Economic Anthropology 2019; 6: 110–122 DOI:10.1002/sea2.

12135

Tracing indium production to the mines

of the Cerro Rico de Potosí
Kirsten Francescone

Department of Anthropology, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6, Canada

Corresponding author: Kirsten Francescone; e-mail: kirsten.francescone@gmail.com

In this article, I examine the valorization process in the indium commodity chain. The first section of the article looks closely at small-scale polymetallic
production in Potosí. Here I demonstrate how producers and mill operators in Bolivia, because of the nature of the metal, do not know their production
contains indium and instead perceive their production to be less valuable. The second section of the article seeks to link Bolivian production to
international indium markets. I demonstrate how accumulation occurs along the commodity chain for companies that deny the Bolivian origin of
their mill feeds. I conclude with an analysis of the state of the commodity in economic anthropology. I argue, with help from Bolivian miners, that
previous and contemporary notions of the commodity have neglected an important part of its composition, what Marx referred to as “dead/past labor.”
Incorporating this notion into our understanding of commodities, I argue, can help us understand the way raw material mineral markets function today.

Keywords Mining; Indium; Commodity Chains; Value; Bolivia

In 2013, I was working as a researcher at the Centre for Documentation and Information Bolivia (CEDIB) in
Cochabamba. My colleague and I, in compiling a database on the active mining operations in the country, stumbled
across a US Geological Service (USGS) report on the Bolivian mining industry (Anderson 2013). The report listed
Bolivia as a significant source of indium, a metal essential to LCD flat-screen production present in every cell phone,
laptop, and tablet we consume today. We were both taken aback by this revelation. In Bolivia, indium was unknown.1
No producing or commercializing entities reported exporting the metal, and no taxes or royalties were paid on its
production.
Later in 2015, I was sitting in an auditorium with a group of small-scale miners from a mine in the department
of Potosí. I had been hired as an interpreter for a Canadian miner’s union that was financing some small-scale
development projects in mining communities in Bolivia. One member of the union asked the miners in attendance
how they perceived their position as producers as compared to that of Canadian or European miners. A miner in
the crowd stood up and, gesturing to the other Canadian representative at the front of the room, who was taking
notes on a tablet, said,

The minerals from our mines, which you have now seen, go into making those tablets. We are in them. We produce
them, someone ships them across the world to Asia to be made into electronics, and then they come back to us
here. And yet, we cannot afford to buy one for our children who might benefit greatly from owning one. The
structure of the industry permits that. (small-scale miner, personal communication, April 18, 2015, Siete Suyus
mine, Potosí, emphasis mine)

This article seeks to trace indium production back to the mines in Potosí, Bolivia. These two moments described
above—the discovery of the report and the mine meeting—represent the context that compelled me to begin my
search for indium in Bolivia in 2013.2 Although these two moments appear disparate, I demonstrate here that they
are in fact linked. Bolivia is historically an important mining country for silver, tin, and now lead and zinc mineral

