Abstract
This article explores the uneven geosocial traces created by transcontinental and corporeal circulations of tin ore, metallic tin, and tin cans from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Although tin has no essential relationship to human life, I argue that the extraction, circulation, and consumption of tin have nevertheless contributed to the production of metabolic unevenness across continental space. Since the early industrial era, tin has been used primarily for food preservation, in which capacity it has nutritionally supported the metabolic processes (and labor power) of workers, settlers, and soldiers, among others. Tin canning technologies relied, in turn, on the relentless labor of tin miners, whose own metabolic processes were interrupted by the accumulation of mineral dust in their lungs. These histories have been archived as geosocial strata as both discarded tin cans and pulmonary fibrosis. Drawing insights from geophilosophy and both Marxian and toxicological approaches to metabolism, this article reflects on how inhuman forces and substances subtend not only life but also its disparate energies and exposures.
In February 2014, a Northern Californian couple made an astonishing discovery. Out for a walk on their rural property, they decided on a whim to investigate an ancient-looking tin can left partially exposed on the edge of the trail. Tucked inside the cracked and rusted can—and seven similar cans in the vicinity—the couple uncovered the largest cache of gold coins found in US history. The coins were dated from 1847 to 1894, the height of California’s gold rush era. A minor media frenzy ensued when it was announced that the coins had an estimated worth of over $10 million, and the couple chose not to disclose the location of their farm for fear of sparking a “second gold rush” of amateur prospectors.1
Amid the excitement about the gold, no one seemed particularly interested in the tin cans that had housed the precious metal for more than a century. Yet there could not have been a more symbolically appropriate vehicle for stashing Californian gold in the late 1800s. Since the gold prospectors who poured into California from the mid-1800s onward bent their energies toward scouring the earth for a substance devoid of nutritional value, they relied on tinned food to keep body and soul together. Tin, a metal whose food preservation capacities stem from its ability to resist corrosion and oxidation, unyoked the prospectors from the seasonal cycles and geographical constraints of food production, allowing them to focus all their energies on mining. A metal extracted from one corner of the earth thus facilitated the extraction of another metal from another corner of the earth. Once emptied of food, moreover, tin cans were returned unceremoniously to the earth as discards, where they settled into a new geosocial stratum, a metallic layer that “constitute[d] the interlocking operations” of social and geological forces.2 Although most were not filled with gold coins, abandoned tin cans nevertheless archive the extent to which the bodily energies of nineteenth-century settler-prospectors were made possible by distant labor and distant geologies.
This article offers some preliminary thoughts on the uneven geosocial traces left by transcontinental and corporeal circulations of tin ore, metallic tin, and tin cans between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. During this time, tin was used primarily as a vehicle of food preservation and circulation, an apparently domestic purpose that seems to have shrouded its vital importance to the clanking gears of industrial capitalism. Yet increasingly throughout this period, the physical power of labor depended on tin-plated cans, which acted as a kind of metabolic infrastructure not only for prospectors but also soldiers, explorers, and urbanizing populations. This mobile infrastructure, however, relied in turn on the relentless labor of tin miners, whose own metabolic processes were inhibited by the accumulation of minerals in their lungs. As they shoveled ore out of the ground, tin miners also inhaled silica dust that resulted in pulmonary scarring and a reduced ability to absorb oxygen. In these ways, although tin has no essential relationship to human life—humans do not require tin like they do calcium or iron, nor is tin a toxicant like mercury or lead—the extraction, circulation, and consumption of tin have contributed to the production of metabolic unevenness across continental space. Moreover, these differences have been territorialized as geosocial strata within and beyond the traditional boundaries of the human body: discarded tin cans and pulmonary lesions tell different stories, but they both document tin’s energetic implications from the mines to the dinner table.
