Mining

JESSICA M. SMITH1 AND STUART KIRSCH2

1 Colorado School of Mines, United States
2 University of Michigan, United States

The role of mining in human history includes material progress as well as social
and environmental costs. Mining has provided our species with the means to move
beyond the Stone Age but only by consuming land, water, and energy at increasingly
greater orders of magnitude. Mining has also been a site for the exploitation of labor
and the emergence of collective forms of resistance. Consequently, anthropological
research on mining raises fundamental questions about the nature of capitalism, from
changes in the organization of labor to corporate strategies for neutralizing political
opposition.
The classic anthropological literature on mining focused on the transformation of
labor regimes and economic development. In the African Copperbelt, British social
anthropologists affiliated with the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute studied the migration
of the rural labor force into company towns and the contribution of mine workers to
modernization. The gold and diamond mines of southern Africa led to widespread
labor migration and were complicit, if not instrumental, in the establishment and imple-
mentation of apartheid labor regimes. As James Ferguson (1999) noted with regard to
Zambia’s copper industry, the promise of modernity continues to elude mine workers
on the margins of the global economy.
The colonial conquest of Latin America was driven in part by the search for gold and
silver. The silver mines of Potosí and the mita system of coerced labor, which took a
huge toll on human lives, have become emblematic of these encounters. Anthropolo-
gists working in Bolivia described how tin miners made offerings of coca and alcohol
to the spirit of the devil in return for its protection and assistance in finding rich veins
of ore (Nash 1979). Michael Taussig (1980, xi) refers to the devil of the tin mines as a
“stunningly apt symbol of alienation” that condenses “political and economic history.”
Conflicts over mining were often central to the political struggles that rocked Latin
America during the 1960s and 1970s, including the CIA-sponsored coup d’êtat in Chile
in 1973 after the nationalization of substantial holdings by the US companies Kennecott
and Anaconda (Finn 1998).
The new Chilean economy became an incubator for experiments in economic policy
that gave rise to neoliberalism. The subsequent spread of neoliberal economic policies
facilitated the investments of mining companies around the world. In the wake of the
collapse of a socialist alternative to capitalism in 1989, the World Bank encouraged
reluctant states to lift restrictions on foreign investment and reduce regulatory over-
sight. These developments led to the expansion of mineral exploration by a factor of
six in Latin America, by four in the Pacific, and by two in Africa. Many of these new
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1307
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mining projects were located in marginal areas in which indigenous peoples retained
control over lands that were not previously seen to have value and where development
had been historically limited or absent.
These economic changes corresponded with a shift from labor-intensive under-
ground mining to capital-intensive surface mines. Underground mines generally
employed large workforces that engaged in strenuous manual labor under hazardous
conditions. In contrast, the new open-cut mines are capital intensive, using enormous
construction equipment to move vast quantities of minerals, earth, and rock. This
method requires fewer but more technically skilled workers, who are often recruited
from outside the communities closest to the production sites. The reduced influence
of mineworkers’ unions at these sites parallels larger declines in union membership,
but can also be traced to new regimes of fly-in fly-out production and increased use
of temporary and subcontracted labor. Although labor conflict in the mining industry
has not disappeared, its political significance is greatly diminished. Alternative modes
of organizing mine labor, such as a Mexican silver cooperative that has privileged
intergenerational continuity of jobs over short-term production (Ferry 2005), are rare
in an industry dominated by major transnational corporations. These companies,
however, increasingly find themselves in competition for access to ore from the
growing ranks of artisanal and small-scale miners whose activities expose them to
considerable health and safety risks.
Ethnographies of mine labor also contribute to long-standing anthropological inter-
est in kinship and gender. A pervasive series of symbolic oppositions between the labor-
ing bodies of masculine miners and feminine ore bodies and mine spaces shape the
everyday practices of miners and their families, creating distinctively gendered spheres
of mine and community that are “parallel though distinct” (Ferry 2005, 100) as women
play a key, but often unrecognized, role in reproducing the social relations of produc-
tion (Finn 1998). These oppositions appear natural when people embody and reinscribe
them in their everyday practices. Miners in the expansive coalfields of Wyoming that
opened in the wake of the US feminist movement and a series of successful gender dis-
crimination lawsuits in the industry’s symbolic Appalachian heartland have partially
undone strict gender dichotomies by crafting a sense of relatedness between crewmem-
bers (Rolston 2014).
The new generation of open-cut mines also dramatically increases the environmental
costs of production, generating fifty times the waste rock of underground mining. These
impacts increase exponentially when tailings and waste rock are discharged into rivers
or the sea. Since production began in the mid-1980s, the Ok Tedi copper and gold mine
has discharged more than one billion metric tons of finely ground tailings and waste
rock into the Fly River in Papua New Guinea, compromising the lives and livelihoods of
thousands of people living downstream (Kirsch 2014). Such environmental transforma-
tions may also have ontological consequences, fueling local and transnational activism
that draws on the discourses of indigenous rights and environmentalism. Anthropolo-
gists studying the ways mining companies respond to their critics are at the forefront
of the new anthropology of the corporation and corporate social responsibility (Kirsch
2014; Rajak 2011). However, ethnographic research conducted within corporate head-
quarters warns against viewing the corporation as a monolithic entity with a single,
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coherent set of interests (Welker 2014). The role of labor in relation to corporations
underscores this point, as miners navigate a tenuous relationship with corporations,
embraced as members of “big company families” at the same time as they are subject
to CSR discourse and practices that reinvent earlier forms of industrial discipline (Finn
1998; Rolston 2014).
Though investment in mining is frequently promoted as alleviating poverty, it is
inversely correlated with economic growth in a relationship that economists refer to
as the “resource curse,” which is also associated with the tendency toward authori-
tarian governance and conflict. These problems are intensified by the environmental
impacts of mining, which have been described as the microeconomics of the resource
curse (Kirsch 2014). Proposed solutions to the resource curse are generally techno-
cratic rather than political, as there do not seem to be significant differences between
the policies of left-of-center governments and those of more conservative governments
in relation to resource extraction.
Researchers are beginning to investigate how the materiality of the resource affects
social relations. This includes new resources like tar sands that blur the distinction
between mining and petroleum extraction. These modes of production are also linked
by overarching questions about energy and sustainability. In contrast to earlier pre-
dictions, the critical issue is not absolute resource scarcity, but the rising social and
environmental costs of extraction. Concerns about “peak oil” and other shortages of
raw materials have declined in light of new supplies made available by the risky new
technologies of fracking, deepwater drilling, and deep-sea mining. Resources produced
in conflict zones through “don’t ask, don’t tell” commodity chains also attract attention.
The United States and the European Union have passed legislation to monitor the use
of conflict minerals, and there are a number of private-sector certification programs
that seek to address these issues, including the Kimberly Process for conflict diamonds,
Tiffany’s responsibly sourced gold initiative, and the Conflict Free Sourcing Initiative’s
smelter program, although voluntary initiatives are not sufficiently robust to systemat-
ically address ongoing mineral extraction in conflict zones.
Mining will continue to play a role in even the greenest new economies, as smart-
phones, laptops, wind turbines, electric cars, and LED lights all require the expanded
production of rare minerals. This suggests that mining will remain a fertile avenue of
inquiry for both its contribution to technological innovation and its ever-present impli-
cations for labor, communities, and the environment.

