Sorte, trabalho e poder: uma sociologia do garimpo na Fronteira Franco-Brasileira

Abstract

Based on an extensive fieldwork at the Franco-Brazilian border, this doctoral thesis aims to analyze the illegal miner, known in Brazil as ‘garimpeiro’, from the standpoint of his insertion in the broader system of mining activities. Through discussing the garimpeiro, I also set out to understand the complex political, economic, legal, social and cultural issues in which this activity takes place. The garimpeiro emerges as a vertex that brings together two points that are difficult to identify: the owners of the illegal mining sites and the large corporations in the national and international gold market. Illegal mining is part of a complex system, in which those who directly carry out artisanal or rudimentary mining activities do not know all the stages of the process from gold extraction in the forest all the way to the national and international markets of precious metals. Garimpeiros and their families have learned the craft of gold mining through a shared learning process, with the transmission of shared practices and behavior, such as the native, emic category of gossip, understood in this work in its communicative agency, as well as in its temporal agency. Other social agents are the owners of the illegal mining sites, who concentrate economic power at the base of the mining activity. At the same time that they exercise their power as entrepreneurs in search of economic profits by retaining 70% of everything that is collected in the mining, they also base their actions as “protectors”, responsible for relations with politicians, with the police and the judiciary. They are the mediators of two worlds, the State and the garimpeiros, as they are participants at large in these two fields that are however incredibly distant in the social space. Owners of illegal mining sites also mediate with the third vertex of illegal mining: large corporations and the financial market. Attributing a façade of legality to illegally extracted gold in indigenous lands or in areas of environmental preservation takes into account a complex set of documentation and authorizations, which is very distant from the everyday practices and shared knowledge in the gold extraction process. The analysis therefore takes into account moral and symbolic issues inherent in the mining and trade practices, carrying out a research strategy in the field through interviews, production of fieldwork notes, in addition to cataloging local, national, and international newspapers and magazines. Thus, by focusing on the Franco-Brazilian border, this work intends to contribute to a broader discussion regarding illegal gold mining activity in the Amazon, in its proximity and its distances.