110 © 2018 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved

 Tracing Indium Production

markets globally (Diaz-Cuellar 2017). I was not surprised, then, when I learned that Bolivia was also an important
source of indium. I was surprised, however, to find out that not many people in Bolivia seemed to know anything
about it. The geological and economic sources were clearly identifying Bolivia as having some of the most important
indium deposits worldwide, but producers that I knew didn’t seem aware.
Indium is a metal that, when refined, is silvery white and soft. Because of its malleability, its alloyed form has
become widely used in the fabrication of LCD and touch screens, DVDs, and solar panels (Pradhan, Panda, and
Behari Sukla 2017, 3). Because of its perceived limited supply worldwide, indium has been labeled a critical metal
or rare metal by states and members of industry (Werner, Mudd, and Jowitt 2017, 939). Although indium had been
used industrially since World War II as a coating for bearings in high-performance aircraft engines (Jorgenson and
George 2005, 2), the demand for indium has increased exponentially with the advent, and now generalized use of,
LCD screens over the past two decades. Indium, then, is in every electronic device that has a flat screen (laptops,
smartphones, televisions), and it is because of this that it has become so essential to world commodity production.
In Bolivia, indium has been identified in tin-polymetallic veins and is most commonly associated with zinc
concentrates (Sphalerite-zinc sulfide) but also with tin and silver sulfides (Ishihara, Murakami, and Marquez-Zavalia
2011, 190). According to a 2017 study that analyzed worldwide indium deposits, Bolivia ranked first in terms of its
share of all deposits, housing 20% of the total, while China came in second with 18% (Werner, Mudd, and Jowitt
2017, 944–45). But, whereas Chinese indium sources are believed to be of “low quality” (lower grade), Bolivia’s
indium reserves are believed to contain not only low quality, but medium, and high-quality deposits, the only
country to have a distribution of this kind (Werner, Mudd, and Jowitt 2017, Figure 3a). So, not only does Bolivia
have the most important indium deposits in the world but the quality of indium deposits is also higher. According to
sampling collected by Ishihara, Murakami, and Marquez-Zavalia (2011), the deposits with the highest concentration
of indium per ton are those in the Cerro Rico de Potosí mines and neighboring Huari Huari mines. The authors go
so far as to argue that the Cerro Rico de Potosí deposits, if sourcing mechanisms were available, is likely “the largest
indium deposit” in the world (Ishihara, Murakami, and Marquez-Zavalia 2011, 191). The deposits in the Huari Huari
and Cerro Rico de Potosí mines are said to be the main reason for the twelve thousand tons of indium estimated to
account for Bolivia’s indium reserves. At 2016’s global total indium metal production capacity (including reclaim),
this means the reserves from Bolivia alone could provide enough supply for seven and a half years (Duan et al. 2016,
87, Figure 1a).
Based on the consensus in the geological literature about Bolivia’s role as a major source of indium, and the
evidence suggesting that the mines in Potosí are perhaps the most important single source historically, I expected
the knowledge of indium production to be commonplace among producers and buyers in Potosí. When I began
fieldwork at the mines of the Cerro Rico de Potosí in 2016, indium was on my mind.
In this article, I ask, how is it that indium can be “from Bolivia” but not “produced in” Bolivia? What does this
tell us about how contemporary commodity markets are organized? This article contributes to past and current
discussions in economic anthropology about value and commodity production in contemporary capitalism (see,
e.g., Ferry 2011; Tsing 2015; Walsh 2010). Indium, like other highly demanded critical and rare earth metals,
is an important component in the majority of today’s information technology commodities. Asking under what
conditions accumulation occurs for these commodities can reveal the ways in which supply chains facilitate certain
forms of exploitation (Tsing 2009).

Penalizing impurities: Small-scale production at the world’s most important indium

sources
I sit and watch Rene attentively, desperately trying to mimic his gestures and see what his eyes see, what his hands feel.
I don’t want to make his work any harder by making him keep teaching me, but it is hard to notice the difference in

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K. Francescone

Figure 1 Pallando, Cooperativa Minera Unificada, Candelaria Bajo.

the minerals he is describing. Rene, his wife, his daughter, and I have been sitting for about twenty minutes pallando
(concentrating by hand) the mineral he has just brought out of the mine from a week’s work (Figure 1). He plans
on selling it to one of the mills nearby but wants to purify the grades first because he’ll “get better prices that way”
(personal communication, January 16, 2017, Candelaria Baja, Potosí). He lifts up the small sledgehammer he holds
in his hand and, using its weight and his strength as momentum, brings the head down precisely onto the large
piece of complejo (a mineral compound containing zinc, silver, tin, and lead) along the mineral he has identified
and wants to separate from the caja (garbage). The rock splits along the vein, crumbling under the pressure and
leaving larger chunks alongside tiny pebbles and dust. “See?” he asks me, gesturing to the sparkled purplish gray
insides that have become visible in this manipulation. He runs his finger along the rough surface, clearly satisfied
with his work. “This is zinc, and this darkness here, see the dark gray-black color, this tells us it is of good grade.”
Rene is a partner of the Cooperativa Minera Unificada, one the of the twenty-seven active small-scale mining
organizations currently producing some combination of silver, zinc, tin, and lead concentrates in the colonial-era
mines of the Cerro Rico de Potosí mountain in Bolivia. An estimated ten thousand miners journey into the mines
every day. The mines are all small scale, and many operate using manual and semimanual extraction techniques akin
to colonial times (see Michard 2008; Nogales and Collque 2014). Some mines have mechanized their production,
using pneumatic drills to extract slightly larger quantities of ore. These slightly mechanized mines still depend on
an extensive deployment of labor to clean and ready work areas, extract the mineral from the mine on rail carts, and
load mineral onto trucks for transport.3 It is important to note, as others have, that labor conditions within these
cooperatives are extremely precarious. Workers do not have generalized access to health insurance; they are not
unionized; and working conditions are quite dangerous, with accidents and death being quite common (see Absi
2005; Francescone and Diaz 2013; Poveda 2014).

