Subterranean Matters

“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

"With Subterranean Matters, Marston contributes to a growing corpus of works on new materialisms that decenter the Enlightenment notion of 'the human' by showing how our notions of race, gender, and sexuality are built through contingent interactions with nonhuman materials. As an environmental humanist working in literary studies, I see Marston’s book joining a larger corpus of works highlighting the importance of underground spaces for the constitution of Western modernity. " - Nicolas Campisi, H-Environment, H-Net Reviews

"[Subterranean Matters is] an incredible text that weaves together careful ethnographic research with much-needed insights on the nexus of mineral resources, bodily formations, materialities, and the nation." - Adrienne Johnson, Journal of Latin American Georgraphy