Precarity has become a dominant paradigm of thinking about the contemporary world within the social sciences. Marginality, exclusion, and scarcity have all become conceptual pillars in framing livelihoods on the informal margins of contemporary capitalism. Yet, prisms of precarity continuously threaten to overdetermine subsistence and material inequalities, closing off distinct ideas of what life is for. This is particularly the case for mobile and itinerant populations whose visions of human well-being elude the confines of wage and employment.
With these existential concerns in mind, this paper will draw on empirical data collected from the goldfields of the Tapajós valley to explore informal livelihoods in the Brazilian Amazon. In doing so. I will elucidate and conceptualize the realities of ‘perambulando’ (wandering) as a cultural practice carried out by garimpeiros (artisanal miners) throughout the region. Itinerant garimpeiros wander between mining sites and regions, as well as between forests and cities. Yet, beyond spatial mobility, miners also wander between work and leisure, between prosperity and poverty, and between delight and despair. Where perambulando is at once an inevitable response to more global uncertainties (fluctuations in resource prices and government policy), it is equally a local practice in forging futures from the forest which sustain sentiments of freedom and agency.
The paper, beyond expounding the existential nuances of perambulando in the Amazon, will attempt to build upon ongoing debates on informal labor within anthropology long dominated by urban-based case studies. In particular, I will seek to use and develop Kathleen Millar’s concept ‘ways of living’ (2018) to reformulate wandering as a rural rebellion against the drudgery of waged labor. Here wandering in search of gold does not simply address economic necessities but opens up the possibilities of life – both luminous and challenging – in ways my informants find hard to leave behind.