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 Tracing Indium Production

Miners like Rene depend on the skills and knowledge they acquire over time from other miners, family members,
and friends, while working first as apprentices in the cooperative mines. Toward the end of the 1980s, a slew of
economic, political, and social policies and factors forced miners to renovate their knowledge of the mining they
had been doing for decades (Francescone 2016). The international market for tin collapsed, and the state mining
company COMIBOL was privatized, which triggered the closure of the central mineral commercialization bank,
BAMIN, in 1990, and the subsequent deregulation of mineral commercialization (Solíz Rada 2001). Production
shifted from tin to polymetallic (silver, zinc, tin, and lead) at the end of the 1980s, and as a result, miners have had
to learn, like their ancestors before them, how to identify silver as well as other minerals like zinc and lead by their
color, smell, touch, and weight.
For nearly sixteen months, I followed small-scale producers like Rene as they worked in the mine, readied their
production for sale, and sold their production to other private buyers or mills in the city. During this time, I only met
one miner who had heard of indium, and he had acquired this knowledge under quite exceptional circumstances.
The remainder of miners I encountered thought that I was making some sort of joke or had no idea what I was
talking about when I asked if they produced indium, because indium translates in Spanish as a homograph and
homonym of “Indian” (indio). This is likely due to the geological composition of indium itself. Unlike zinc, silver,
lead, and tin, indium is not visible to the human eye, because its distribution in zinc concentrates is minimal
(Schwarz-Schampera and Herzig 2002). Using inferred deposit sample information from Ishihara, Murakami, and
Marquez-Zavalia (2011), it can be estimated that only 1.2 grams of indium per every 1 kilogram of zinc concentrate
is found in the Cerro Rico’s deposits, and these are considered some of the richest deposits in the world (just 0.0012%
of the overall mass).
Despite the fact that minerals and metals provide the foundation for the majority of commodities we consume
on a global scale, raw materials (perhaps due to their perceived mundane nature) are seldom studied as sites
of commodity formation or contestation (Appadurai 1986). Anthropologists who study minerals as objects of
contested forms of value have tended to focus their attention on more enigmatic mineral specimens (Ferry 2014) or
on gemstones (for the case of emeralds, see Brazeal 2017; for the case of sapphires, see Walsh 2010). Anthropologists
don’t write about raw resources, perhaps, because it is assumed that we have nothing to learn from them.4
I, too, initially assumed that indium was a valuable site of ethnographic inquiry owing to its claim to “newness.”
Indium, as I have already noted, although being around as a commodity since World War II, has become a critical
commodity as of late. What I realized as I began to understand how its commodity chain worked, though, was
that indium obfuscated as much as it revealed about global commodity chains in general. In following indium to
the mines in Potosí, I realized that I would have to focus my attention on what I perceived to be mundane raw
materials: complejo, or polymetallic deposits. Indeed, if miners don’t know indium, they do know zinc. And zinc,
more than indium, was the object that linked miners to international markets.
Miners, despite not knowing indium, know the contents of their mineral production intimately. The energy they
expend, the risks they incur, and the knowledge they gain all inform their experience with producing and selling
complejo to private buyers in Potosí. They often complain that the selling conditions have recently worsened. Buyers,
they note, are paying less and demanding more, putting pressure on their already tight margins.
Don Silvio, a partner working out of the Española mine in the mountain, was frustrated when I ran into him at
his mine. He had just walked around to four or five mills and traders in the city, and none of them wanted to buy
his complejo. The grade, he said, was considered too low for purchase, and the mills were only willing to buy it at
prices much lower than what he was offering. If he sold at the price they were asking for, he would be operating at
a loss. He said,

I know this is good mineral, you saw it, those sacks were pure, pure silver. The grade should be at least 5.5 maybe
6, but they are telling me it is only 3! Can you believe it? I have been doing this my whole life, and my father taught

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K. Francescone

me right! They are trying to rip me off, but I would rather it sit here than sell at those prices, 900 bolivianos5 for
two weeks work. I can’t even feed my family for that. (Don Silvio, personal communication, February 21, 2017,
Cooperativa Central Mixto, Española, Potosí)

