
































Casting Things as Actors in the Peruvian Landscapes of Mining Conflict

Review by Kristina Baines

Unearthing Conflict: Corporate Mining, Activism, and Expertise in Peru

by Fabiana Li

Duke University Press, 2015

In  Unearthing Conflict, Fabiana Li presents a purposeful and careful opening up of the concept of

“conflict” to include “people, places and things,” and the complex relationships between them, in the

context of mining conflict in Peru. As expected from quality ethnography, she “goes deeper” than a

dichotomous pro/con arguments of resource extraction, explicitly tackling how non-human elements in

the landscape, what she refers to as “things,” have taken on a critical role in the politics of extraction in

Peru.

Using multiple historical analyses and two notable case studies, the discussion of lead pollution

in La Oroya and the conflict  surrounding the mining of  Cerro Quilish  in  Cajamarca,  Li  proposes

equivalences  as  a  tool  for  understanding  how  mining  negotiations  occur  and  how  conflicts  are

generated.  Her  discussion  of  equivalence  is  subtle  in  terms  of  whom  this  process  serves.  She

demonstrates through a skillful weaving of history, ethnography and theory that it enables both the

conflict, and the space in which comparisons can be made and different forms of value understood and

negotiated.  Showing  that  the  technical  language,  devices  and  measurement  associated  with  the

scientific monitoring and explanation of environmental impacts compare to other ways of knowing and

inhabiting the landscape, she proposes that this “ontological multiplicity” can somehow be reconciled

for mining conflicts, opening up the potential of grassroots movements to work within this flexible

space to make real changes in national politics.

Part  I,  “Mining  Past  and  Present,”  begins  this  journey  into  the  making  of  a  dichotomous

discussion of mining conflicts into a consideration of multiple “things.” It offers a history of mining



that goes beyond a discussion of “human agency” to include structural factors, process, actors, and their

roles in defining the landscape. It traces the history of pollution and what it means to be polluted,

“scientifically  and  in  the  socio-political  imagination,”  both  from  an  external,  or  environmental,

perspective and an internal, or bodily, perspective.

Part  II,  “Water  and  Life,”  confronts  one  of  the  most  ubiquitous  features  of  the  Peruvian

landscape,  the movement of water,  and describes irrigation canals as “entangled social  and natural

histories.” Li uses classic features of culture and describes how they amount to more than cultural

identity:  the  intersection  of  human  and  non-human  phenomena,  the  reconfiguring  of  place,  the

mobilization of kinship, the articulation of habits or costumbre, and different classificatory systems.

This discussion shows how place was and is “made” through a complex convergence of practices and

ideas and is not simply distillable.

Part  III,  “Activism  and  Expertise,”  consists  of  a  chapter  of  focused  attention  on  the

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), both as an artifact, or “thing,” and a way of demonstrating

the  “competing  ways  of  making  equivalences”  essential  to  Li’s  problematizing  of  the  conflict

dichotomy. It provides a much needed and continued “critique of the participatory process” in which

corporations elicit the participation of mining communities while actually disempowering them through

a shift in perspective from “corporate accountability to shared responsibility.”

One particularly valuable point, which Li’s focused critique of conflict as simply a dichotomous

tension  brings  to  light,  is  that  specific  indigenous  articulations  of  the  natural  world  are  neither

“invented” or pre-existing but are expressed in specific ways when it becomes politically necessary.

These  articulations,  the  idea  of  Apu  as  an  example,  are  part  of  everyday  practice.  “Indigenous

knowledge” is not fixed but responsive and pragmatic, and its use in these global discourses is not

some kind of strategy but the nature of how knowledge and practice exist and become salient. This,

again, is an important contribution to this conversation and might have been emphasized even more,

pushing against the characterization of static and inflexible indigenous communities by corporate and

government forces in many parts of the world. Delving into the literature on Traditional Ecological

Knowledge might have sent Li into a rabbit hole, however, this responsiveness, and how science is

similarly flexible, is supported in this literature and may have contributed to further examination of the

“belief” versus “fact” divide.

While  Unearthing Conflict is  clearly based on skilled and rich ethnographic work,  I  found

myself  sometimes  wishing  it  felt  more  ethnographically  reflexive.  Some  of  the  most  evocative

moments in the book are ethnographic: the one in which Li visits a daycare center and is invited to

watch how “normal” a child with an extreme lead content in his blood is behaving, or another in which



she recounts how a woman loses her job preparing meals for mining workers after a surprise visit from

a mining company representative and an honest admission of using water from the creek, stand out as

powerful examples of the convergence of bodies and landscapes and the other “things” that exemplify

the nuances of the conflicts  the book tackles. These moments are well-done and illustrative,  and I

cannot help but want more of them.

Li delves into much foundational literature to ground her analyses and argument, for example

using Latour to frame her thoughts about science and technology expertise. It was notable to read ideas

about discipline and surveillance, recording of public questions and concerns at the EIA meeting, and

bodies  without  a  mention  of  the  ways  in  which  Foucault  has  put  these  ideas  together,  or  read  a

discussion of pollution and the body without a reference to Douglas. To be fair,  though, Li tackles

weighty theoretical histories and topics in neoliberalism, environmentalism, science and technology

studies, NGOs, corporations, activism, and indigeneity, so perhaps suggesting that she start down the

road of critical medical anthropology is asking way too much.

This book does a lot and it does it well. It will be helpful not only in providing a rich foundation

for studies of mining conflict in Peru, but also for students and scholars really looking for a way to

illuminate the complexities of the common reality of community/government/corporate conflict over

resource extraction in the name of “development” throughout Latin America and beyond.

Kristina Baines is an applied social anthropologist and co-founder of www.coolanthropology.com. Her

primary  research focuses  on  the  relationship  between health  and ecological  heritage  practices  in

Belize  and New York  City.  She  is  Assistant  Professor  of  Anthropology  and Faculty  for  Academic

Technology at the City University of New York (CUNY), Guttman Community College.

© 2015 Kristina Baines


