ISRF Political Economy Fellow 2021-22
ISRF Political Economy Fellow 2021-22
Eva van Roekel is an assistant professor in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She obtained her PhD in Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University for her ethnographic research on the trials for crimes against humanity in Argentina. Her research interests lie with violence, human rights, morality and visual anthropology. Fieldwork, writing and filming are her personal blend of doing anthropology for which she lived and worked for more than ten years in Venezuela and Argentina. She is the author of Phenomenal Justice: Violence and Morality in Argentina (2020) published by Rutgers University Press and various peer-reviewed articles and fictional stories. She has also made three documentaries. She is cofounder of Dokumento, a cultural platform for storytelling, and editor of the Dutch anthropological journal Etnofoor. Her current ethnographic inquiry focuses on the role of gold in the complex humanitarian crisis in Venezuela.
This research will provide the first in-depth analysis of emergency resource extraction and trade of gold in the context of the humanitarian crisis and the growing ecological degradation in the Northern Amazon. The project will focus specifically on Venezuelan/Brazilian borderlands that increasingly show patterns of extra-legal gold extraction as a way of survival that permeate global commodity chains (e.g. mobile phones, jewellery) (Ebus 2019). The current crisis in Venezuela raises essential questions about the contemporary entanglements of economic crisis, global crime and ecological degradation that concern societies beyond the Latin American region. The proposed research will therefore examine intraregional processes of emergency resource extraction and trade that uncovers existing and emerging extra-legal connections between state actors and criminal actors. It will link the irregular economic reconfigurations with the cultural significance of natural resources for Latin American populations (Sawyer 2004). To disengage persistent binary classifications of legal/illegal and culture/nature in the literature on global crime and resource extraction, I will apply a radical empirical approach (Jackson 1996) that explicitly draws from international political economy, moral theory and cultural ecology. The research will specifically undertake ethnographic fieldwork to engage with the lived experiences of gold extraction and trade in the Venezuelan borderlands. Alongside, I seek to advance the development of a context-sensitive methodology (Van Roekel 2019) that enables fieldwork in high-stakes environments by synthesising lived experiences and structural inequalities from the bottom-up. Through its focus on economic crime and ecological degradation as a result of the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, the research unsheathes real-life problems in the Northern Amazon. The project also matches ISRF goals by gathering new empirical data on emergency resource extraction that will be utilised in the development of a new analytical framework to study the nexus of humanitarian crisis, global crime and ecological degradation in contemporary societies.
If you would like to contact any of our Fellows to discuss their ISRF-funded work, please contact Dr Lars Cornelissen (Academic Editor) in the first instance, at [email protected].