A. Bartlett Giamatti Graduate Fellow
About
“Gold doesn’t Like the Law: Property and Family Practices among Afro-Colombian Miners in the Colombian Chocó, 1851-1935”
My PhD dissertation delves into the history of the interaction, proximity, and distance between formal law and customary norms in the gold mining region of Chocó, in Colombia, where current small-scale miners of afro-descendant assert that “gold doesn’t like the Law.” It examines family ownership vernacular rights among this mining society in relation to three specific legal events: the decree of slave emancipation in Colombia in 1851, the codification of Mining Property and Family Law after the 1886 Unionist Constitution, and the establishment of British and U.S.-capital mining corporations in the rivers of this district between 1911 and 1935. My crossed reading of local, national, and transnational sources reveals the power and resilience of custom among African-descendant miners. Despite an intricate history of codification, institutionalization, and appropriation by which local people made law their own, legal formulations never fully replaced customary practices that have regulated family mining ownership. Instead, agents of both the government and foreign companies often found themselves negotiating with various forms of local black power under the assumptions of flexible customary normative bodies rather than prescriptive legal codes. I wonder how all these actors navigated the strained space between custom and law.
Daniel Varela Corredor is a PhD candidate in Anthropology and History.
