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Mining Encounters

Mining Encounters

Extractive Industries in an Overheated World

Edited by Robert Jan Pijpers and Thomas Hylland Eriksen

How different mining industries across the world affect landscapes, people and politics.
In a fast-changing world, where the extraction of natural resources is key to development, whilst also creating environmental and social disasters, understanding how landscapes, people and politics are shaped by extraction is crucial.

Looking at resource extraction in numerous locations at different stages of development, including North, West and South Africa, India, Kazakhstan and Australia, a broad picture is created, covering coal, natural-gas, gold and cement mining, from corporate to 'artisanal' extraction, from the large to the small scale. The chapters answer the questions: What is ideological about resource extraction? How does extraction transform the physical landscape? And how does the extractive process determine which stakeholders become dominant or marginalised?

Contributing to policy debates, Mining Encounters uncovers the tensions, negotiations and disparities between different actors in the extractive industries, including exploiters and those who benefit or are impoverished by resource exploitation.

Robert Jan Pijpers holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Oslo. His research focuses on the micro-politics of (large-scale) mining in West Africa. He is co-coordinator of both the AEGIS Collaborative Research Group 'Resource Extraction in Africa' and the EASA 'Anthropology of Mining' Network. He is the editor of Mining Encounters: Extractive Industries in an Overheated World (Pluto, 2018).

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and former President of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). He is the author of numerous classics of anthropology, including Small Places, Large Issues, Ethnicity and Nationalism and What is Anthropology?

'By bringing contemporary research on resource extraction into conversations about the overheating of the planet, this accessible collection of essays examines the material, social and ethical consequences of our current habits of production and consumption' - Stuart Kirsch, author of 'Mining Capitalism: The Relationship between Corporations and their Critics' 'The millennial scramble for resources brings fresh urgency to questions about the social and environmental costs of extractive capitalism. This book answers that call, offering rich ethnographic insights into the lifeworlds of those who sit in the shadow of extraction. - Dinah Rajak, University of Sussex

List of Figures and Maps
Preface
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 D’Angelo
9. Risky Encounters: The Ritual Prevention of Accidents in the Coal Mines of Kazakhstan - Eeva Kesküla
Notes on Contributors
Index

Published by Pluto Press in Dec 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 9780745338378
eBook ISBN: 9781786803764

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