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Intro -- List of figures and tables -- Preface and acknowledgements -- Notes on contributors -- 1. Reframing the debate on informal mining -- Section One: Historical antecedents and value‑making -- 2. Artisanal gold-rush mining and frontier democracy: Juxtaposing experiences in America, Australia, Africa and Asia -- 3. Tanzanite: Commodity fiction or commodity nightmare? -- 4. Agrarian distress and gemstone mining in India: The political economy of survival -- 5. The social ecology of artisanal mining: Between romanticisation and anathema -- Section Two: Precarious and gendered labour -- 6. Theorising transit labour in informal mineral extraction processes -- 7. A good business or a risky business: Health, safety and quality of life for women small-scale miners in PNG -- 8. Rice, sapphires and cattle: Work lives of women artisanal and small-scale miners in Madagascar -- 9. Is it possible to integrate health and safety risk management into mechanised gold processing? A methodology for artisanal and small-scale mining communities in the Philippines -- 10. Resources and resourcefulness: Gender, human rights and resilience in artisanal mining towns of eastern Congo -- Section Three: Conflicts and governance -- 11. Historical trajectory of gold-mining in the Nilgiri-Wayanad region of India -- 12. Conflicts in marginal locations: Small-scale gold-mining in the Amazon -- 13. Small-scale gold-mining: Opportunities and risks in post-conflict Colombia -- 14. Muddy rivers and toxic flows: Risks and impacts of artisanal gold-mining in the riverine catchments of Bombana, Southeast Sulawesi (Indonesia) -- 15. Artisanal and small-scale mining governance: The 'emerging issue' of 'unregulated mining' in Lao PDR -- 16. Reassembling informal gold‑mining for development and sustainability? Opportunities and limits to formalisation in India, Indonesia and Laos

"Between the Plough and the Pick deepens our understanding of informal, artisanal and small-scale mining, popularly known as ASM. The book engages with wider scholarly conceptualisations of contemporary global social, agrarian and political changes, whilst underlining the roles that local social‑political-historical contexts play in shaping mineral extractive processes and practices. It shows that the people who are engaged in these mining practices are often the poorest and most exploited labourers—erstwhile peasants caught in the vortex of global change, who perform the most insecure and dangerous tasks. Although these people are located at the margins of mainstream economic life, they collectively produce enormous amounts of diverse material commodities and find a livelihood (and often a pathway out of oppressive poverty). The contributions to this book bring these people to the forefront of debates on resource politics. The contributors are international scholars and practitioners who explore the complexities in the histories, in labour and production practices, the forces driving such mining, the creative agency and capacities of these miners, as well as the human and environmental costs of ASM. They show how these informal, artisanal and small‑scale miners are inextricably engaged with, or bound to, global commodity values, are intimately involved in the production of new extractive territories and rural economies, and how their labour reshapes agrarian communities and landscapes of resource access and control.
This book drives home the understanding that, collectively, this social and economic milieu redefines our conceptualisation of resource politics, mineral‑dependent livelihoods, extractive geographies of resources and commodities, and their multiple meanings."

The chapters in this book offer concrete examples from all over the world to show how community livelihoods in mineral-rich tracts can be more sustainable by fully integrating gender concerns into all aspects of the relationship between mining practices and mine affected communities. By looking at the mining industry and the mine-affected communities through a gender lens, the authors indicate a variety of practical strategies to mitigate the impacts of mining on women's livelihoods without undermining women's voice and status within the mine-affected communities. The term 'field' in the title of this volume is not restricted to the open-cut pits of large scale mining operations which are male-dominated workplaces, or with mining as a masculine, capital-intensive industry, but also connotes the wider range of mineral extractive practices which are carried out informally by women and men of artisanal communities at much smaller geographical scales throughout the mineral-rich tracts of poorer countries.

Our body consists, by weight, of an average of 60 percent water (in man it is slightly more, in women slightly less). Nothing is as elementary to life as water; Without water, people can not survive more than a few days. The significance of the mere presence of water in the life of man is shown in the special position which it possesses for man's imagination and cosmology. John Wagner points out that water has a social life (this term refers to a wide range of human relationships, such as political, economic, or spiritual). Even if the water moves between all forms of life and between the animate and the inanimate world, the social interrelationships between mankind and the water represent a subgroup within the broader range of ecological relations.

Masculinist historiography, either purposively or inadvertently, has tended to present the ancient human endeavour of mining as a male domain in which gender was, to use a technical, engineering term, not much more than just an 'overburden', a disposable material that is treated as waste for being marginal to the major purpose of extracting valuable and worthy minerals. As a corrective to this avowed gender-blindness, feminist researchers from a range of disciplines have illuminated the heavily gendered nature of mining as work and an industry, and the gendered labour processes that create gendered impacts on communities, creating gendered places of production and reproduction. Drawing on this large and growing body of literature, this chapter presents the main strands of feminist arguments and brings the political economy approaches closer to the emergent threads of political ecology studies. By doing so, the chapter offers an overview of the 'industrial' studies of labour by feminists coupled with feminist writings on the 'gender selective impacts of mining' emerging primarily from the studies in less-affluent nations where mining has been expanding rapidly since the 1980s. In particular, the chapter argues that the masculinity of mining as an industry cannot be divorced from the gendered impacts of the industry; a masculine workplace with masculine labour processes is intimately linked to situations where women bear disproportionately heavy burdens of environmental degradation and social disruptions caused by large-scale mining.

Dans le présent article, l'auteure soutient que l'approche fondée sur les droits, telle qu'appliquée dans le contexte minier, s'appuie sur une interprétation limitée du concept des femmes. Les femmes sont généralement pensées comme étant en dehors du secteur minier et comme des victimes de l'oppression patriarcale. Une vision aussi incomplète du genre va à l'encontre d'une perspective féministe qui est nécessairement holistique, tout comme elle est éclectique dans son traitement des problématiques touchant les femmes. Pour justifier cet argument, l'auteure discute des résultats de recherches-actions menées dans des mines de charbon en Indonésie et en Inde orientale. Elle démontre comment l'approche fondée sur les droits, lorsqu'elle s'appuie sur une conception incomplète du genre, aliène la figure de la femme qui, bien que travaillant comme citoyenne économique à l'intérieur du secteur minier, généralement tout au bas de l'échelle, n'en est pas moins asservie.