Tracing indium production to the mines of the Cerro Rico de Potosí
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I examine the valorization process in the indium commodity chain. The first section of the article looks closely at small‐scale polymetallic production in Potosí. Here I demonstrate how producers and mill operators in Bolivia, because of the nature of the metal, do not know their production contains indium and instead perceive their production to be less valuable. The second section of the article seeks to link Bolivian production to international indium markets. I demonstrate how accumulation occurs along the commodity chain for companies that deny the Bolivian origin of their mill feeds. I conclude with an analysis of the state of the commodity in economic anthropology. I argue, with help from Bolivian miners, that previous and contemporary notions of the commodity have neglected an important part of its composition, what Marx referred to as “dead/past labor.” Incorporating this notion into our understanding of commodities, I argue, can help us understand the way raw material mineral markets function today.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".