François-Michel Le Tourneau, *Chercheurs d'or: L'orpaillage clandestin en Guyane française*. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2020, 421 pp. (Paper € 26.00)

French geographer François-Michel Le Tourneau, a specialist on the Amazon region, has written an excellent account of illegal goldmining in Guyane (French Guiana). His emphasis is on *garimpeiros* (miners from Brazil), the special “system” their forebearers developed over the centuries, and the way they have carried its social, technical, and economic organization into the Guianas since the 1990s. A fluent speaker of Brazilian Portuguese (familiar with the argot of the miners from his previous work in Brazil), he joined up, for reasons of his own security, with French military units fighting against illegal mining, yet somehow managed to persuade garimpeiros to sit down for 275 structured interviews as well as hundreds of informal discussions, all across the forested face of Guyane.

Chapter 1 describes the long history of artisanal mining in Brazil and the unique “système garimpeiro” that developed out of it—by 2012 there were some 200,000 garimpeiros active in Brazil. Chapter 2 reviews the rise and decline of the nineteenth-century gold rush, the “boom” in the 1990s, and efforts by the state to eradicate illegal mining, as well as the effects of mining on deforestation (artisanal goldmining accounts for 41 percent of deforestation in the Guianas) and the devastating pollution of Guyane’s rivers by the mercury used by miners to amalgamate particles of gold. There are presently some 15,000–20,000 Brazilian garimpeiros in Guyane and more than 1,000 illegal mining camps. In 2019, the French conducted 1,220 military operations against more than 500 sites and destroyed 5,254 small buildings, 290,000 liters of fuel, 1,092 moto-pumps, and 273 vehicles—but they seized only 9 kilos of gold; these operations cost 70 million euros. (Le Tourneau estimates the annual amount of gold extracted by garimpeiros in Guyane at 5,000–10,000 kilos, worth some 250–500 million euros.) Chapter 3 provides as detailed a primer on the methods of gold extraction (including the massive barges on the rivers) as any reader could desire, augmented, as throughout the book, by numerous photos and diagrams.

Chapters 4 and 6 delve into the economics of gold mining, particularly the logistics of supplying the mining camps. Two towns outside of Guyane furnish the starting points: Albina, on the Suriname side of the Marowijne/Maroni border river, and Oiapoque, on the Brazilian side of the Oyapock border river. The first supplies miners on rivers in western Guyane, the latter is the starting point for eastern Guyane. Prices multiply by 10 or 20 as goods journey upstream. For example, a 200-liter oil drum that sells for 2.5 grams of gold in Albina has 2 grams added to its price (paid to the Maroon canoeman) on the way to the Chinese supermarkets in Ronaldo, a settlement on the Suriname side across from

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Maripasoula, where it sells for 8g, another 10g paid to the specialist who takes it around the French police barrier on the creek, 5g to a Brazilian canoeman who takes it further upstream, and 10-15g to the driver of the quad who takes it from the creek to the mining site, where it sells for 50g—a 20-fold markup. A bottle of beer that costs the equivalent of a half euro in Paramaribo often sells for 12 euros in the mining camps, where one can buy almost anything, from frozen chickens and patent medicines to a night with a sex worker (for the equivalent of €200, compared to €50 in Paramaribo). It turns out that canoemen earn the highest annual income from the gold fields (some €40,000 annually), the average mine boss €34,000, quad drivers €22,000, miners €5,000-10,000, and cooks last at €9,000. Prostitutes average around €15,000 (5.5 times Brazil's minimum wage).

Chapter 5 describes life in the camps, from Evangelical churches to “cabarets” where alcohol and women are available, and from hunting and fishing to gardening and health care. Chapter 7 examines the geographic origins of Guyane’s garimpeiros and explores their life histories: the majority hail from Maranhão, and most are truly transnational, moving between sites in Brazil, Suriname, and Guyane as new opportunities beckon—Le Tourneau compares them, both in their frequent movement and their marginalization vis-à-vis the surrounding society, to Europe’s Romas (Gypsies). Interestingly, almost all illegal miners in Guyane are Brazilian, while in Suriname many of them are Maroons.

The sole (glaring) omission in this remarkably detailed study is the virtual absence of Maroons. While in Suriname, the gold concessions are often held by politicians and their relatives, the majority of those in Guyane, along the Maroni and Lawa, are owned by Aluku Maroons, and it is they who collect the 10 percent revenues from the mines. Apart from this lacuna, *Chercheurs d’or* is pure gold.

Richard Price

Coquina Key FL, U.S.A.

rixsal@gmail.com