CLaSP invites you to a seminar titled ‘The intertwining of finance and mining: gold extraction in the Amazon and the global gold market’

Catarina Morawska (Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil) will present her paper and Jessica Sklair (Queen Mary University of London) will act as discussant.

This paper describes the efforts of Canada-based Belo Sun Mining Corp to implement the “Volta Grande do Xingu Gold Project”, expected to become the largest open-pit gold mine in Brazil. The aim is to explore how gold extraction in the Amazon region is intertwined with financial knowledge regimes in the global gold market. Located in the margins of the Xingu river, in Pará state, the project has been surrounded by controversy. Indigenous groups and environmental non-governmental organizations have commissioned independent technical reports from mining specialists to dispute the data produced by Belo Sun on the project’s feasibility, risks and impacts. However, advocacy strategies to question the project in courts and publicly denounce the company's lack of transparency in relation to the project's environmental, social and governance (ESG) have not disrupted trade of its stocks in exchanges in Canada, Germany and the US, where mining is still seen as an opportunity to diversify financial portfolios. An ethnography of the Volta Grande do Xingu Gold Project highlights the intertwining of the worlds of mining and finance, with the opening of pits and the opening of financial opportunities as two intrinsically associated practices. I argue that the indigenous critique of Belo Sun foregrounds what is left obliterated by both the company’s executives and investors: the impact of extracting gold on a river whose high and low flows maintain life in the Xingu region.

PLEASE NOTE: We will circulate Catarina's paper draft for pre-reading two weeks before the seminar - please get in touch if you would like to receive it on j.sklair@qmul.ac.uk

Speaker bio:
Catarina Morawska is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) in Brazil and Visiting Academic at Queen Mary University of London. She coordinates the Laboratory of Ethnographic Experimentations, a research group interested in the ethnographic challenges of co-writing with activists a critique of the geopolitics of technofinancial capitalism. Her long term engagement with grassroots organizations in Pernambuco has been reflected in her work, mainly published in Portuguese, on the methodological implications of partnering up with social movements to decolonise knowledge production.