“Priceless!” and Other Mysteries of Value
My first trip to San Miguel was in an old Toyota with two friends, one a North American historian, the other a Guatemalan teacher, researcher, and mountaineer, to participate in the demonstration where Aniseto spoke. Passing one of Goldcorp’s billboards, Federico, who is Maya-K’iché, said “Why was gold at $250 and now it’s at 1000?” Everyone in the car had read their Marx and we knew that value is a tricky thing indeed. After a moment of silence we just burst out laughing. But the laughter did not dispel the wonder/horror of the question. Then Federico told a tale about climbing a nearby volcano where he came upon two young Mayan men who asked him if he knew how to find Juan Noj. Federico didn’t know. The men said, “We are very indebted. We are looking for the door into the volcano. We are trying to get some money.” “Who is Juan Noj?” I asked. The historian snorted. “You anthropologists should know that!” Federico explained that he is a man, or a spirit, that lives in the mountain. Some say he is Satan, others that he makes life flourish in the hills, others that he lives beneath the stone in a palace of gold and silver and rewards the lazy and malicious with wealth, but that they must work off their debt in the afterlife, or sacrifice a child as part of their contract. Noj is a Mayan name but he is sometimes depicted as a Ladino, the owner and overseer par excellence. And of course I’ve read Michael Taussig on the devil contracts of South America that lay bare, in places where accumulation by dispossession is not yet naturalized, how deeply creepy it is.60 The unlucky lads were unsuccessful in their search, and Federico helped them find their way back down off the mountain, their souls intact. June Nash tells of a similar figure in the mines of Bolivia, called the Tio, the earth owner, who controls what happens in the mines, and is petitioned with coca leaves, cigarettes, 90-proof alcohol, and llama fetuses for there to be rich seams of mineral and no disasters.61 Unlike the stories that mix an under-the-mountain Juan Noj with bounty on the earth’s surface, the Tio is kept tightly distinct from the Pachamama who rules the world of “natural” increase and reproduction. For her, none of that uncanny money-making-money or prices suddenly increasing four-fold for no apparent reason (and for something you can’t even eat)!
Having encountered the Tio on a disaster tourism excursion in the mountain of Potosí Bolivia just a few weeks before (where the women on the trip were encouraged to fondle his huge, priapic member to encourage fertility), I asked Hermana Maudilia if there were any such ideas about the mine in San Miguel. She sighed. “You know they have taken away our culture. They forced us to become ladinos, by law! In the nineteenth century. They made us work. That’s why we don’t even wear our traje here.” Yet a few days later I heard her joking with a man to “not lose his head.” I asked what she meant and she laughed, “Oh, they say the mine demands human heads and the company has to go out and find them.”
Here was the dark equivalent for Goldcorp’s publicity images of the brightly-lit mining installations shining like a small city, the reciprocation for “a mine with secure technology for human health and the environment, strengthening the integral development of San Miguel.” Such are the exacting demands of “millennial capitalism,” the specters haunting the speculation that make me wonder, to be frank, what in the world are these Sipakapenses and San Migueleños thinking?62 These women in the church? These well-intentioned activists? Who can stop that kind of money being made? Over $1500 an ounce? And with CAFTA, Plan Puebla Panama, the WTO, etc., the transnational investments and legal safeguards for capital are so overwhelming that while a half million people saying no is great, how much weight can that put in the balance? What resources do they have but their numbers? And when has that counted? But counting, as a biotechnology, might, like life itself, be pretty wily, labile, a tool for labors with often unexpected outcomes.
