Between the Plough and the Pick: Informal, artisanal and small-scale mining in the contemporary world

Between

the Plough and the Pick deepens our understanding of

informal, artisanal and small-scale mining, popularly known as ASM. The book

engages with wider scholarly conceptualisations of contemporary global

social, agrarian and political changes, whilst underlining the roles that

local social-political-historical contexts play in shaping mineral extractive

processes and practices. It shows that the people who are engaged in these

mining practices are often the poorest and most exploited labourers-erstwhile

peasants caught in the vortex of global change, who perform the most insecure

and dangerous tasks. Although these people are located at the margins of

mainstream economic life, they collectively produce enormous amounts of

diverse material commodities and find a livelihood (and often a pathway

out of oppressive poverty).

The contributions to this book bring these people to the forefront of

debates on resource politics. The contributors are international scholars and

practitioners who explore the complexities in the histories, in labour

and production practices, the forces driving such mining, the creative

agency and capacities of these miners, as well as the human and environmental

costs of ASM. They show how these informal, artisanal and small-scale miners

are inextricably engaged with, or bound to, global commodity values, are

intimately involved in the production of new extractive territories and rural

economies, and how their labour reshapes agrarian communities

and landscapes of resource access and control.

This book drives home the understanding that, collectively, this social and

economic milieu redefines our conceptualisation of resource politics,

mineral-dependent livelihoods, extractive geographies of resources and

commodities, and their multiple meanings.