Andrew Walsh | Western University Canada (original) (raw)

Andrew Walsh

For more information about Made in Madagascar, and to read the Introduction, please see www.madeinmadagascar.org
Address: Department of Anthropology
University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario
CANADA
N6A 5C2

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Books by Andrew Walsh

Papers by Andrew Walsh

The Anthropology of Precious Minerals, 2019

Although the activity known as “artisanal and small-scale mining” (ASM) has been around for mille... more Although the activity known as “artisanal and small-scale mining” (ASM) has been around for millennia, the conventional use of this phrase to denote “low-tech, labour-intensive mineral extraction and processing” (Hilson & McQuilken, 2014: 1) is fairly new. More precisely, the “artisanal” nature of this distinctive sort of work, previously known simply as “small-scale mining,” has only recently been specified by observers. While there are critical questions to be asked about how and why this label has come to stick, in this chapter I am more con- cerned with its appropriateness as a means of denoting a particular kind of work. Drawing from recent research and reflections on arti- sanal production generally and artisanal mining specifically, as well as from my own ethnographic research with artisanal sapphire miners in Madagascar, I focus especially on what might be gained from attending more explicitly to the “artisanal” nature of “artisanal mining” in our analyses of this activity.

Ateliers d'Anthropologie, 2023

In the once booming, but now slumping, northern Malagasy sapphire mining town of Ambondromifehy, ... more In the once booming, but now slumping, northern Malagasy sapphire mining town of Ambondromifehy, people make do in the face of uncertainty. As a place of internal migrants organized around the mining and trade of a commodity destined for complex and fickle foreign markets, this town features a wide range of distinctive arrangements and compromises. Of special concern here are the arrangements through which people strive to live responsibly – in accordance with traditional Malagasy norms of sociality – while still managing to make a living through work that can lead them astray. I argue that such distinctive arrangements owe a great deal to the particular articulations of place and mobility one finds problematized in a context like this one. The first articulation is well encapsulated in the experience of what Malagasy people term being very or ‘‘lost’’, a condition of mobile people who either don’t know or have no hope of returning to the places from which they have come. The second articulation is apparent in the experi- ence of being tavela or ‘‘left behind’’, the condition of people who find themselves staying put while the things, people and possibilities they value flow away from them. For the many people in Ambondromifehy who are managing either or both of these conditions and the circumstances that come with them, idealized systems of social and moral exchange – systems of responsibility – are inevitably forums for compromise.