Subterranean Matters

Andrea Marston is Assistant Professor of Geography at Rutgers University.

“In this superb study, Andrea Marston follows Bolivia’s cooperative miners into the spaces, materials, and sedimented histories of the subterranean to write a brilliant account of the tensions and competing visions of the plurinational state. Stunningly original and brimming with insight, Subterranean Matters challenges us to reconsider how we understand the fraught relation between nature and nation in Latin America. This is material history at its very best.” - Bruce Braun, author of (The Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture, and Power on Canada's West Coast) “Drawing on extensive ethnographic research and a deep engagement with scholarship on nationalism, ethnicity, political theory, materiality, and racialization in Bolivia and Latin America more generally, Andrea Marston uses the seemingly anomalous case of cooperative miners to analyze the twenty-first-century Latin American left as well as the rise of the right in Brazil, Colombia, and elsewhere. Clear and readable, this fascinating book contributes to literature on racialization and mestizaje in Latin America from a relational and material perspective.” - Elizabeth Ferry, Professor of Anthropology, Brandeis University "Andrea Marston’s brilliant Subterranean Matters, the first English language monograph to examine Bolivian mining cooperatives, examines these little studied and poorly understood entities with a compassionate ethnographic sensibility."- Tom Perreault (Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences)

• List of Abbreviations  ixPreface. Thieves of Patria  xiAcknowledgments  xviiIntroduction. Fault Lines: Mining Cooperatives in Plurinational Bolivia  11. Subterranean Property: Geology, Theology, and the Law  312. Material Fix: Making Mining Cooperatives  593. Tangled Veins: Of Tubers and Tin  904. Flesh and Ore: Graded and Degraded Matters  1235. Industrial Ruins: Matters of Time  1636. Geology of Patria: Patrimony, Patronage, Violence  193Afterword: Historical Matters and New Eruptions  223Notes  237References  255Index  279