When producers are ready to sell, they take samples of their production to a third-party lab in the city to have the
grade verified. Despite the fact that miners can and are often obliged by mills to sample their production chemically
in privately owned laboratories around the city, it is essential that miners know their mineral prior to submitting
to the lab-analysis process. Since the privatization of the BAMIN, miners have depended on their sense of metal
grade content in their production in order, according to Rene, to not be “taken advantage of by buyers who are only
looking for ways to squeeze us” (personal communication, January 16, 2017, Candelaria Baja, Potosí). Knowing
one’s grade prior to submitting to analysis, then, often assists miners in recognizing if a mill is not being honest but
does not always protect them from “false testing” in the laboratories believed by miners to be clandestinely owned
by mills.
These days, however, small-scale miners have very little room to negotiate. Mills and buyers are constantly
telling miners that their product is basura (garbage), a point of conflict between miners who are convinced their
production is worth more (especially because of the sacrifice it means for them) than buyers are willing to pay.
Their frustrations are aggravated when they receive their payout stubs from mills at the point of transaction. One
afternoon, I was sitting with Miguel, a second-generation miner, outside of his mine as he showed me his payout
stubs from the mill where he had sold his production. Miguel was trying to explain the way the transaction works
between buyer and seller. He kept saying to me, “Lead doesn’t count though” as I kept trying to figure out the
calculations. Exacerbated, he said,

We are forced to regalar [give away, also used when referring to gifts] some of our production every time we bring
the product to market. Mills will only compensate us for two of the minerals in our complejo, since they say that
it means our production isn’t pure. They penalize us for any complejo that has more than two minerals. (Miguel,
personal communication, December 7, 2017, Candelaria Baja, Potosí)

As I didn’t really understand, I responded, “But complejo always has lead, silver, and zinc, and sometimes even tin,
doesn’t it?” “Yes,” he responded, “but that is precisely the problem. They want pure grades. They won’t pay us for
more than two.” When I asked mill operators about this, they blamed international trading companies who were
buying the milled concentrates as they came out of the mill for shipment overseas.
When miners sell their complejo to either a buyer or a mill in the city, that complejo is sent to a mill for processing.
Mills concentrate complejo first by combining production from several sources from several mines around the
department. This is done to improve the overall grade of the concentrates being produced by mixing overall
lower-grade with higher-grade inputs. Then the complejo is submitted to the chemical separation process, which
uses different chemicals depending on what is being “purified” (in the case of zinc, copper sulfate is commonly used
in the mills in Potosí) in the flotation process (Figure 2). After flotation, what is left is a product called concentrado
(concentrate), which results as a purer form of the dominant mineral, most commonly silver or zinc (but it still
contains by-products of the other minerals, but at lower percentages). That concentrate is then sold or exported
directly to international traders or smelters, who will further purify it (Figure 3).
This mixing process contributes to the relative anonymity of the source of a particular batch of concentrate
production. When I would ask mill operators where the feeds were from, they would often respond, “From many
mines,” or they would give me a list of possible productive centers. Mill operators try to combine what they perceive
as better with worse grades (more with less pure) because they are forced to improve their production.
But mill owners also complain about the perception of their production with respect to international buyers.
Just like the miners with whom they negotiate lower prices, Bolivian mill owners complain of penalties imposed on

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Figure 2 El proceso químico (the chemical process), anonymous mill, Pampa Ingenio, Potosí.

Figure 3 Simplified complejo commodity chain in Potosí.

them by international trading companies who also imply their production is garbage. According to one mill’s buyer,
Sergio,

multinationals [trading companies] penalize us for our concentrates due to their impurities since we don’t have
the technology to purify our grades any more than we already are. It would require much larger investment and
we simply don’t have the capital. (personal communication, May 10, 2017, Porco)

The zinc commodity chain in Potosí, according to those directly involved in it, operates within a difficult
environment, given that miners and Bolivian mills are forced to compete against international capital. Foreign
companies, according to mills, penalize mill owners for poor grade quality, and this, in turn, impacts the way
mill owners and buyers further discount the production of miners from their mines. Producers, having the most

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K. Francescone

“impure” product (because the goal is purification), are penalized based on the more secondary and tertiary mineral
content their complejo has.
Some mills do not seem to know that their production may contain some indium. When I asked a mill owner
about the possibility of his zinc concentrates containing indium, he was surprised and said that he would test
for indium the next time he assessed it. But he also noted that he wasn’t really surprised that this might be the
case. Daniel, a mill owner, was frustrated with recent unfavorable sales contracts he signed with an international
commodity trader that had argued that the concentrate qualities were worsening in the city and, as a result, the mill
would be penalized accordingly. Aggravated, he noted,

If our concentrates are of such terrible quality, why then is Glencore currently buying all the zinc they can from
the mines in the Cerro Rico like crazy? We don’t even want to buy mineral from the Cerro anymore, the grade
is too low, its basura, we prefer to travel further to get better inputs for our plants. But they are buying it and
shipping it, which is obviously more expensive ... and, its zinc we believe to be of much poorer quality. We don’t
understand what they see in it. (Daniel, personal communication, May 15, 2017, Potosí)

Miners and mill owners alike do not know much about indium-bearing minerals or concentrates. From their
perspective, due to supposed impurities of their production, they are forced to negotiate sale prices in an adverse
climate and are penalized accordingly. The rift that occurs, though, between Bolivian producers and international
indium metal markets, manifests itself as one based on a different form of knowledge, an abstract form. Despite
the fact that they know their production, they don’t know about indium. Bolivian producers and buyers are at a
disadvantage when bringing their product to market, a disadvantage that is exploited, as we will see in the next
section, by international companies involved in the indium supply chain.

