We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us

We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us
Author: June C. Nash
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 414
Release: 1993
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780231080514

In this powerful anthropological study of a Bolivian tin mining town, Nash explores the influence of modern industrialization on the traditional culture of Quechua-and-Aymara-speaking Indians.

Fires of Gold

Fires of Gold
Author: Lauren Coyle Rosen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2020
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0520343336

Fires of Gold is a powerful ethnography of the often shrouded cultural, legal, political, and spiritual forces governing the gold mining industry in Ghana, one of Africa's most celebrated democracies. Lauren Coyle Rosen argues that significant sources of power have arisen outside of the formal legal system to police, adjudicate, and navigate conflict in this theater of violence, destruction, and rebirth. These authorities, or shadow sovereigns, include the transnational mining company, collectivized artisanal miners, civil society advocacy groups, and significant religious figures and spiritual forces from African, Islamic, and Christian traditions. Often more salient than official bodies of government, the shadow sovereigns reveal a reconstitution of sovereign power--one that, in many ways, is generated by hidden dimensions of the legal system. Coyle Rosen also contends that spiritual forces are central in anchoring and animating shadow sovereigns as well as key forms of legal authority, economic value, and political contestation. This innovative book illuminates how the crucible of gold, itself governed by spirits, serves as a critical site for embodied struggles over the realignment of the classical philosophical triad: the city, the soul, and the sacred.

From the Mines to the Streets

From the Mines to the Streets
Author: Feliciano Félix Muruchi Poma
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2011-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0292723962

From the Mines to the Streets draws on the life of Félix Muruchi to depict the greater forces at play in Bolivia and elsewhere in South America during the last half of the twentieth century. It traces Félix from his birth in an indigenous family in 1946, just after the abolition of bonded labor, through the next sixty years of Bolivia's turbulent history. As a teenager, Félix followed his father into the tin mines before serving a compulsory year in the military, during which he witnessed the 1964 coup d'état that plunged the country into eighteen years of military rule. He returned to work in the mines, where he quickly rose to become a union leader. The reward for his activism was imprisonment, torture, and exile. After he came home, he participated actively in the struggles against neoliberal governments, which led in 2006—the year of his sixtieth birthday—to the inauguration of Evo Morales as Bolivia's first indigenous president. The authors weave Muruchi's compelling recollections with contextual commentary that elucidates Bolivian history. The combination of an unforgettable life story and in-depth text boxes makes this a gripping, effective account, destined to become a classic sourcebook.

Bolivia in the Age of Gas

Bolivia in the Age of Gas
Author: Bret Gustafson
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2020-08-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1478012528

Evo Morales, Bolivia's first Indigenous president, won reelection three times on a leftist platform championing Indigenous rights, anti-imperialism, and Bolivian control over the country's natural gas reserves. In Bolivia in the Age of Gas, Bret Gustafson explores how the struggle over natural gas has reshaped Bolivia, along with the rise, and ultimate fall, of the country's first Indigenous-led government. Rethinking current events against the backdrop of a longer history of oil and gas politics and military intervention, Gustafson shows how natural gas wealth brought a measure of economic independence and redistribution, yet also reproduced political and economic relationships that contradicted popular and Indigenous aspirations for radical change. Though grounded in the unique complexities of Bolivia, the volume argues that fossil-fuel political economies worldwide are central to the reproduction of militarism and racial capitalism and suggests that progressive change demands moving beyond fossil-fuel dependence and the social and ecological ills that come with it.

Practicing Ethnography in a Globalizing World

Practicing Ethnography in a Globalizing World
Author: June C. Nash
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2007
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780759108813

In her new book, distinguished anthropologist June Nash tackles the critical question of how people of diverse cultures confront the common problems that arise with global integration. She reveals these impacts on an urban U.S. community, on Mandalay rice cultivators, as well as on Mayan and Andean peasants and miners. Her decades-long research in these communities provides a valuable resource for anthropologists and other social scientists engaged in contemporary ethnographic research.

Let Me Speak!

