Papers by Filipe Calvao
Cahiers d'études africaines, 2022
This article examines the growing corporate reliance on artisanal labour in the cobalt mines of t... more This article examines the growing corporate reliance on artisanal labour in the cobalt mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo. This shift from autonomous miners to corporate contractors, we suggest, holds historical significance and augurs a radical break with contemporary modes of extractive production. Under the banner of “responsible mining,” this form of dependent contracting fosters wageless relations in exchange for legal access to mining sites and corporate monopoly over artisanal production. By analysing the roots and mechanisms underlying these cooperative-corporate partnerships, we describe this emergent relation between labour and capital around three key features: the role of cooperatives as labour platforms, corporate control over local markets, and the deployment of discursive and technological regimes of responsibility and traceability.
Distributed ledger technologies (DLT) enable the creation of digital databases stored across mult... more Distributed ledger technologies (DLT) enable the creation of digital databases stored across multiple locations. In the most-advanced design of DLTs, blockchains record and publish transactions through a peer-to-peer and tamper-proof block structure, and operate securely through a consensus-based algorithm. Increasingly, DLTs and blockchain-based initiatives are deployed in the mineral sector to address the problem of conflict minerals, ensure respect for due diligence standards, and improve supply chain management and traceability. The fast adoption of this technology for governing natural resources by creating immutable digital records of sourcing and geological information engenders new opportunities and risks for mining communities across Africa. These include the creation, ownership and access of digital data, the participatory role of upstream actors, and the effects of monitoring and traceability for informal miners and the future of sustainable development in mining communities.
Political Geography, 2021
This article advances the notion of "digital extraction" to describe the collection, analysis, an... more This article advances the notion of "digital extraction" to describe the collection, analysis, and instrumentalization of digital data generated under the banner of blockchain-based due diligence, chain of custody certifications, and various transparency mechanisms, situated alongside and in support of mineral extraction. We mobilize concepts from political geography and political ecology to argue that digital technologies of traceability in extractive processes potentially create new forms of control and exclusion or exacerbate existing social, political, and territorial dispossession through asymmetric relations of power and knowledge in mineral supply chains. Despite industry efforts to make mineral supply chains more sustainable by resorting to digital certification and traceability, the strategic uses of uncertainty, ignorance, and ambiguity undergirding blockchain-enabled traceability systems fail to challenge existing inequalities in resource use and access or fulfill the promise of transparency and accountability.
Exchange, 2006
Marshall Sahlins is the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology at the Un... more Marshall Sahlins is the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. His works, which have been greatly influential in the fields of anthropology and history, include: Stone Age Economics; Culture and Practical Reason; How 'Natives' Think: About Captain Cook, For Example; Islands of History; and, most recently, Culture in Practice and Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa. He is also the Executive Publisher of Prickly Paradigm Press, a publishing company inspired by the role of the pamphlet as a medium for political expression in 18th century Britain. Sahlins talks to Exchange about culture and anthropology in the contemporary world, political engagement and the university, and the history of his own work.
Extractive Industries and Society, 2021
The consumption of cobalt has tripled globally over the last decade, largely driven by rising dem... more The consumption of cobalt has tripled globally over the last decade, largely driven by rising demand for electronics and electric-battery vehicles. This fast-growing market has pressured multinational mining companies operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the world's largest supplier of cobalt, to formalize artisanal mining under the banner of responsible sourcing. Based on field research in the cobalt-rich Province of Lualaba, survey data and interviews with relevant actors, this article examines the integration of artisanal miners in corporate-led formalization projects. First, we suggest that the reliance on wageless artisanal workers in large-scale industrial operations holds important lessons for understanding the unintended effects of mining formalization. Second, the flexible recruitment of artisanal workers by mining companies represents an emergent trend of corporate outsourcing of responsibility.
Revue d'anthropologie des connaissances, 2020
This article puts forth the notion of visual refraction to analyze the subjective and technical c... more This article puts forth the notion of visual refraction to analyze the subjective and technical construction of grading certificates in the global diamond trade. Research was based on an ethnographic study of rough diamond grading and evaluation courses in gemological laboratories in Belgium and India, as well as interviews with novice and experienced evaluators (Belgium, United States, India, United Kingdom, and Switzerland). By "seeing in the stone" the learning of gestures and procedures meant to bring order to the imperfections of natural objects, we reveal the tensions between the aspirations of objectivity and the subjective visual practices that characterize the classificatory apparatus of the diamond industry. We suggest that the visual expertise learnt by graders consists notably of recognizing and valuing the fallibility of their own sensory assessments. This apparent paradox is constitutive of the certification system and aligns with the rhetoric of exceptionality upon which the diamond industry and its markets are built.
Arts, 2020
The Geneva Free Port in Switzerland has paved the way for a new generation of art and luxury free... more The Geneva Free Port in Switzerland has paved the way for a new generation of art and luxury free ports. These are critical spatial pivots for the management of art assets, including storage and transactions of artworks, and serve as proxy to examine mechanisms for the capture and generation of value, integral but also outside the global art market. Drawing from the trajectory of the Geneva Free Port and an interdisciplinary body of scholarship on "offshore" and other special zones of production, and value circulation in human geography, anthropology, history, and sociology, this article frames free ports in a longer genealogy of offshore capitalism. First, we claim that the emergence of the Geneva Free Port prefigures and helps illuminate contemporary transformations in offshore capitalism; second, these spaces are more deeply imbricated with public and state authorities than previously suggested. Finally, a holistic understanding of art capital-works of art for investment and asset management-requires an encompassing view of free ports not as accidental and exceptional features in the world of high art but as spaces deeply implicated in the creation and operation of the art market more generally.
African perspectives Global insights, 2019
Distributed ledger technologies (DLT) enable the creation of digital databases stored across mult... more Distributed ledger technologies (DLT) enable the creation of digital databases stored across multiple locations. In the most-advanced design of DLTs, blockchains record and publish transactions through a peer-to-peer and tamper-proof block structure, and operate securely through a consensus-based algorithm. Increasingly, DLTs and blockchain-based initiatives are deployed in the mineral sector to address the problem of conflict minerals, ensure respect for due diligence standards, and improve supply chain management and traceability. The fast adoption of this technology for governing natural resources by creating immutable digital records of sourcing and geological information engenders new opportunities and risks for mining communities across Africa. These include the creation, ownership and access of digital data, the participatory role of upstream actors, and the effects of monitoring and traceability for informal miners and the future of sustainable development in mining communities.
International Development Policy, 2019
With access to data communication networks and the prevalence of informal work, workers in the gl... more With access to data communication networks and the prevalence of informal work, workers in the global South are rapidly inching closer to confronting the impact of automated or digitally enabled non-standard employment. What are the social and political responses required to face this shifting engagement with the means of automated production and the experience of digital work mediated through privately owned global technology platforms? By examining India's job market, with a focus on the country's information technology (IT) industry, this chapter assesses whether the International Labour Organization's (ilo) focus on labour rights and social protection is suited to addressing the potential for capital-labour substitution and the new ecosystem of software-mediated work. The chapter suggests a new engagement with digital labour, closer scrutiny of unregulated working conditions, and democratic control over tech-enabled digital platforms.
Economic Anthropology, 2019
This article examines the labor power of digital miners. Though an obscure and still incipient fa... more This article examines the labor power of digital miners. Though an obscure and still incipient facet of the digital economy, crypto-mining powers
and secures transactions across blockchains, or public distributed digital ledgers. Drawing from interviews with cryptocurrency enthusiasts, blockchain advocates, and developers; participation in online and offline discussions; and a survey with small-scale crypto-miners, this article takes on the material and technoscientific valuation of crypto-mining to understand how a future of open, decentralized accountability implicates human labor alongside automated processes. The work of digital mining, performed in the work of inscribing, registering, and politically organizing mining operations, enables the formation of democratic communities in the digital economy and remains inevitably embedded in social relations as a mode of productive, meaningful action.
In 1957, the security force of Angola’s colonial diamond mining
company recruited African diviner... more In 1957, the security force of Angola’s colonial diamond mining
company recruited African diviners to help them solve a case of diamond theft in Lunda. This event reveals a peculiar convergence of divinatory practices with techniques of corporate surveillance in Lunda’s political economy of security. In their overlapping features of secrecy and control, divination and corporate security can be understood as historically aligned evidentiary practices, or what I call “corporate divination.” By examining divinatory rituals in tandem with the “occult” apparatus of corporate surveillance, and the figure of a colonial sorcerer- detective renowned for his “divinatory” prowess, I ask how such seemingly opposed modes of knowledge production eroded or shored up colonial rule. The cultural significance of divination within the context of a mining company, I
suggest, exposes the conditions under which a colonial corporation appropriates the social world in which it intervenes, and conversely, the cultural resources that potentially shape or undermine corporate life in a colonial context.
Introduction to special issue of Globe on "Inequality and Identity in an Unequal World"
Etnografica, Nov 1, 2006
Page 1. Entrevista com Marshall Sahlins 385 NA AUSÊNCIA DO CAMPO METAFÍSICO: Entrevista com MARSH... more Page 1. Entrevista com Marshall Sahlins 385 NA AUSÊNCIA DO CAMPO METAFÍSICO: Entrevista com MARSHALL SAHLINS Por FILIPE CALVÃO e KERRY CHANCE Marshall Sahlins é Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service ...
This review examines the ambiguous condition of unfree labor in modern, Fordist, or postindustria... more This review examines the ambiguous condition of unfree labor in modern, Fordist, or postindustrial systems of exploitation. Unfree labor is reviewed across two multidisciplinary strands of research. The first pertains to forms of coercion and exploitation of labor in situations of human mobility or bondage—so-called modern-day slavery and human trafficking. The second attends to the effects of precariousness and dependency conceived at the interstice of recent theorizations of affect and belonging. Whereas the first case is framed as an exception, morally and legally condemned, the second is presented as a new ordinary form of inequality. A theoretical and empirical engagement that straddles both literatures under the prism of unfree labor consolidates this renewed anthropological focus on work. This review suggests that the objectification and dehumanization of labor should be placed back at the heart of anthropological reflection to pave the way for a refined scrutiny of exploitation, inequality, and dispossession.
The purest diamond is an emblematic ideation of an elusive and notoriously complex ethnographic o... more The purest diamond is an emblematic ideation of an elusive and notoriously complex ethnographic object, the commodity. At the turnover moment from rock to commodity, the materiality of a diamond remains at the centrepiece of negotiations over value. More significantly, diamonds also emerge as an unstable material by way of a ritualized negotiation alongside other materials in the trading context. What is the matter, then, with the material life of a diamond stone? This chapter asks how the social, institutional and technical process by which diamonds are evaluated can change the material itself. I approach this problem by way of ethnographic events of trading diamonds in Lunda, Angola’s diamond-rich province.
This chapter examines how megaengineering spaces of mineral extraction in Angola mediate the soci... more This chapter examines how megaengineering spaces of mineral extraction in Angola mediate the social significance of a commodity, in complex relations with state agents, security forces, diggers, miners, local dealers, and global corporations. Under what conditions does a megaengineering project, its technological features and residential architecture, influence the broader meaning of diamonds as extracted commodities? How do recent projects resonate with pre-existing built environments? Amidst talk of global market crisis, diamond mining sites are examined against a genealogy of political, economic and violent conflicts over sovereignty in the region.
This article examines the qualitative dimensions invoked and procured by smugglers, traders, and ... more This article examines the qualitative dimensions invoked and procured by smugglers, traders, and agitators in events of transporting and trading diamonds in Angola. The experience of qualities generally attributed to diamonds is exhibited and embodied in indexical and iconic relation to organized semiotic qualisigns of speed and slowness, secure and insecure bodies, mobility and immobility. In other words, 'qualia' orient objects and people by displaying a connection to the experience of diamonds' qualities of visibility and hiddenness, and allow in turn for the articulation of disparate social processes implicating both the materiality of carbon-based stones and the social relations inscribed in the labor of extraction and exchange.