Situating indium: Differentiating markets from deposits

Indium production statistics account for global primary production of indium metal, which is a refined product
of a smelting process that involves processing zinc concentrate feeds known to contain indium. Just like other
metals, indium requires refining to exist independently of the mineral compound within which it is embedded
(see Figure 4). Workers at zinc and other refineries work to separate and purify indium, gallium, and other rare
metals that appear in tandem with zinc.
China, the Republic of Korea, Canada, and Japan are the four principal primary producers of indium metal
(Tolcin 2017, 35.2). In 2016, China was the top producer, producing 44% of the global supply, whereas South Korea
produced 30% of the global supply, making the two countries responsible for three-quarters of the world supply
(Werner, Mudd, and Jowitt 2017, 945). At present, Bolivia does not have a single zinc smelter. All of Bolivia’s zinc
production gets exported as zinc concentrates as feed for zinc refineries overseas (Ministerio de Minería 2015).
As early as 1975, the state mining company COMIBOL developed plans to construct a zinc refinery with the
capacity to extract value-added by-products (including indium) in order to diversify the mining economy, which

Figure 4 Indium metal production process.

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 Tracing Indium Production

was dependent on the volatile tin economy (Sandoval 1975, 20). But, following the privatization of the state mining
company in 1985, industrial underground unionized miners were replaced by the small-scale artisanal miners
known today as cooperative miners, and the plans for diversifying production by moving into refining were buried.
If, according to the indium commodity chain, Bolivia is not a producer of the metal, why, then, is there an
insistence on Bolivia’s importance for world indium markets? In 2006, shortly after the election of left-leaning
president Evo Morales, metal market publications published several press releases about the threat Morales posed
to indium supply levels. According to Mark Shaw (2006) of Metal Bulletin, producers and traders alike were
“concerned” about the possible nationalization of the country’s mines and the impact that would have on their
supply levels. One indium producer, he notes, worried that “renationalisation of the mining industry” would “make
a huge difference to indium supply. It’s one of the world’s largest concentrate suppliers,” whereas another US trader
worried that “the best indium concentrates come out of Bolivia. I can think of a few people who rely on Bolivian
concentrates. This would be a huge problem if [renationalisation] happens” (Shaw 2006).
Indium refineries depend on supply from indium-bearing zinc concentrates as feed for their operations, since
many refineries do not source their own production. This is particularly true with respect to Korean production, as
the country is listed as having insignificant deposits inferred to contain indium (Werner, Mudd, and Jowitt 2017,
945). In fact, in 2013, the country was believed to source its indium primarily from Bolivia, merely supplementing its
production with locally sourced production (Tolcin 2016). Bolivia, then, matters for discussions of the international
indium market because it has an integral position within the metal’s global supply chain—so much so that any
perceived threat to concentrate production causes a panic among international traders and producers.
No data are available on the exports of zinc concentrates from the Cerro Rico mines that end up finding their way
to indium refining mills overseas.6 We do know that Korea Zinc Metals (KZ), the principal indium refiner in South
Korea, processes zinc concentrates from its mill in Potosí. Miners are always mentioning that the “Koreans are the
worst buyers,” since many have had a negative experience when attempting to sell their production at the KZ mill.
One miner commented that, after agreeing on a price with a KZ representative, he transported his production to the
mill. At the door, the buyer refused to pay the prearranged price, and the miner, forced with either assuming the cost
of transport or taking the lower price, chose the latter, since his “margins were too small to pay for transportation
twice” (personal communication, November 16, 2017, Potosí). Producers feel the squeeze international buyers are
placing on them and yet are nearly powerless to do much about it. For companies like KZ, however, the lack of
knowledge about the quality and content of zinc concentrates in Bolivia is beneficial. They are able to secure feeds
for their plants at a lower cost. And for them, this makes good economic sense, since, according to the USGS, “Korea
Zinc is a main importer of Bolivian zinc concentrates to be refined in their Onsan plant” (Tolcin 2016, 35.3). The
Onsan plant is the largest indium refinery in Korea and one of the most important in the world.
Another case in point is the transnational mining giant Glencore-Xtrata (GX). This company has several
operating subsidiaries in Potosí and around the country (Sinchi Wayra, Illapa, Sinchi Metals). The company
produces zinc, lead, and tin concentrates at its five Bolivian mines and commercializes production, miners informed
me, through another subsidiary from mines in the Cerro Rico and Huari Huari, inferred to contain indium.
According to Amy Tolcin (2017, 35.2) of the USGS, GX’s Bolivian subsidiary “was a significant producer of
indium-bearing concentrates which were exported and produced elsewhere,” despite the fact that it neither reported
production nor paid royalties on indium. Where that “elsewhere” is, and how concentrates get there, is murky
due to the lack of transparent information about refinery feed sourcing and trading. GX currently has at least
two zinc refineries with the capacity to produce indium metal: the Kazzinc Ust–Kamenogorsk Metallurgical
Complex (Kazakhstan; Glencore is the majority shareholder) and the Kidd Creek Refinery (Timmons, Canada).
Both refineries depend on zinc concentrates produced locally at adjoining mines as well as externally sourced feed.
According to Glencore, their future success in commodity trading and production would be due to their “uniquely

