Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T23:24:30.706Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

No Ethnographic Playground: Mining Projects and Anthropological Politics. A Review Essay

Review products

GolubAlex. Leviathans at the Gold Mine: Creating Indigenous and Corporate Actors in Papua New Guinea. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
KirschStuart. Mining Capitalism: The Relationship between Corporations and Their Critics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.
RajakDinah. In Good Company: An Anatomy of Corporate Social Responsibility. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.

Show more reviewed productsShow more reviewed products

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2016

Marina Welker
Marina Welker*
Affiliation:
Anthropology, Cornell University
*
[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

“Mining is no ethnographic playground,” Chris Ballard and Glenn Banks warned in their 2003 review of the anthropology of mining. The deep conflicts that characterize the industry find echoes in “a parallel war of sorts …waged within the discipline about the nature and scope of appropriate forms of engagement” (p. 289). This review essay examines how authors of recent ethnographic studies of large-scale, capital-intensive mining projects in Papua New Guinea, South Africa, and the United States have politically positioned themselves as researchers, and the insights into mining companies that derive from these situated perspectives.

Type
CSSH Discussion
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 58 , Issue 2 , April 2016 , pp. 577 - 586
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Ballard, Chris, and Banks, Glenn. 2003. Resource Wars: The Anthropology of Mining. Annual Review of Anthropology 32: 287–313.Google Scholar
Fortun, Kim. 2001. Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Furnivall, J. S. 1991. The Fashioning of Leviathan: The Beginnings of British Rule in Burma. Canberra: Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University.Google Scholar
Jacka, Jerry K. 2015. Alchemy in the Rain Forest: Politics, Ecology, and Resilience in a New Guinea Mining Area. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Kirsch, Stuart. 2006. Reverse Anthropology: Indigenous Analysis of Social and Environmental Relations in New Guinea. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
LeCain, Timothy J. 2009. Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines that Wired America and Scarred the Planet. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Li, Fabiana. 2015. Unearthing Conflict: Corporate Mining, Activism, and Expertise in Peru. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Rogers, Douglas. 2012. The Materiality of the Corporation: Oil, Gas, and Corporate Social Technologies in the Remaking of a Russian Region. American Ethnologist 39, 2: 284–96.Google Scholar
Rogers, Douglas. 2015. Oil and Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 365–80.Google Scholar
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Welker, Marina. 2014. Enacting the Corporation: An American Mining Firm in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar