Speculating with the Terminator
Opening session of the Latin American Ethnography Seminar
Speaker: Pablo Jaramillo (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia and ILCS School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK)
Speculating with the Terminator
According to Lauren Berlant, 'the present is perceived, first, affectively: the present is what makes itself present to us before it becomes anything else'. But what happens when people are forced to face no other than Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Terminator, who arrives to buy shares in a mining venture? This presentation explores the affective regime of financial speculation in Marmato, a historic gold mining frontier in the Colombian central Andes. Far from reducing the life in the town as damaged, I argue that the event is the object of countless rumours and stories that signal a far richer and generative engagement with capitalist processes.
Pablo Jaramillo (PhD University of Manchester) is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of the Andes (Bogotá) and Visiting Fellow at CLACS (ILCS, School of Advanced Study, University of London). His work focuses on the anthropology of natural resources and energy futures in Colombia and Latin America. He has conducted extensive ethnographic research on renewable energy projects, controversies surrounding the expansion of coal mines and the livelihoods of small-scale gold miners in Colombia's Caribbean and Andean regions.
Event date: 2 November 2023