“Death and Eternal Life in Medieval Chapel Tombs of fourteenth-century Lisbon.” This article exam... more “Death and Eternal Life in Medieval Chapel Tombs of fourteenth-century Lisbon.” This article examines conceptions of death and eternal life in Medieval Portugal through the study of funeral chapels in the Lisbon of Late Middle Ages. The original testaments (14th and 15th c.) are part of an unexplored collection and allow for understanding the management of earthly acts meant to ensure the perpetual salvation of the soul.
O presente trabalho aborda a temática da morte no Portugal medieval
através do estudo da fundação de capelas fúnebres na Lisboa da Baixa
Idade Média. Esta série de tombos de capelas, contendo o testamento ou a instituição de capela original (séculos XIV e XV), faz parte de um acervo documental praticamente inexplorado e permite compreender a administração de actos terrenos para garantir a perpetuação da alma.
Call for Paper by Filipe Calvao
The world is experiencing today new relations between synthetic, 'natural', and digital materiali... more The world is experiencing today new relations between synthetic, 'natural', and digital materialities, from industrial laboratories to tropical rainforests, in agrifood systems and synthetic meat production, from computer simulations to medical biotechnology. In spite of their empirical imbrication across various industries and economic processes, anthropological approaches have commonly privileged the material specificity and separateness of the synthetic and the digital in their relation towards what is framed as "natural". Rather than considering natural, synthetic and digital worlds as politically antagonistic, materially distinct, or ontologically separate, this Special Issue of Tsantsa interrogates how digital, synthetic and natural materialities are interlocked in socio-material processes of mediation, transmutation and valuation. Drawing inspiration from earlier conceptualizations of "hybrid" collectives of human and non-humans (Latour 2005), the frictions of global interconnections of movement, forms, and agency (Tsing 2005), or the cyborg blurring of natural and artificial boundaries (Mitchell 2003), we seek to highlight how the separateness and distinctness of these material orders are produced, and the interconnections between them. Our approach to mediation privileges the conceptual and actual entanglements between materialities; transmutation takes into account the transformations of forms and substance across material orders; valuation, finally, implicates the commensuration, evaluation, and marketization of biosocial and economic processes within and across natural, synthetic and digital orders. Synthetic fibers, plastics, and fabrics have long been a mainstay of modern mass consumerism. With recent attempts to engineer and synthesize life itself, and the growing prospects of digitally-mediated, algorithm-powered, and AI-driven futures, social scientists are now taking stock of the emergence of, and transgressions between, natural, synthetic and digital products in a wide range of socio-cultural, political, and economic contexts. Along with studies of virtual realities, anthropologists and other social scientists have examined the social and political effects of digital and algorithmic processes, including the interface and mediation between humans and computers (Coleman 2013; Kockelman 2017), and have taken an acute interest in exploring how scientists engineer new life forms (e.g. Roosth 2017). We push these analyses further through the prism of socio-material processes of mediation , transmutation, and valuation. For example, diamonds or human cells are organic-based material substances that can be grown in a laboratory and be the target of digitally-mediated crypto-certification and data management. In these transmutations, synthetic, digital and natural materialities are imbricated in ways that lead to new forms of mediation, bio-economies, and valuation. This Special Issue inaugurates a reflection of anthropological relevance around the following questions: Can the synthetic or digital be biologic, and what is natural about artificial materials and processes? What are the boundaries, leakages, or forms of contamination between human and artificial intelligence, digital and synthetic production, from economic spaces to intimate spheres of life? What questions and challenges do ever-more synthetic and digital material cultures raise about the conditions of the human, and the posthuman? How is health, labor, or sociality transformed by digital or synthetic production processes? How is value created and defined across these different social, epistemological, and material orders? What are the political, epistemological, ecological, and social conditions underpinning a future that promises to be increasingly enmeshed in synthetic and digital properties?