My larger intention in this article is to reflect on how inhuman forces and substances subtend not only life but also its disparate energies and exposures. The geosocial relations commonly bundled as the Anthropocene are mineralized in the anatomies of differentially exposed communities and individuals: veins and cells and organs are full of minerals with varying abilities to support or interrupt metabolic processes. While scholars are increasingly exploring the emergence of geology as a white, colonial science that has emerged in conjunction with not only extractive economies but also racialized notions of the human, comparatively little attention has been paid to ways that the material substances of the deep earth have contributed energetically, metabolically, or toxicologically to this process of embodied differentiation.3 The frequent observation that humans, like all vertebrates, are formed through processes of skeletal mineralization is useful in that it underscores the shared porosity of human bodies and orebodies, but it is too narrow to capture the myriad ways that geological materials support (and inhibit) human life.
To expand this lens, this article combines a diverse set of approaches to the concept of metabolism with reflections from the emergent field of geophilosophy. The concept of metabolism, which has been central to Marxian-inspired political ecologies as well as critical histories of agriculture and nutrition, draws analytic attention to the energetic, material processes of circulation, as occurring at the cellular, organismal, societal, and planetary scale. Geophilosophy, on the other hand, is defined by its insistence that geological and other inhuman processes are historically and conceptually prior to and subtend all forms of life, which necessarily include biochemical and political economic metabolisms. While geophilosophy has influenced a broader geological turn across multiple disciplines, its specific bearing on notions of metabolism has not been explored. This is perhaps because of their apparently antithetical underpinnings: while metabolism focuses on energetic reactions, material transformations, and typically human timescales, geophilosophy centers inhuman, often invisible forces, slow sedimentations, and deep historical time. Even more, metabolism in the Marxian imaginary is conjoined with a dialectical theory of change, while geophilosophy has emerged alongside Deleuzian notions of rhizomatic becoming. Yet an empirical exploration of the role of “geological substratum in subtending modes of production” involves considering how geological strata are deterritorialized and circulated through not only modes of production but also forms of life more broadly conceived.4 Metabolic processes are clearly entangled with geological processes—vertebrates decompose underground, bacteria metabolize minerals, plants fix nitrogen from the soil, fossil fuels circulate commodities through cities built from sand and clay—and the point is to muster theoretical articulations adequate to this complexity.
The article begins by linking Marxian theories of metabolism to Deleuzian notions of stratification in order to explore how the production of tin cans and the bodily ingestion of tinned food supported nineteenth-century projects of militarism, imperialism, and Victorian-era nationalism. I then turn from tin cans to tin mining, specifically considering how ongoing exposures to rock dust shaped the metabolic energies of twentieth-century Bolivian tin miners. This section draws on insights from the fields of toxicology and immunology as well as archival evidence from the tin mines. In the article’s conclusion, I briefly examine the collapse of the global tin market in the 1980s to suggest that, despite its currently reduced economic and corporeal importance, tin was crucial to the formation of a set of social relations that endure today.5 Although it is no longer the strategic metal that it once was, tin’s uneven metabolic circulations constitute a historical substratum with which contemporary political projects must contend.
