Robert J. Pijpers - Mining Encounters: Extractive Industries in an Overheated World

Mining Encounters

Also available:

Overheating:

An Anthropology of Accelerated Change

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Identity Destabilised:

Living in an Overheated World

Edited by Thomas Hylland Eriksen
and Elisabeth Schober

Boomtown:

Runaway Globalisation on the Queensland Coast

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Extractive Industries in
an Overheated World

Edited by
Robert Jan Pijpers and
Thomas Hylland Eriksen

First published 2019 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Robert Jan Pijpers 2019

The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 3837 8 Hardback

ISBN 978 1 7868 0375 7 PDF eBook

ISBN 978 1 7868 0377 1 Kindle eBook

ISBN 978 1 7868 0376 4 EPUB eBook

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1. Introduction: Negotiating the Multiple Edges of Mining Encounters
Robert Jan Pijpers and Thomas Hylland Eriksen

2. From Allegiance to Connection: Structural Injustice, Scholarly Norms and the Anthropological Ethics of Mining Encounters
Alex Golub

3. The Shooting Fields of Porgera Joint Venture: An Exploration of Corporate Power, Reputational Dynamics and Indigenous Agency
Catherine Coumans

4. Rubbish at the Border: A Minefield of Conservation Politics at the Lawa River, Suriname/French Guiana
Sabine Luning and Marjo de Theije

5. Territories of Contestation: Negotiating Mining Concessions in Sierra Leone
Robert Jan Pijpers

6. Drilling Down Comparatively: Resource Histories, Subterranean Unconventional Gas and Diverging Social Responses in Two Australian Regions
Kim de Rijke

7. Coal Trafficking: Reworking National Energy Security via Coal Transport at the North Karanpura Coalfields, India
Patrik Oskarsson and Nikas Kindo

8. Diamonds and Plural Temporalities: Articulating Encounters in the Mines of Sierra Leone
Lorenzo DAngelo

9. Risky Encounters: The Ritual Prevention of Accidents in the Coal Mines of Kazakhstan
Eeva Keskla

When the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant project Overheating: An anthropological history of the early 21st century started in 2012, we the researchers did not anticipate the centrality of mining and the resource industry in the overall project. In the event, virtually all the subprojects, including one by the Principal Investigator (Eriksen), two PhD projects, four postdoctoral projects and altogether 15 ethnographically based MA projects partly funded by Overheating included a mining element, directly or indirectly. The economic boom of the early years of the twenty-first century, the crisis of 20078, the recovery of the subsequent years and the downturn in countries like Australia, Venezuela and Norway from around 2014 were all directly connected to the extractive industries, as is the phenomenal economic growth of certain countries, China being the most obvious example, in this period of accelerated change or overheating. Mining, as it slowly dawned upon us, is key to understanding the momentous changes shaping politics, social identities, economic relations and trade patterns in this turbulent age.

Based on a workshop taking place in Oslo on 2729 April 2015, this book follows previous Overheating publications on knowledge and power, destabilised identities, sustainability and growth, and the different facets of accelerated change in our day and age. Bringing together scholars approaching resource extraction from different perspectives, from the legal to the symbolic, from the environmental to the economic, what holds the contributions to this book together is the ethnographically informed emphasis on what we call the mining encounter, the interface, interaction and interpretations of the different actors and stakeholders brought together in extractive projects. As processes of negotiation within these encounters are placed centre stage, particular attention is drawn to the changing dynamics, the inequalities and the fluidity of extractive practices. In doing so, the various authors in this volume bring to light the tensions, negotiations and disparities between different actors in the extractive industries.

The contributions of the editors and the process leading up to this publication have been funded by the ERC Advanced Grant project Overheating, ERC Grant number 295843. We, the editors, would like to thank the ERC for its belief in our sprawling research project. Moreover, we would like to extend a special thanks to the contributors-cum-workshop participants, and to Pluto Press for their encouragement and support.

Robert Jan Pijpers
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Oslo, 10 February 2018

Whereas the extraction of raw materials has been a human concern in all times, certain periods are more intense than others in this respect. Todays world definitely finds itself in the middle of such a period, with resource booms and busts, taking place in all continents; new extraction sites are developed, closed mines are being reopened, foreign investors compete for leases, millions of people are engaged in artisanal and small-scale mining, and the global trade in resources such as coal, copper and iron ore has grown enormously since the turn of the millennium, not least due to Chinas industrial development and its quest for resources (see, for example, Brautigam 2009; Alder et al. 2009). In the case of Africa, Bryceson and Jnsson (2014: 35) even identify the current era of mineralisation as one of the continents three major mining eras of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, following an era of apartheid mining in Southern Africa and of conflict mineral mining. And indeed, human extraction and consumption of mineral resources have increased steadily since the Industrial Revolution, but never as fast as today.

Within the context of the current expansion of the extractive sector, questions related to unequal economic growth, the local distribution of benefits, development, global commodity chains, taxation, sustainability, livelihoods issues, local resistance and climate change, among others, are becoming more and more pertinent for an understanding of resource extractions multiple effects. After all, the extractive sector (involving both large-scale industrial as well as small-scale artisanal operations) has the allure, capital and power to trigger changes across societal domains: it attracts large numbers of people, either searching for employment in industrial operations or engaging in artisanal mining; it requires, shifts and generates capital, and may contribute to local economic development through spill-over effects; it brings together a variety of stakeholders with different and sometimes opposing interests; (Gamu et al. 2015). Nonetheless, whereas extractions effects are perhaps double-sided, they do not necessarily pose a question of either/or. On the contrary, as Pijpers (2018) argues elsewhere, while being constantly renegotiated by different combinations of actors, the effects of resource extraction, and the rapid changes it may trigger, are fluid and multifaceted, simultaneously accommodating both positive and negative dynamics. A crucial question is, therefore, how different actors position themselves vis--vis each other and negotiate the multiplicity of potential effects of resource extraction.