Subterranean Matters: Cooperative Mining and Resource Nationalism in Plurinational Bolivia

by Andrea Marston, Ph.D.

In an era of increased state involvement in natural resource governance, members of Bolivia’s “mining cooperatives” are commonly described as thieves of national wealth.

Nevertheless, these small-scale miners won significant influence in Bolivia’s radically restructured Plurinational State. Drawing on ethnographic work with tin mining cooperatives, Subterranean Matters (Duke University Press, 2024) explores the tense coexistence of resource nationalism and plurinationalism in Bolivia.

Centering labor as a site of analysis, the book develops the concept of “material history” to theorize across historical materialism and new materialisms, and specifically to examine how the meanings historically sedimented underground shape cooperative miners’ individual bodies as well as their body politic.

Dr. Andrea Marston is associate professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her research examines the political economies and cultural politics of natural resources and energy systems. She is author of Subterranean Matters: Cooperative Mining and Resource Nationalism in Plurinational Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2024), co-editor for the book series Critical Geographies of Latin America and the Caribbean (University of Florida Press), and the first recipient of the Margaret Fitz Simmons Early Career Award in Political Ecology. Her research has appeared in such journals as Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Environmental Humanities and the Journal of Peasant Studies.