2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic heory 7 (3): 159–183 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Mareike Winchell. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau7.3.011 Economies of obligation Patronage as relational wealth in Bolivian gold mining Mareike W inchell, University of Chicago Recent scholarship in anthropology offers critical attention to inequality as a constitutive feature of social life to which specific legal, cultural, and religious traditions supply diverging answers. Drawing upon these debates, this article explores the ways that Quechua- and Spanish-speaking subjects in the Bolivian province of Ayopaya imagine, inhabit, and strive to address inequalities stemming from the region’s history of labor violence. While Ayopaya’s history of hacienda servitude lives on in contemporary structures of racialized disparity, I argue that it also conditions particular traditions of exchange that rural groups draw from in order to contest a new gold mining economy. Against more pessimistic accounts of late capitalism as a moment of inexorable abandonment, particularly for indigenous groups, I query the tenacity of obligation and probe its political possibilities as a practice of claim making (and a scholarly heuristic) by which to expose the ethical refusals on which “free” exchange relies. Keywords: inequality, labor, indigeneity, ethics, extractivism, value, circulation To the grating rhythm of an air compressor located just outside the building, René recounts how he came to own the Ayopaya gold mine. It is April 3, 2010, and René and I are seated in the living quarters of his gold processing plant—a cement build- ing perched precariously above the winding Sacambaya River in the rural province of Ayopaya, Bolivia. René is in his late thirties, descending from a wealthy criollo (white) family in the eastern Bolivian city of Santa Cruz. In 2002 he and his cous- ins bought the mine from Fabio Rodriguez, the nephew of an influential hacienda patrón or owner of a landed agrarian estate. During subsequent years, Fabio ad- vised the fledgling entrepreneurs on their mining affairs. Yet he also used his famil- ial status to intimidate the young men, warning them of the dangers of working in This content downloaded from 162.234.010.204 on April 30, 2018 09:44:31 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).