Productive Habitus and Mining: the Case of Marmato, Caldas

Mining activity shares the characteristics of a field, in the sense attributed to the concept by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. This can be observed through a case study in Marmato, in the department of Caldas. 470 years of gold-vein mining have formed a culture tied to beliefs and traditions that influence the degree of rationality in work relationships, work itself, and economic behaviour in general. It is possible that these habita are being broken by the presence of a global agent that has now entered the dispute for gold: multinational companies. This paper uses the concepts of field and habitus to study the dispute between ancestral and industrialised forms of production, and their strategies.