Tin Cans and Metabolic Strata
As much as capitalism relies on the extraction of surplus value in the labor process, it also relies on the extraction and circulation of raw materials and energy derived from resources; it is, as Mazen Labban writes, “extractive in a dual sense.”6 Marx used the concept of metabolism to discuss the movement of raw materials through capitalist production processes, into the sphere of exchange, and throughout social formations (including agricultural properties, the built environment, and human bodies). It was a concept that he had borrowed from his contemporary, German soil scientist Justus von Liebig, who argued that declining soil fertility was caused by disruptions to its metabolic cycle: in exporting agricultural produce to urban areas without importing human metabolic wastes, farmers were also stripping the land of nutrients, creating a rift in what should have been a cycle. Marx expanded on this insight by showing how this rift was created and perpetuated by capitalist economics. While humans and their social systems necessarily metabolized energetic natures as a condition of survival, capitalism represented “a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil.”7 Defined by its socio-spatial division of labor, including the urbanization of workers, capitalism required an expanded circulation of commodities whose biological degradation rarely involved a return of nutrients to original soils. This point, which Marx elaborated in the third volume of Capital, has underpinned a great deal of work by political ecologists and eco-Marxists, for whom metabolism has offered an analytic key to considering nature-society relations in a capitalist context.8
Human interference with global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles through industrial agricultural and urbanization has also been a topic of discussion within the recent transdisciplinary geological turn, though the focus here has been less on interrupted metabolic processes and more on the degree to which geological substrata subtended metabolic potentials to begin with.9 Indeed, a geophilosophical analysis might extend this argument even further to suggest that these geological substrata—and their disruption—also subtended Marx’s theoretical elaborations, making possible the emergence of eco-Marxism and contemporary understandings of the second contradiction of capital. Elizabeth Grosz uses the language of “geopower,” a word she attributes to Foucault but reads through the work of Deleuze and Guattari, to explain how geological and inhuman forces remain “the literal ground and condition for every human, and non-human, action.”10 Importantly, this includes not just material processes that might be understood as economic, political, or even social, but also the apparently immaterial realm of philosophy itself.11
My concern in this section is how metallic tin and specifically tin cans supported human metabolic processes in moments of increased mobility. The metal itself circulated long before the rise of capitalism in Europe, but the food preservation technology has a much shorter history.12 While the emergence of canning in general is typically dated to the Napoleonic Wars—especially to Napoleon’s 1795 offer of 12,000 francs to anyone who could invent a means of preserving food to feed his army and navy—it was a British merchant, Peter Durand, who patented the technique for canning in tin-plated steel.13 A thin coat of tin applied to both sides of the steel can prevented corrosion even through the thermal sanitation process. In 1812, Durand sold his patent to the British firm Donkin, Hall & Gamble, whose first major client for food in “tin cannisters” was the British army, confirming the link that Napoleon had drawn between militarism and preserved food. Explorers followed closely on the army’s heels: Sir William Edward Parry brought tinned food with him on his Arctic expeditions in the 1820s, and soon no expedition was considered prepared if it did not have a large supply of tinned food on deck.14 For hundreds of years, European sailors and soldiers had subsisted on unvaried diets of salted meats and dried biscuits, neither of which offered much protection against scurvy and other illnesses, and tinned food was a welcome reprieve. Tinned food was designed with mobile workers in mind; soldiers, sailors, and explorers were its prototypical consumers.
Accordingly, the tin can’s circulatory geographies grew with the expansion of European empires and even became a symbol of imperial achievement.15 In 1851, tin cans appeared in the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in London, which “elevated the commodity above the mundane act of exchange and created a coherent representational universe for commodities.”16 The tin can was advertised as sanitary, self-contained, easy to serve, and completely separated from the messy processes of agriculture, livestock, and death. It was presented as a feat of modern technology and a credit to the empire, two commitments that undergirded Victorian-era senses of British nationalism.17 The connection between empire and tin cans was cemented in the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), when the British army depended on imported tinned meats from Australia and New Zealand. In a different way, tin cans were also key technologies of the emerging US empire, which relied, for instance, on salmon canneries to transform Indigenous salmon runs along the Pacific coast into fish factories.18 As Jane Busch summarizes: “The tin can has always been a pioneer. It went west with the settlers, south with the Union troops, and overseas with the G.I.’s. The portable, ready-made character of canned food was valuable to explorers and soldiers, who did the tin can a service in turn by accepting it.”19
Like all pioneers, tin cans left marks on the landscapes through which they traveled. For contemporary archeologists working in abandoned mining camps and settler villages along the western coast of North America, trash heaps filled with tin cans are informational treasure chests. Slight shifts in canning technologies (from a “hole-and-cap” lid to a “hole-in-cap” lid, for instance) can help date colonial settlements along the western coast of North America, while the number of workers employed by mining and logging companies can be estimated by the number of tin cans left buried in their vicinities.20
Early tin cans were typically sealed with a lead-based solder that almost certainly leached into the can’s contents, particularly the more acidic foods. Lead poisoning from the solder in tin cans is even one hypothesis for the deaths of all 129 members of Sir John Franklin’s expedition to find the Northwest Passage in 1845.21 The tinplate part of the can, however, was relatively innocuous. In general, while tin inevitability leaches from the can into the food, 95 percent of metallic and inorganic tin consumed in this way passes through the excretory system within twenty-four hours after consumption rather than accumulating in the body’s fatty tissues.22 Tin’s rapid passage through the body has actually contributed to the omnipresence of elemental tin around the world: according to applied chemists, “the phenomenal success of [tin canning] is attested to by the fact that tin, a naturally non-ubiquitous element, is now present in small amounts in practically all animal life.”23 In other words, the roaming consumers of tinned food contributed to the constitution of a new geosocial stratum not only every time they tossed an empty can along the trail but also every time they took a piss.
