombia and New Brunswick.

Tubb’s book can be purchased here.

This lecture was organized by St. Thomas University’s Environmental Praxis course and supported by the NB Media Co-op and RAVEN Rural Action & Voices for the Environment, a research project based at the University of New Brunswick.