Tracing the Veins: Of Copper, Culture, and Community from Butte to Chuquicamata

By Janet L. Finn and Janet L Finn

Book Overview

This tale of two cities-Butte, Montana, and Chuquicamata, Chile-traces the relationship of capitalism and community across cultural, national, and geographic boundaries. Combining social history with ethnography, Janet Finn shows how the development of copper mining set in motion parallel processes involving distinctive constructions of community, class, and gender in the two widely separated but intimately related sites. While the rich veins of copper in the Rockies and the Andes flowed for the giant Anaconda Company, the miners and their families in both places struggled to make a life as well as a living for themselves.

Miner's consumption, a popular name for silicosis, provides a powerful metaphor for the danger, wasting, and loss that penetrated mining life. Finn explores themes of privation and privilege, trust and betrayal, and offers a new model for community studies that links local culture and global capitalism.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520211375
• ISBN13: 9780520211377
• Release Date: August 1998
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 347 Pages
• Weight: 1.02 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Thoroughly researched and written from the heart.

Having grown up in Butte Montana and being very familiar with Ms. Finns work, I cannot say enough about how valuable this book is in terms of telling the long-untold story of women in the mining community.Her intense and thorough research is extraordinary and her heartfelt personal connection to the subjects she deals with make it an engrossing book. I recommend it to all who would understand the universal plight of women creating culture in a society which chose to largely ignore them - a society that could not have existed without them and their heroic efforts.