The tin can was specifically linked to European imperialism and industrial capitalism: tin cans helped to free workers and settlers from the daily labors of food cultivation and preparation, thereby increasing their mobility without overly compromising their energetic capacities to labor. In geographical terms, the tin can seemed uniquely suited to overcoming the problems of imperial space with apparently timeless produce. Although twentieth-century commentators may have doubted the nutritional content of tinned food—a concern that prompted George Orwell to speculate that “we may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun”24—it nevertheless fortified individuals and empires against alimentary uncertainties. From the perspective of capital, securing the metabolisms of workers, settlers, soldiers, and explorers assisted in the steady accumulation of surplus value. Of course, the bodily energies of all these people could not be so easily controlled, and the nutrients assured by tinned food could be redirected toward union organizing or anticolonial activities. Nevertheless, the geosocial stratum of tin cans—by which I refer to both the material scattering of tin cans across the landscape and the set of geological and social relations that crystallized around the tin can—primarily archives the degree to which tin canning technologies enabled the energetic expansion of the colonial-capitalist frontier. This was an expansion permitted by tin ores and memorialized by tin cans.
Tin Ores and Corporeal Sediment
To the extent that Marxian deployments of metabolism examine the human body at all, they usually focus on the corporeal circulation of food and occasionally water, emphasizing individual bodily entanglements with industrial agriculture, complex shipping logistics, and extractive processes around the world.25 Ignored in these analyses is the fact that cellular respiration—the metabolic process that releases energy from glucose—cannot proceed without oxygen, which implies that the lungs and air quality are as crucial to human metabolism as the digestive system and food quality. Taking respiration seriously, moreover, involves accounting not only for the composition of atmospheric gases but also for the reactive capacities and constitutive meanings of the particulate matters inhaled along with each breath.26
As with most extractive industries, tin mining generates a lot of particulate matters. Wastewater sediments transform downstream watersheds; suspended particulates acidify soils as they settle; and everyone living in the shadow of a mine is familiar with the dust that stings their eyes and cracks the parched creases of their skin. While Cornwall was the primary supplier of tin ores within not only Europe but also the Middle East and North Africa until the turn of the twentieth century, it was Bolivia that experienced the brunt of wartime tin demands—and their corresponding material remains.27 After Bolivian prospector Simón I. Patiño struck tin in a region of the country known as Norte Potosí, Bolivian tin ores passed rapidly through smelters and manufacturers in Europe and North America before appearing on battlefields as military attachments, as well as on shelves as a vehicle for fruit, fish, coffee, and milk. Meanwhile, what remained in the Bolivian highlands were mountainous slag heaps, slowly corroding machinery, and the corporeal legacies of dust.