Numbers seem to stand alone, transparently representing the world, but it all really depends on the system of measurement, the regime of logic, in which they are embedded. Such qualifications of quantities—that “condition that must be met in order to exercise certain rights”—is what enlivens them and makes them meaningful. François Ewald traces two competing systems of accountability developed in Europe since the eighteenth century, both claiming totality and operating via specific and mutually exclusive categories, regimes, and economies. “Risk” is characteristic of the insurance regime, which assumes that all risk is calculable so that “even in misfortune one retains responsibility for one’s affairs.”63 Market decisions, like deciding to sell your land or grant mining licenses, are supposed to work within this system of rationality in which people balance costs and benefits and try to maximize the latter. “Insurance is a moral technology […] To conduct one’s life in the manner of an enterprise indeed begins in the eighteenth century to be a definition of a morality whose cardinal virtue is providence.”64 In this universe it is preposterous that someone who got Q4000 for a plot of land worth far less before the mining company arrived, should to come back, once the mine is installed, and ask for more money. Really, it’s immoral.65 But Ewald suggests that another system of measure has accompanied risk regimes, that of “fault,” the legal or juridical understanding of responsibility that holds that damage is the result of an individual acting in a certain way. Thus “judicial decisions on accident compensation had to be linked to investigation of the cause of injury.” Was it “due to natural causes, or to some person who should bear its cost”?66 In this system it is immoral not to defend oneself against those who injure you.67
There is a similar tense simultaneity to the two regimes of perception that qualify (both making meaningful and limiting) the pollution numbers. One, toxicology, is scientific, in the etymological and methodological sense that connects science to scissors and discernment. It works (often quite effectively) by cutting off what is to be studied from its context, to trace “the effects of chemicals in stimuli-reduced experimental settings.”68 The other, often called “popular,” or “lay,” “creek-side,” even “housewife” epidemiology, instead, “maps human relationships in a muddy, unrestrained, lived place. The assemblage of tools, practices and subject positions that structured popular epidemiology made perceptible, not specific causal pathways, but […] evoke chemical exposure’s proximate and diverse condition. [It] first, fashioned an aggregate health problem out of an array of particularized experiences and, second, mapped a collectivity of health effects onto a concurring social inequality or tension of place.”69 In the words of Phil Brown and Edwin Mikkelson, writing about community organizing around the industrial toxins accumulated at Love Canal, New York, and Woburn, Massachusetts in the United States, popular epidemiology emphasizes “social structural factors as part of the causative chain of disease, in involving social movements, in utilizing political and judicial remedies, and in challenging basic assumptions of traditional epidemiology, risk assessment, and public health regulation.”70 It is “an extremely significant advance for both public health and popular democratic participation”—themselves significant tools for make life less limited.71
In contrast to insurance and toxicology logics (Ltd), fault and popular epidemiology tend toward the Un(Ltd). They measure the costs that tend to hide “off-book.” They focus on “externalities” like sick children, contaminated water, environmental degradation, false claims (engaño), lack of consultation, and unfair distribution of profits and risks. The numbers, assembled with these logics, and lashing together some tenacious lawyers, a UN Convention, the Inter-American Court (for awhile), and national and transnational activists who are realizing that they are also the pobrecitos, have inspired another half a million Guatemalans to hold consultas, block roads, occupy installations, and in many other ways, insist that they count. They are leaching through the hemisphere leading people from Canada and the United States to Chile to do the same.
Standing Up
It was a rather wet, dank afternoon as Hermana Maudilia urged the Padre’s big car up the muddy hairpin turns to a tiny hamlet north of San Miguel for an afternoon Sunday School class. We were with Ana, a Maya-Mam woman training to be a catechist who was quite nervous about her role in the upcoming meeting, so on the way, Maudilia chatted about the challenge of learning to drive, and how another nun gave her a car so she didn’t have to walk up and down the hills for meetings. “Of course,” she laughed, “I’ve gained a lot of weight since I don’t walk anymore!” Unfortunately, that car had been stolen at gunpoint in Guatemala City. Arriving at the hamlet we walked a ways through quite impressive mud, past the small monument to the military government’s mid-1980s post-war rebuilding efforts, to the small neat chapel above the futból field. Men and women of various ages, most with kids, slowly filtered in. Several helped Maudilia arrange some flowers and grasses in the center of a circle where we started with the antimining song and prayers. Then she began her day’s lesson: the differences between crawling and walking. Joking, getting people up and walking on all fours around the chapel, making good-humored comments about gender equality (leading one young man to mime nursing his baby to widespread giggles), having folks comment on a bible story, and encouraging Ana in her portion of the afternoon’s events, she gracefully brought the lesson around to the mine, its effects on San Miguel, and how that related to our lesson.