SEE ALSO: Business Anthropology; Capitalism; Capitalist Corporation, the; Corpo-

rate Social Responsibility; Economic Anthropology; Energy Issues in Development;
Environmental Activism; Extractive Industries and Development; Gender; Industrial
Workers; Labor Migration; Transnational and Multinational Corporations; Work

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Ferguson, James. 1999. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zam-
bian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Ferry, Elizabeth. 2005. Not Ours Alone: Patrimony, Value, and Collectivity in Contemporary Mex-
ico. New York: Columbia University Press.
Finn, Janet. 1998. Tracing the Veins: Of Copper, Culture, and Community from Butte to Chuquica-
mata. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kirsch, Stuart. 2006. Reverse Anthropology: Indigenous Analysis of Social and Environmental Rela-
tions in New Guinea. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Kirsch, Stuart. 2014. Mining Capitalism: The Relationship between Corporations and Their Critics.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Li, Fabiana. 2015. Unearthing Conflict: Corporate Mining, Activism, and Expertise in Peru.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Nash, June. 1979. We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian
Tin Mines. New York: Columbia University Press.
Powdermaker, Hortense. 1962. Copper Town: Changing Africa, the Human Situation of the Rhode-
sian Copperbelt. New York: Harper Colophon.
Rajak, Dinah. 2011. In Good Company: An Anatomy of Corporate Social Responsibility. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Rolston, Jessica Smith. 2014. Mining Coal and Undermining Gender: Rhythms of Work and Family
in the American West. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Taussig, Michael T. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press.
Welker, Marina. 2014. Enacting the Corporation: An American Mining Firm in Post-Authoritarian
Indonesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.