20 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 26 NO 3, JuNe 2010 Jessica Smith and Frederico Helfgott Jessica Smith has a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research addresses gender and kinship in Wyoming coal-mining families. Her email is Jessica. Mary.Smith@colorado.edu. Federico Helfgott is a PhD candidate in the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan. He is currently doing field and archival research for his dissertation on transformations in labour and community relations in Peru´s mines. His email is federimi@umich.edu. Fig. 1. Most company CSR initiatives focus on agriculture and ranching. This poster at Chalcomayo’s booth at a local fair states: ‘We are committed to working with social responsibility and participating in the sustainable development of communities. Mining and ranching together for development’. Flexibility or exploitation? Corporate social responsibility and the perils of universalization A defining feature of contemporary capitalism is the restructuring of production along the lines of what many have called flexibilization. Since the 1990s, anthropolo- gists such as Emily Martin, Elizabeth Dunn and Sylvia Yanagisako have critiqued this reorganization of the labour process, especially its accompanying shifts in workers’ sense of personhood and the conditions in which they labour. The 1990s, however, were also characterized by the global rise of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement, as executives sought to deflect criticisms of their business practices by presenting their operations as socially and environmentally responsible. In recent years anthropologists have theorized CSR as a key site for the interface between corporations and civil society (Welker 2009) as well as a corporate strategy to neutralize criticism (e.g. Benson and Kirsch 2010). Yet even though these two developments – the flexibilization of labour and the rise of CSR – emerged at about the same time, few scholars and anthropologists have considered them together (see Benson 2008 and Cloud 2007 for two exceptions). In this article, we examine the mining industry in order to explore the potential contradiction between the drive to rationalize labour and reduce the employer’s finan- cial responsibility for the workforce that characterizes contemporary capitalism, on the one hand, and the par- allel pressure on corporations to demonstrate their social responsibility, including their treatment of workers, on the other. We argue that the process of universalization – by which we mean the way in which capital’s interests come to subsume a range of issues raised by production and con- sumption – allows this contradiction to remain latent. In the case of the Peruvian mining industry we examine here, the process of universalization results both from labour’s general loss of visibility and from corporate strat- egies to manage the workforce, impose the requirement of flexibilization, and control the politics of labour. We conclude by suggesting that academics and activists have been influenced by this process in their analyses of the mining industry as a unitary, external force confronting communities. Our analysis focuses on two sites in the Peruvian mining industry. Around the world, sharp criticisms of the social and environmental impacts of mining have prompted the industry’s top transnational executives as well as local managers to formulate CSR policies, practices, discourses and reports. The Peruvian case provides a crucial perspec- tive on this development because the mining industry in Peru has expanded rapidly since the 1990s amidst vocif- erous opposition, with widely reported conflicts in places like Tambogrande and Yanacocha. Most academic investigations of corporate responsi- bility in the mining industry focus on worst-case scenarios such as these, leaving the analysis of so-called success sto- ries to the companies themselves. To address this gap, we selected two mines in Peru with moderately positive rep- utations for responsibility and relatively less conflictive relations with surrounding communities, Colquebamba and Chalcomayo (both pseudonyms). Our justification for focusing on these two sites for this article is twofold. On the one hand, we want to show that the developments we note here are not limited to a single company or site. On the other, this approach allows us to compare two sites in two different cultural areas (central and southern Peru) with different degrees of local mining tradition. Our research involved dozens of formal interviews with com- pany personnel, current and former workers and commu- nity members, as well as informal conversations, visits to production sites, and consultation of written materials. Colquebamba and Chalcomayo Around 1550 individuals work at Colquebamba, a medium-sized underground mine located in the traditional mining heartland of central Peru. The mine produces silver and zinc, and smaller amounts of lead, copper and gold. 1 Though the current company arrived in the last decade, the mine operated under a different administration throughout most of the 20th century, cultivating a strong mining tra- dition in the area. During much of this time local people combined mining work with raising sheep, llamas and alpacas; it is still common to see shepherds guiding herds briskly past tailings dams. Census data indicate that today around 60 per cent of the district’s employment is tied to mining in some way. Others work in commerce, transport and education. Over 10,000 people live in the district, both on small rural ranches called estancias and in the main town, which has boomed since 2005, partly owing to increased mining production. As in many places in Peru, mine properties are interspersed with land belonging to comunidades campesinas (peasant communities) – formal, legally rec- ognized entities representing families that own the land in common but mostly work it separately. These communi- ties increased their landholdings after the agrarian reform of the 1960s dissolved large private estates. The larger of the two peasant communities in the area has around 1400 registered members plus unregis- tered family members. About 140 of its members work at Colquebamba, with others at other local mines. Many community members hire shepherds – both relatives and people from poorer regions – to tend their animals while they work at the mines. While many residents criticize the This research is part of a larger project with Stuart Kirsch, funded by the Center for International Business Education at the University of Michigan. JeSSICA SMITH