Then she called on me to say a few words. Me? “Yes,” she said, “tell them what you told me at dinner about the poison in your home.” So I rather awkwardly thanked them all for letting me be there and told them about how my hometown, nestled in the rolling hills of southern Ohio among small farms and abundant forests, had turned out to also house a post-Manhattan Project nuclear facility, kept secret for many years. It was knowingly built over an important aquifer, and considered to be “in the middle of nowhere,” where “nobody” farmers (“easy to buy”), were willing to sell their land. In the late 1970s, what had been individual family tragedies of young people with strange diseases, or only partly legible health effects like miscarriages, began to combine with the ecology movement and a public increasingly dubious about its government. These networks revealed that the Fernald feed plant, complete with a Purina-style checkerboard water tower, had not been an animal feed factory, as anyone who had even briefly considered the spot probably thought, but a site for uranium upgrade for use in “feeding” bombs (as well as a repository for waste from other sites). Once people knew this (itself a long struggle) nearby families began to organize and look for allies and to confront anger and fear about losing lucrative employment in a poor area during a deepening recession. Contaminated wells and aquifers affecting nearby Cincinnati and undeniable cancer clusters galvanized organizing, and over several years the site was slowly closed and the EPA and DOE (Department of Energy) began a Superfund-supported cleanup. I ended my story, finally aware of Maudilia’s plan, by saying that the whole project of taking on the United States government and the nuclear establishment was started by one woman, a housewife, who was worried what the contaminated water would do to her young son.
Some of the women there had been at Vinicio’s lecture and had heard him tell of how much better miners were protected and paid in North America and the higher royalties companies had to pay. Everyone seemed genuinely shocked that the US government would treat its own people in such a nonchalant way. “You mean they lied about the pollution?” “They covered up the danger?” “They didn’t want to clean up?” Then one man said, “That’s why we had our consulta here. We know the dangers of the mine.”
Maudilia ended the meeting with everyone searching for a symbol outside the chapel of what it meant to stand up. We stood in a circle in those high mountains, the clouds breaking up, the wind strong, and the valleys stretching out around us, as people held flowers and stones and explained each of their symbols. And then we were treated to warm chicken soup in the glow of a fire as night fell and the rain began.
In San Marcos thanks to Hermana Maudilia, Pancho Guindon, Padre Eric, and the catechists Simón, Humberto, and Leonel, members of COPAE (especially Alejandro, Vinicio Lopez, Ana Gonzalez, and Teresa Fuentes) and ADISMI (especially Javier de León, Aniseto Lopez, and Carmen Mejia), and community members in Agel and San José Ixcaniche. Thanks also to members of CATAPA, and to Luis Solano, Federico Velasquez, Greg Grandin, Enrique Recinos, Carlos Flores, Carlos Loarca, Katherine Fultz, members of Madre Selva, especially Pepe Cruz and Johanna van Strien, researchers at AVANCSO, Ron Eglash, and the careful readers of Oxidate. Finally thanks to Rachel Lee, the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, and the other brilliant participants in Life(Un)ltd. Fieldwork was funded by Mellon Title VI funds through Duke University Latin American and Caribbean Studies, thanks to Natalie Hartman. I began research in San Marcos in 2009 but have worked in Guatemala since 1985. All translations and errors are mine.
- Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1983). [↩]
- June Nash, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines, (New York: Columbia UP, 1993). [↩]
- Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, eds., Millenial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism, (Durham: Duke UP, 2001). [↩]
- François Ewald, “Insurance and Risk,” The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991): 207. [↩]
- Ewald 1991: 207. [↩]
- What’s kind of amazing is that the regime of insurance grew out of mining because the statistics on death and disaster there were so regular! [↩]
- Ewald 1991: 206. [↩]
- See also Carlota McAllister, Good People: Revolution, Community and Conciencia in a Maya-K’iche’ Village in Guatemala, Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins U, 2003. [↩]
- Murphy 2006: 106. [↩]
- Murphy 2006: 106-7, 97. She genealogizes this method to W.E.B. DuBois’s study, The Philadelphia Negro, which documented “a social condition and environment […] rather than discrete causes.” [↩]
- Phil Brown and Edwin Mikkelsen, No Safe Place: Toxic Waste, Leukemia, and Community Action. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990): 126. [↩]
- Brown and Mikkelsen 1990: 207. [↩]
