Vikki Bell, The Art of Post-Dictatorship: Ethics and Aesthetics in Transitional Argentina (Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. xvi + 170, £75.00, hb.
how social and cultural capital (masculinity, connoisseurship, middle-class habitus and fluency in English) are essential to succeeding in the mineral marketplace. These processes, like those that make the minerals themselves valuable, exploit differences between people, specifically between Mexican and US actors. While the insights of transnational appropriation of knowledge and the production of value unveiled in this text are provocative and compelling, it seems to lack some depth on how monopoly on value is developed and maintained between the two nations. The reader may feel that more needs to be included on the backdrop of the wider political and economic context that has facilitated this discrepancy in the power to define what is valuable and what is not. Most notably, very little explicit discussion on the more recent neoliberal restructuring of the economy exists, which has arguably determined many of the imbalances in power analysed in the book: the infiltration of foreign mining companies, lack of jobs and surplus labour, an increasingly powerful transnational corporate class of actors, as well as the free markets, legal channels, technology and information systems that are both controlled by and that bolster wider US power. The analytical frame of actor-network theory also falls short of giving the reader a real sense of the materials as actants and how they transcend an existence as categories constructed by certain powerful humans, as is emphasised throughout the book. One feels that ethnographic data on materiality and value might need to be further expounded in order to bring such approaches to light; these might include more voices on aesthetics and desire, on the social ties and offering to saints, the conflicts within groups (hegemonic or otherwise), and local understandings of the distinction between nature and culture. Doing so might have added to a more detailed description of ‘assemblages’ on the ground and an unpacking of received categories such as inequality (perhaps itself a ‘black box’). Nevertheless, this does not detract from the strength of this unique exploration of minerals and the accompanying power differentials manifest in their value-making.