Gold as something to be proud of? Contradictions of ethical consumerism in artisanal and small-scale gold mining in Latin America

Abstract

This article examines how artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) is represented in a voluntary responsible sourcing certification programme in Latin America. By critically analysing the language and imagery employed on the programme’s online platforms, we explore how advertising campaigns of ethical consumerism embody gendered and racialised ideologies and commodify development stories. Our analysis shows that the images of development and racialised bodies in this case study illustrate and reproduce two key contradictions of contemporary global development: first, between the extractive and humanitarian ideologies in liberal development, often made strange bedfellows in transnational mining; and, second, between the simultaneous hypervisibility and invisibility of the rural labour that underpins ethical consumerism in mining. We argue that this campaign commodifies ASGM’s development stories, which (re)produces a false and harmful good/bad mining dichotomy where, in the case of artisanal mining, the ‘good ASGM’ is defined and policed by Western consumers and expert-outsiders. We suggest that, by implication, (1) non-certified artisanal miners are portrayed as incapable of effectively managing their own resources, which instead ought to be managed by outsiders, and (2) the existing link between non-certified ASGM and rural development is made invisible.