Gold attraction: an ethnography of gold valuation from the UK to Colombia

Abstract

Drawing on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork among bureaucrats, technocrats, and entrepreneurs working on a mineral traceability project in Colombia and financiers and consultants working on projects of responsible gold sourcing in London, Switzerland, and Paris, this dissertation examines the practices and narratives involved in making gold—and people along its valuation chain—attractive for investment. The valuation of gold is profoundly paradoxical. In financial markets, gold is valuable for being a risk-free asset. Gold bullion stored in banks is used to hedge the risk of investment portfolios and preserve wealth in times of economic crisis. But gold is not risk-free; in fact, it creates risks for racialised ASM miners and wider communities subjected to the intense resource extraction necessary to sustain the gold market. Therefore, for gold to become a valuable financial asset that literally enables the accumulation of capital and wealth, it needs to be physically and morally purified from the ‘dirtiness’ of its extraction. This thesis is an ethnographic exploration of how the value of gold is purified, stabilised and sustained through advertisement campaigns, training courses, market reforms, responsible sourcing standards, narratives around transparency, sustainability and development, certification schemes, traceability initiatives and sovereignty aspirations. I argue that the creation of gold’s financialised value is the result of the labour of attraction of actors along a racially hierarchised valuation chain. Actors may have different motivations to do this work, yet their labour of attraction is arguably always intended to make gold more morally pure. Gold attraction is underpinned by a racialisation of gold desire that was born in the colonial encounter—the desire of the wealthy to accumulate gold is celebrated while the desire of miners to extract the mineral is condemned. The research primarily draws on anthropological work on the connection between financial markets and resource extraction, and on critical analyses of the material consequences of financial practices in exacerbating racial and geographical inequalities. This thesis proposes shifting the focus away from resource extraction to develop a new framework for analysing resource attraction, contributing to a broader understanding of how material substances are transformed into resources with financial value.