In the archives of Patiño’s mining company, which he fully consolidated in 1926, every employee is remembered today in a manila folder.28 Each folder contains, at minimum, a single sheet of pink cardstock that records the employee’s basic information: name, gender, date and place of birth, medical exam results, and some notes on when and why the employee stopped working (fired, laid off, quit, or died). Depending on the employee, some folders also contain subsidiary documents, including handwritten letters from the employees or more often their widows, imploring the company to grant them compensation in the wake of “professional illness” or death. Someone in the company read these letters, carefully underlined key claims in red pencil or pen, and made tiny, neat counterclaims in the margins, frequently in all caps: “Pneumonia is not a professional illness.” “Compensation was already given at the onset of disease. no more.” “que deje de escribir cartas [stop writing letters].” In these exchanges, the definition of a “professional illness” is the contested ground on which claims are made and rejected.
The process of mining churns up rocky particulates that, when inhaled, can cause, exacerbate, or increase vulnerability to pulmonary diseases, only some of which were counted by Patiño Mines as professional illnesses. Most notoriously, silicosis is a chronic pulmonary illness caused by the inhalation of crystalline silica dust. Although the larger particles can be expelled by coughing, the smallest particulates cause problems once they settle into the alveoli of the lungs. Silica’s chemical name is silicon dioxide (SiO2), and it is one of the most significant components of the earth’s crust, not to mention one of the primary compounds in the granite, quartz, and feldspar formations that characterize most lode tin mines, such as those in Bolivia, Cornwall, and Yunnan (China).29
Silica dust intervenes in metabolic processes via the immune system. Macrophages, or white blood cells that typically destroy microorganisms, treat the silica particles as if they were live bacteria, engulfing them with the intention of killing them. But crystalline silica, never having been alive to begin with, kills its macrophage attackers. The silica particles released by the dying macrophages are soon taken up by new macrophages in a repeated process that induces inflammation and fibrosis.30 On X-rays of miners’ lungs, fibrosis looks like a steadily thickening fog that continues to advance long after miners officially retire to the surface. Recent studies also show how activated macrophages release reactive oxygen species, also known as free radicals, and other metabolites that can damage genetic material and cause cellular decay. Specifically, these studies suggest that silica induces cellular methylation that decreases the expression of tumor-suppressing genes (and correspondingly increases lung cancer rates).31 As in the world of nutritional epigenetics, in which food is increasingly understood as constituting the environment within which specific genetic codes are activated or suppressed, geological particulates are now understood to have an effect not only on the immune system but also on the genetic regulation of the immune system.32 Geological matters do not just enter human bodies and settle like a sedimentary layer; this corporeal geosocial stratum of particulates and inflamed macrophages is produced through metabolic, immunosuppressant, and even genetic processes. Although the complexities of these interactions were not as well understood in the early twentieth century, Patiño’s company policy categorized silicosis as a properly professional illness that could be—albeit somewhat reluctantly—recognized with monetary compensation.
Neither pneumonia nor tuberculosis, on the other hand, counted as professional illnesses, even though both pulmonary diseases are exacerbated by the subterranean labor of mining, not to mention the inhalation of silica-laced air. Tuberculosis, for instance, is an airborne bacterial infection, but it typically remains latent—that is, it does not become symptomatic—unless the human body is stressed in other ways, such as by inadequate nutrition or oxygen deprivation. Once activated, tuberculosis tears holes in lungs before attacking the rest of the body, such as bones and brains. In her study of public health in twentieth-century Bolivia, Ann Zulawski notes that tuberculosis was a huge problem in Bolivia in the 1930s, intensified by the Chaco War (1932–35) and by a tendency among medical professionals to chalk its prevalence up to a constitutional weakness among indios.33 For many poor Bolivians, the environmental and domestic conditions that activate tuberculosis never went away: in 2017, the case rate was at 117 cases per 100,000 inhabitants.34 Then and now, tuberculosis was particularly common in mining districts, where latent infections are galvanized by the conditions of underground labor, hours spent in alternately cold, damp, hot, and dusty environments. Silicosis itself creates ideal conditions for tuberculosis to spread, which is why the two diseases often move together through a miner’s life.35
In the archives, requests for compensation for pneumonia or tuberculosis were often rejected due to “prior sickness,” as assessed by a doctor upon entry into the mines. For instance, in August 1932, Dionicia, a former palliri—a woman who works on the surface sorting through rocks to determine which ones have sufficient tin content to warrant further processing—pleaded her case thus:
I’ve been requesting recognition for compensation for two months and the lawyer told me that I was sick when I entered [the job]; [but] it’s clear, Señor Gerente [Mr. Manager], that the disease from which I suffer is obtained from working for the long years that I was with the Company. I beg you . . . for just a small compensation to go to my village and die with my family, here I am in total poverty and very sick and in the ultimate misery and without family. It is the inheritance that I carried out of the mine, this sickness from which I suffer.