Let Me Speak!
Author: Domitila Barrios De Chungara
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2024-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 168590050X

A classic recounting of a unionists' struggle against exploitation and dictatorship—from within the mines of Bolivia Let Me Speak! is a moving testimony from inside the Bolivian tin mines of the 1970s, by a woman whose life was defined by her defiant struggle against those at the very top of the power structure, the Bolivian elite. Blending firsthand accounts with astute political analysis, Domitila Barrios de Chungara describes the hardships endured by Bolivia’s colossal working class, and her own efforts at organizing women in her mining community. The result is a gripping narrative of class struggle and repression, an important social document that illuminates the reality of capitalist exploitation in the dark mines of 1970s Bolivia and beyond. Twenty-five years after it was first published in English in 1978, the new edition of this classic book includes never-before-translated testimonies gathered in the years just before the book’s translation. Let Me Speak picks up Domitila’s life story from the 1977 hunger strike she organized—a rebellion that was instrumental in bringing down the Banzer dictatorship. It then turns to her subsequent exile in Sweden and work as an internationalist seeking solidarity with the Bolivian people in the early 1980s, during the period of the García Meza dictatorship. It concludes with the formation of the Domitila Mobile School in Cochabamba, where her family had been relocated after the mine closures. As we read, we learn from Domitila’s insights into a range of topics, from U.S. imperialism to the environmental crisis, from the challenges of popular resistance in Latin America, to the kind of political organizing we need—all steeped in a conviction that we can, and must, unite social movements with working-class revolt.

Mayan Visions

Mayan Visions
Author: June C. Nash
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2002-09-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135957134

A significant work by one of anthropology's most important scholars, this book provides an introduction to the Chiapas Mayan community of Mexico, better known for their role in the Zapatista Rebellion.

Twinkie, Deconstructed

Twinkie, Deconstructed
Author: Steve Ettlinger
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2007
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781594630187

Includes information on amino acids, animal feed, artificial vanilla, baking powder, bread, browning, butter, canola oil, Cargill, chlor/alkali industry, chlorine, corn, cosmetics, cream, Crisco, egg whites, egg yolks, ethylene, ethylene oxide, explosives, fermentation, flour, Food and Drug Administration, food coloring, glycerin, Hostess, hydrochloric acid, hydrogenation, ice cream, Kraft, lime, limestone, monoglycerides, monosodium glutamate (MSG), Monsanto, natural gas, Neutrogena, nitrogen, obesity, oxygen, palm oil, Papett's Hygrade Egg products, petroleum, phosphates, phosphoric acid, plaster, plastic, polysorbates, preservatives, propylene glycol, protein, red no. 40, refined sugar, salad dressings, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, shelf life, shortening, Silver Springs (New York), soap, soda ash, soybean oil, soybeans, stearic acid, sucrose, sugarcane, sulfuric acid, trans fats, trees, triglycerides, Trona, vanilla, vanillin, vitamins, Wise, Wonder Bread, yellow no. 5, etc.

Holding the Line

Holding the Line
Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2012-11-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0801465095

Holding the Line, Barbara Kingsolver's first non-fiction book, is the story of women's lives transformed by an a signal event. Set in the small mining towns of Arizona, it is part oral history and part social criticism, exploring the process of empowerment which occurs when people work together as a community. Like Kingsolver's award-winning novels, Holding the Line is a beautifully written book grounded on the strength of its characters. Hundreds of families held the line in the 1983 strike against Phelps Dodge Copper in Arizona. After more than a year the strikers lost their union certification, but the battle permanently altered the social order in these small, predominantly Hispanic mining towns. At the time the strike began, many women said they couldn't leave the house without their husband's permission. Yet, when injunctions barred union men from picketing, their wives and daughters turned out for the daily picket lines. When the strike dragged on and men left to seek jobs elsewhere, women continued to picket, organize support, and defend their rights even when the towns were occupied by the National Guard. "Nothing can ever be the same as it was before," said Diane McCormick of the Morenci Miners Women's Auxiliary. "Look at us. At the beginning of this strike, we were just a bunch of ladies."

Boom, Bust, Boom

Boom, Bust, Boom
Author: Bill Carter
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2021-08-31
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1439136580

A sweeping account of civilization's dependence on copper traces the industry's history, culture and economics while exploring such topics as the dangers posed to communities living near mines, its ubiquitous use in electronics and the activities of the London Metal Exchange. By the author of Fools Rush In. 30,000 first printing.