Environmental Humanities Colloquium: “Thieves of Patria: Subterranean Matters in Plurinational Bolivia”
Andrea Marston, associate professor of geography at Rutgers University, will present “Thieves of Patria: Subterranean Matters in Plurinational Bolivia” for the second talk in the fall 2022 Environmental Humanities and Social Transformation Colloquium sponsored by the High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI).
Marston will discuss Bolivia’s enduring “resource nationalism” wherein land can be governed collectively and at multiple scales, but the subsoil remains the domain of the state. Challenging this are thousands of small-scale miners frequently described as thieves of the nation’s natural inheritance. Marston will draw on her ethnographic work with small-scale miners — as well as historical and feminist materialisms — to explore how the Bolivian subterranean shapes national politics, from the scale of an individual miner’s body to the “plurinational” state.