Books by Filipe Calvao
The Anthropology of Precious Minerals, 2020
Concerted efforts by state and corporate actors to promote and certify a more transparent and eth... more Concerted efforts by state and corporate actors to promote and certify a more transparent and ethical diamond mining industry have stumbled upon the near impossibility of technically establishing a reliable origin "signature" for rough diamonds. As pure carbon molecules, the origin of diamonds is often said to be unidentifiable, but a complex relationship between the value of rough stones and polished jewels in the business of "ethical" mining remains. This chapter examines how the source (of extraction) and a diamond's origin (defined by its natural properties) are invoked or concealed in expert evaluations in Angola's trading rooms and Swiss jewellery auctions. Despite claims to absolute transparency or the secretive reputation of the mining industry, the origin of a diamond is ultimately co-produced in the practices, qualities, and regulation technologies linking owner and worker, miner and manager, producer and consumer.
Uploads
Papers by Filipe Calvao
and secures transactions across blockchains, or public distributed digital ledgers. Drawing from interviews with cryptocurrency enthusiasts, blockchain advocates, and developers; participation in online and offline discussions; and a survey with small-scale crypto-miners, this article takes on the material and technoscientific valuation of crypto-mining to understand how a future of open, decentralized accountability implicates human labor alongside automated processes. The work of digital mining, performed in the work of inscribing, registering, and politically organizing mining operations, enables the formation of democratic communities in the digital economy and remains inevitably embedded in social relations as a mode of productive, meaningful action.
company recruited African diviners to help them solve a case of diamond theft in Lunda. This event reveals a peculiar convergence of divinatory practices with techniques of corporate surveillance in Lunda’s political economy of security. In their overlapping features of secrecy and control, divination and corporate security can be understood as historically aligned evidentiary practices, or what I call “corporate divination.” By examining divinatory rituals in tandem with the “occult” apparatus of corporate surveillance, and the figure of a colonial sorcerer- detective renowned for his “divinatory” prowess, I ask how such seemingly opposed modes of knowledge production eroded or shored up colonial rule. The cultural significance of divination within the context of a mining company, I
suggest, exposes the conditions under which a colonial corporation appropriates the social world in which it intervenes, and conversely, the cultural resources that potentially shape or undermine corporate life in a colonial context.
O presente trabalho aborda a temática da morte no Portugal medieval
através do estudo da fundação de capelas fúnebres na Lisboa da Baixa
Idade Média. Esta série de tombos de capelas, contendo o testamento ou a instituição de capela original (séculos XIV e XV), faz parte de um acervo documental praticamente inexplorado e permite compreender a administração de actos terrenos para garantir a perpetuação da alma.
Call for Paper by Filipe Calvao
Books by Filipe Calvao
and secures transactions across blockchains, or public distributed digital ledgers. Drawing from interviews with cryptocurrency enthusiasts, blockchain advocates, and developers; participation in online and offline discussions; and a survey with small-scale crypto-miners, this article takes on the material and technoscientific valuation of crypto-mining to understand how a future of open, decentralized accountability implicates human labor alongside automated processes. The work of digital mining, performed in the work of inscribing, registering, and politically organizing mining operations, enables the formation of democratic communities in the digital economy and remains inevitably embedded in social relations as a mode of productive, meaningful action.
company recruited African diviners to help them solve a case of diamond theft in Lunda. This event reveals a peculiar convergence of divinatory practices with techniques of corporate surveillance in Lunda’s political economy of security. In their overlapping features of secrecy and control, divination and corporate security can be understood as historically aligned evidentiary practices, or what I call “corporate divination.” By examining divinatory rituals in tandem with the “occult” apparatus of corporate surveillance, and the figure of a colonial sorcerer- detective renowned for his “divinatory” prowess, I ask how such seemingly opposed modes of knowledge production eroded or shored up colonial rule. The cultural significance of divination within the context of a mining company, I
suggest, exposes the conditions under which a colonial corporation appropriates the social world in which it intervenes, and conversely, the cultural resources that potentially shape or undermine corporate life in a colonial context.
O presente trabalho aborda a temática da morte no Portugal medieval
através do estudo da fundação de capelas fúnebres na Lisboa da Baixa
Idade Média. Esta série de tombos de capelas, contendo o testamento ou a instituição de capela original (séculos XIV e XV), faz parte de um acervo documental praticamente inexplorado e permite compreender a administração de actos terrenos para garantir a perpetuação da alma.