Diamond's Captives. Ethnoarchaeology, Garimpo and Capitalism

Abstract

The introduction of industrial mining in Brazil followed the internationalization and consolidation of capitalism in the non-european world. At that moment, beginnings of the XIX century, a large portion of Minas Gerais population was dedicated to a small-scale form of mining, known then as Faiscação and today as Garimpo. As the nineteenth century's scientists and lawmakers adopted a rational discourse about the brazilian mining that ascribed decay, waste, unproductive methods and poverty to the traditional forms of exploration, the local narratives described an universe rich in interactions between social behaviors and material world, where men, women, children, technology, diamonds natural deposits, artifacts and their meanings entangle. The intention here is to understand the conflict between those two forms of mining, with special interest for
the interactive ways and modalities by which local collectives reacted (and react) to the capitalist-mining impositions.