Making Mining Licit: Gold, Commodification, and the Everyday Performance of Law in Colombia

ABSTRACT Ethnographies of resource‐making have shown that the extraction of resource value from objects is premised on obviating the emplaced lifeworlds that surrounded objects before they traveled to consumer markets. Much of this literature looks at such supply‐chain disentanglement from the viewpoint of corporate and formal regulatory practices. Lead firms, legal regimes, and downstream industries do the obscuring; disadvantaged people in production sites are being obscured. This article broaches the question of commodification somewhat differently, as it focuses on a gold frontier where variously informalized peoples are playing their own part in enacting politically loaded erasures. In the Colombian Chocó, small‐scale mining participants mystify key aspects of gold's sociopolitical life by repurposing state symbols and structures. Through such appropriation, they performatively remove the illicit character of their economic dealings, and concurrently, render the mining and selling of gold perceptible as activities that are fundamentally quotidian and legal.