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diversified structure by commodity and geography,” which includes “major low-cost supply positions in copper,
zinc, nickel and cobalt” (Glencore 2016, 2). These low-cost zinc supply positions include the producers in Potosí.
In particular, this has meant substantial financial success for GX. According to the USGS “Bolivian Mineral
Yearbook,” GX’s Bolivian subsidiary Sinchi Wayra had an estimated indium production capacity of 52.5 tons at its
Bolivian mines in 2013. If we use average New York dealer prices for this same year of US$576/kg (Tolcin 2013,
74), the value of the indium produced by this company alone was US$30 million.7 Since indium is not recognized
as an export of the company officially, the company did not pay royalties or taxes in Bolivia, a point raised to me
repeatedly by various Bolivian government officials.
Transnational companies producing and trading zinc-and-indium-containing minerals benefit from the power
imbalances in the uneven relationships they maintain as buyers with small-scale producers. But they also benefit
from appropriating the previous labor contained in zinc concentrates from which the production of indium will
be completed. This is rendered possible because of a different form of knowledge that recognizes the existence of
indium in those concentrates. Companies who are buying poor-quality zinc are doing so not only for their zinc
commodity business trading but also precisely because they know it has more potential value than they are willing
to admit officially. As one market report notes, “as a byproduct, indium benefits from sharing some production costs
with its associated main product. Thus, costs of producing indium as a byproduct are undoubtedly lower than if it
were produced by itself” (Lokanc, Eggert, and Redlinger 2015, iv). Companies, then, “share” the costs with local
producers, without sharing the gains. For producers and mills in Potosí, by-products are considered impurities
and penalized accordingly. But for companies involved in indium production, by-products contribute to making
indium refining cheaper and thus more profitable. A loss in one end of the chain is converted into a gain in the
other. Companies like GX know the potential of the zinc concentrates they trade in Bolivia; otherwise, as Daniel
notes, they wouldn’t be buying “garbage like crazy.” Because producers aren’t able to see indium and mills don’t
have the capacity to process it, companies are not then required to pay for something that “doesn’t exist.”
Based on fieldwork she completed in Indonesia, Anna Tsing (2000) describes a process of performative spectacle
as junior mining company Bre-X sought to create a world-class gold deposit. The creation of a deposit to generate
investor interest and investment was key to what she calls the “economy of appearances.” Bre-X claimed that
significant gold was present to push prices up. In the case of indium deposits in Potosí, companies engage in
performative speculation through their denial of the potential of deposits, to push prices down. Both performances
have similar outcomes. Companies accumulate significant wealth, and in the case of Potosí, this is at the expense of
miners’ hard work and sacrifice. But what is being denied in this process? Is it indium, or something else?

Salvage accumulation: The “gift” in commodity supply chains

Enrique and I were tailing the transport truck in his Toyota Hilux as it moved his complejo from his mine to the mill.
The truck slowly crawled along the narrow mine roads carved into the mountain as gusts of wind blew powdered
dust off the load and into the air. Sighing, Enrique glanced over at me. “The mineral,” he said, “gets into everything.
We work and breathe it in, it’s in our lungs, in our skin, our children breathe in the dust. ... And yet, we need zinc
to build things. This truck has zinc in it, my phone has zinc in it, the plant where the complejo will be processed has
zinc in its machines.” He trailed off, watching intently as the truck in front of us teetered precariously around a sharp
curve in the road. “Zinc is in everything,” I responded, “but, is it worth the sacrifice?” Slowing down to pull into
the mill, he grinned. “Zinc is in us, and we are in zinc” (personal communication, November 30, 2017, Guadalupe,
Porco).
Since Arjun Appadurai (1986) edited the collected volume of The Social Life of Things, economic anthropology
has taken a specific interest in commodities and the various ways they are valued. Appadurai, “updating” Marx’s
conception of the commodity with that of Georg Simmel’s, argued that labor was not the thing that determined an