On the bottom of her letter, a different handwriting—likely that of the doctor, though it is signed only with initials—notes: “She was sick with pulmonary tuberculosis when she entered [the mine] on May 2, 1927. At present she suffers from the same condition but is not unable to work. She does not have a case [pleito] with the company.” Underneath this note, the red pencil scrawls: “According to the medical report, there is no case for compensation.” Each word in the second clause of the sentence is underlined twice for emphasis.
Dionicia was far from alone in losing out on compensation due to “prior illness,” and particularly due to tuberculosis. In my review of 642 company files, I found that more than half of the workers were deemed to have either tuberculosis or a generic “lung sickness” or “heart sickness” at the time of initial employment. What is striking in their appeals to the company, however, is how miners and their widows worked to connect their bodily illnesses to the environmental context in which they labored. While Dionicia described her medical condition as an “inheritance that [she] carried out of the mine,” many others wrote that mining was the practice of “leaving one’s lungs in the mountain.” Both these formulations link the enervation of the body to the deterritorialization of the mountain: as much as fragments of the earth had been incorporated into their lungs, energetic fragments of their bodies remained buried in the earth. More fundamentally, both formulations run counter the Western ontological distinction between bios and geos. As inherited from European philosophical traditions, the difference between geological matters (nonliving) and human bodies (living) logically precedes both everyday “commonsense” categories of thought and much contemporary critical theory.36 By contrast, Dionicia and the other miners were articulating a relationship of mutual permeability between bodies and rocks that more closely resembles contemporary descriptions of silicosis and other pulmonary diseases exacerbated or triggered by rocky particulates.37 Bodily labors not only transform rocks into commodities; rocky materials also interfere with the body’s metabolic processes.
While tin cans helped ensure a steady stream of nutrients for workers and others whose labors had been disarticulated from food production, the metabolic impact of widespread tin canning on tin miners was inverted. Moreover, while trace amounts of tin passed quickly through human bodies when ingested along with food, rocky materials inhaled during the tin mining process tended to linger, causing health problems years down the line. Metabolic processes operated within and across the geosocial strata that connected tin miners’ lungs to discarded tin cans, but they were energetically uneven. These metabolic processes contributed to the territorialization of difference within and beyond individual bodies, sedimented in the lungs and gut as well as the earth.
Metabolic Remains
Completed in 1962, Andy Warhol’s iconic Campbell’s Soup paintings might be interpreted as a prospective memorial for the tin industry, which was already on the verge of collapse.38 After reaching a zenith during World War II, tin prices fell and remained low over the next several decades as a result of more effective recycling programs, wartime stockpile dumping by the United States, and the rapid ascent of aluminum, an ultralightweight metal that became something of a symbol of postwar modernity.39 In the early 1980s, the International Tin Council (ITC)—a producers’ cartel that united Bolivia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and a handful of other countries—was no longer able to borrow enough money to buy all the tin off the market to stabilize prices, and tin prices went into freefall.40
In Bolivia, the tin crisis resulted in the closure of most state-owned and private tin mines, including those established by Patiño in Norte Potosí. Today, the mine that once belonged to Patiño is a complex network of empty, twisted tunnels that spread out in all directions. Aside from the major passageways, the tunnels mark the spaces where tin used to be, since early excavation projects followed the trajectories of tin ores that mineralized between fifty and twenty million years ago. When depicted on maps, these passageways seem to exemplify Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of lines of flight, as they are the vectors through which the physical stuff of territory—earth, wealth, affect—was drained away for distant markets.41 Yet these are hardly dead or empty spaces. Inside the hollowed veins, some two thousand small-scale miners, organized into collectives called cooperativas mineras (mining cooperatives), walk, crawl, and slither through the interior of the mountain, filling the passageways with their equipment, bodies, and stories while continuing to remove tin ore. Many of these workers are the descendants of those memorialized in Patiño’s archive, while others have come more recently. All, however, have been drawn by the promise of tin: they still link dreams of individual and national wealth to subterranean tin ores, even though any evidence of that connection evaporated along with the collapse of the tin industry. The relations that tin helped solder thus linger in the absence of the metal itself.
