The social ecology of artisanal mining: Between romanticisation and anathema

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) has existed for millennia, and is ingrained in many cultural traditions. However, as this book's first four chapters have demonstrated, the activity has often faced challenges of acceptance by mainstream institutions because it occupies an interstitial space 'between the pick and the plough'. It is at once an extractive sector but is also practised as a seasonal activity of agrarian peasants. It may not have all the hallmarks of a formal enterprise, but it is also seldom anarchic plundering of a resource. Thus, in this chapter, I attempt to negotiate through these seemingly conflicting elements of ASM by offering a synthetic conceptual anchor for the preceding chapters. I am guided in this task by an acute recognition that environmental concerns about ASM would need to be addressed in any effective framing of its social development imperative. Development donors have considered ASM as suitable for technical interventions to improve yield of minerals or alternative techniques for safer extraction. The World Bank and the Communities and Small-Scale Mining (CASM) program