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object’s valuation; rather, it was the social relationship within which it becomes a commodity. Exchange, he argued,
was the critical point when a commodity became a commodity but also gained value. Igor Kopytoff, in the same
volume, argued that commodities “become” under certain specific social histories, and so commoditization is a
process of becoming and unbecoming that happens through its exchange with money or other goods. The move
to studying things as they are “exchanged” (Appadurai 1986) or “consumed” (see Miller 1995) provoked a move
away from production and thus labor in economic anthropology, since with this turn came the idea that “value”
didn’t only represent the labor embodied in a product but could include people’s conceptions, sentiments, and
interactions with things as cultural “values.” Earlier economic anthropologists and ethnohistorians had positioned
the commodity as produced within broader circuits of colonial and capitalist markets (see Mintz 1985; Nash 1979),
but with this shift away from production to exchange and consumption, labor, and its articulation within capitalist
systems and, with it, the labor theory of value (Hart 2007) was lost.
Most recently, Anna Tsing (2015, 122–28), in The Mushroom at the End of the World, notes that matsutake
mushrooms are only truly commodities at a particular moment in the chain, when “they spend a few hours as fully
alienated commodities” in the warehouses and on the plane on their way to markets in Japan. At all other points
in the chain, she says that the mushrooms begin as and are transformed into “gifts” for pickers (producers) and for
consumers. These “gifts,” the noncapitalist forms of commodity production, are translated into capitalist value in
the exchange process, which contribute to capitalist accumulation, a process she calls “salvage accumulation.” But
Tsing (2015, 122), also drawing influence like her forbearers from Marx, sees the commodity as “becoming” as a
result of what she calls “alienation”: the ripping of objects from their lifeworld. Mushrooms are not commodities
until thrust into the exchange relationship where they are ripped from their life worlds and their producers.
On one level, this is certainly what happens in Potosí. The further zinc moves away from the mines, the
more it morphs (with the help of labor, of course) into a distinct and indiscernible alienated commodity. And,
small-scale miners, like Tsing’s pickers, are not wage-laborers in the traditional sense. But commodification, or
economic valuation, to put it another way, cannot only be relegated to an immediate market exchange relationship
(Marx 1990). When zinc concentrates arrive at overseas mills to be processed, they are not arriving tabula rasa.
Miners, using tools and machines composed of other materials, expended their energy and labor to extract
those polymetallic concentrates earlier on. Local mills processed and purified them. Even if you don’t see these
relationships at the immediate point of exchange, it does not imply that they do not contribute to a commodity’s
valuation.
These conceptions of commodities, then, fail to recognize the extent to which Marx’s conception of the
commodity-as-raw-material also always included an element of what he referred to as “past labor” (in Capital) or
“dead labor” (in the Grundrisse). Past labor/dead labor recognized the social character of labor which had gone into
producing the previous commodities to be consumed productively as “raw materials,” which blended or disappeared
in the new product.8 It contributes, with its activation through living labor, to the valorization of commodities (see
Marx 1990). Capitalists always benefited, especially with raw material for industrial processes, from the dead labor
embodied already in the object. It wasn’t, then, simply exchange that created value but the embodied labor within
each commodity, which, when combined with living labor, contributed to producing new value. This is particularly
relevant for the “critical metals” and “rare earth metals,” raw materials so essential to the production of today’s
electronics. Indium, gallium, tantalum, and others all need to be extracted from the ground before they are refined
into their metal forms. How and where that happens becomes relevant for their valorization (Smith 2011).9 The past
labor of miners in Potosí and the tools, machines, and energy expelled in extracting polymetallic minerals at their
mines contribute to the value of indium. The fact that the miner with whom I opened this article perceived himself as
being in the tablet, and Enrique’s emphasis on Bolivian miners’ gift to the world, emphasizes this very idea. Miners
are in the products they extract from the mines, and those products are transformed into other consumable goods,
but they (their labor) still remain. Miners do not necessarily have to know indium to know that the zinc and other