My goal in this article has been to show, through the story of tin, how geologic materials can circulate through both social systems and individual human bodies, metabolized in ways that are ubiquitous yet uneven. Tin, a metal whose consumption throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries involved eating and breathing in addition to buying and selling, both permitted and interrupted the metabolic processes that define human life. For those who consumed tinned food, tin was often a metal of mobility: it permitted metabolic endurance for travelers and those entering nutritionally uncertain spaces. By extension, the tin can supported the expansion of the colonial-capitalist frontier, since it enabled workers, settlers, prospectors, soldiers, and others to roam far from familiar foodscapes. For those who produced tin ores, however, tin was energetically depleting. Lodged in their lungs and attacked by their immune systems, silica dust released in the tin mining process slowly inhibited miners’ metabolic functions. The metal extended some lives while shortening others, producing a kind of metabolic disparity that remains archived territorially (as tin cans) and corporeally (as pulmonary fibrosis). It is only by reading these geosocial traces across and through one another that the story of tin and tin cans can be told together.
Acknowledgments
Thanks are owed first to the Bolivian tin miners and archivists who shared time and knowledge with me. I also benefited from feedback from Jen Rose Smith, two anonymous reviewers, and participants in the “Volumize the Social” panels at the 2022 meeting of the American Association of Geographers, where I presented an early version of this article.
Notes
For reflections on geological science, colonialism, and race, see Braun, “Producing Vertical Territory”; Himley, “Underground Geopolitics”; Simpson, “Resource Desiring Machines”; Yusoff, Billion Black Anthropocenes. For reflections on geological materialities and racial formations, see Barra, “Good Sediment”; Goffe, “‘Guano in Their Destiny’”; Marston, “Of Flesh and Ore”; and Vasudevan, “Intimate Inventory.”
Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift”; Gandy, “Rethinking Urban Metabolism”; Swyngedouw, “Circulations and Metabolisms”; Davies, “Unwrapping the OXO Cube.”
Winship, “Toxicity of Tin and Its Compounds”; Rüdel, “Case Study.” The major source of toxicological concern surrounding tin cans today is not lead but BPA (bisphenol A), an endocrine disrupter that has been widely used to line the interior of tin-plated steel and aluminum cans since the 1960s. Very recent protests and regulations are encouraging canneries to adopt other materials, though the health implications of these new substances are still unknown. See Almeida et al., “Bisphenol A.”
Barua, White, and Nally, “Rescaling the Metabolic”; Guthman, “Bodies and Accumulation”; Friedberg, Fresh.
Archives of the Corporación Minera de Bolivia, Catavi branch. I reviewed a random sample of 642 employee folders located between boxes 1 and 387. The archivists were in the process of cataloging all the folders at the time of my visits (2016–17), so it is unclear how many boxes were ultimately assembled.
Marrocco et al., “Metabolic Adaptation of Macrophages”; Zhou et al., “Plasma Metabolic Profiling in Patients with Silicosis and Asbestosis.”
Guthman and Mansfield, “Implications of Environmental Epigenetics”; Landecker, “Food as Exposure.”
See also Piper, “Subterranean Bodies.”