Leverhulme and Isaac Newton Trust Fellow 2025 - 2028

Kieran Gilfoy


Leverhulme and Isaac Newton Trust Fellow
Centre of Latin American Studies
University of Cambridge
E-mail: kg570@cam.ac.uk


My academic work has sought to use minerals and resources as an ethnographic vehicle to explore anthropological questions on life, labour and being. My doctoral research investigated the realities, contradictions, and trajectories of resource-making in the highlands of Peru. Tracing projects of social becoming for individuals and communities on the margins of the Bambas copper mine, the project highlights the everyday struggle for a ‘better life’ amidst the challenging limitations of industrial production.

Currently, as a Leverhulme and Isaac Newton Trust Postdoctoral fellow, I am embarking on a new research programme in the eastern Amazon of Brazil entitled ‘When Gold Enters the Blood’. This project homes in on the lives and labour of garimpeiros (wildcat miners) and the personal histories and existential imperatives which inform their pursuit of gold. When Gold Enters the Blood explores the ways in which wandering amidst the Tapajós valley is as much about making a life as making a living. In elucidating how suffering and faith structure garimpeiro relations to minerals and the rainforest, it recasts informal livelihoods as projects of being with consequences for contemporary conservation politics.

Publications

  • Gilfoy, K. 2023. “Global Ideals and Restorative Extraction: Negotiated Indigeneity on the Margins of a Peruvian Copper Mine”, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 28 (1): 21-31.
  • Gilfoy, K. 2022. “Mechanised Pits and Artisanal Tunnels: The Incongruences and Complementarities of Mining Investment in the Peruvian Andes”, Journal of Latin American Studies 54 (4): 679-703.
  • Gilfoy, K. 2022. “Toxic Endurance and Social Becoming: Environmentalism in the Shadows of Andean Extraction”, The Extractive Industries and Society 11: 1-9.
  • Gilfoy, K. 2015. “Land Grabbing and NGO Advocacy in Liberia: A Deconstruction of the ‘Homogenous Community’”, African Affairs 114 (455): 185-205.