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K. Francescone

minerals they produce with their labor end up in a commodity they may or may not be able to purchase later. Miners
see themselves reflected in the screens of tablets and cell phones because their social labor went into producing those
objects, despite the fact that their labor was not paid for.
Companies like GX and KZ are well aware of the potentiality of the “garbage deposits” they buy for next to
nothing in places like Bolivia. Part of the “dramatic performance” (Tsing 2000, 118) companies construct is indeed
making the product of Potosí miners appear less valuable than what it is. This enables them to push prices of
the zinc concentrates they buy down and bring their profit margins up. But they do not only deny that indium
exists; they deny the labor in which small-scale producers and mill operators engage in Potosí, since they do
not pay for it.10 If, indeed, indium “gift” production exists at the mines in Potosí, it is not because the gift is for
miners themselves or for the consumers of cell phones or televisions. The gift is their labor, and the recipients of
that gift are the transnational mining companies who knowingly appropriate it. Expanding our understanding of
commodities and their valorization to include dead/past labor is essential for understanding how contemporary
capitalist markets work.

Acknowledgments
The research for this article was carried out thanks to a Michael Smith Foreign Travel Supplement grant from the Social Sciences and
Research Council of Canada. I also received a Travel Bursary to present a portion of this research at the American Anthropological
Association’s (AAA) annual meeting in Washington, DC, in 2017 from Carleton University. Thank you to Graciela Baltazar for her
research assistance in Potosí and to Vladimir Diaz-Cuellar (York University), Danielle DiNovelli-Lang (Carleton University), and two
anonymous reviewers for their invaluable contributions on earlier drafts. My sincerest appreciation to the miners in Potosí who generously
offered their time to assist me with this project.

Notes
1 In June 2018, a colleague of mine sent me a reference to an article published by Zapata Rosso (2017) that examines the political–economic aspects of
the Bolivian indium chain. This article was published just shortly before my paper was presented at the AAA’s annual conference in Washington, DC. It is
an excellent resource for anyone looking to learn more about this topic.
2 The research for this article comes from research and field visits I completed while working as a researcher at CEDIB, at various mines around the country
between 2012 and 2014. Other minor research was completed while working as a consultant for the Center for Mining Promotion (CEPROMIN) in 2015.
The interviews and ethnographic descriptions are derived from extended fieldwork I completed with small-scale cooperative miners in Potosí, Bolivia,
between January 2016 and June 2017. Because producers didn’t identify indium in their production, I had to draw from multiple kinds of information,
including geological studies, global mineral market reports, and archival documents that I obtained with permission from the state mining company’s
(COMIBOL) archive in El Alto, to try to trace indium to the mines.
3 During my fieldwork in 2016, I visited 140 active operational mines in the Cerro Rico de Potosí, which represents approximately 95% of all of the active
mines in the mountain.
4 Appadurai (1986) notes a similar trend when he says that most of the contributions to his volume look at exceptional commodities.
5 Nine hundred bolivianos (Bs) works out to approximately US$130 (6.96 Bs = US$1). The Bolivian minimum wage in 2017 was 2,000 Bs.
6 I requested this information from three separate government institutions during my fieldwork in 2016–17. In the case of two institutions, I was denied on
the basis that mining was a “strategic resource” and that information regarding the sector was restricted. With respect to the third institution, my petitions
were actively avoided and ignored.
7 I am aware that this is a very crude estimate, because shipping and refining costs on zinc concentrates have been estimated to account for approximately
85% of the total price value (Lokanc, Eggert, and Redlinger 2015, 21). However, because Glencore maintains control over key parts of the supply chain
and refineries (Glencore fixes smelting costs [refining costs] on a yearly basis with Teck Resources, KZ, and Nystar), and because there are no transparent
reporting mechanisms from which to work, I believe the figure I present is, at the very least, illustrative of what is at stake.
8 Geographer Andrea Marston (2017) presented a thought-provoking paper at the AAA’s annual conference in Washington, DC, on small-scale miners’
perceptions of dead labor in the oxidized industrial waste at the mines in Llallagua, Bolivia. Inspired by her presentation, I returned to Marx for this
commodity conundrum.
9 Anthropologist James Smith (2017) presented an interesting case at the AAA’s annual conference in Washington, DC. He demonstrated how artisanal 3 T
producers (tin, tungsten, and tantalum) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are being forcibly removed from deposits to enable transnational mining
companies unfettered access to the deposits. This was done under the guise of enabling “conflict-free production” (see also Smith 2011).

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10 On a related note, recent “responsible supplier” initiatives that companies like Apple are producing annually as a way of minimizing “questionable
sourcing” for their electronics produce information on smelters and not mine sources. These, then, perpetuate this tendency to deny labor that goes into
getting the raw material feeds out of the ground and to the plant.

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