Extractive industries (Economic Anthropology)

Abstract:This essay explores how a recent body of work by Thai artist Piyarat Piyapongwiwat uses an immersive video installation to create a context that affectively connects the viewer with a group of exploited Cambodian labourers. While the struggles of these labourers—whose livelihoods are being eroded as the mountain that has sustained them for generations is fenced off, privatized and mined to supply urban development with limestone—may seem remote and disconnected from the lives of privileged, urban exhibition-goers, Piyapongwiwat’s work belies this disconnection. The affective portal created by the video installation allows us to not only empathize with the labourers, but to see how their sense of their own agency and power to change their plight is negated by what seem to be inexorable autonomous processes of capitalist development beyond their control or influence. At the same time, she enables us to see how we (the privileged viewers) can conveniently ignore our own complicity in these exploitative conditions through that same ideological sleight of hand that allows us to abdicate our responsibility for these seemingly autonomous processes from which we indirectly benefit. This learned acquiescence to exploitation, and concomitant alienation from a sense of agency to challenge these processes, benefits State-sanctioned extractive capitalist exploitation and perpetuates the power to oppress. The essay explores how Piyapongwiwat interweaves fictive, poetic narrative with documentary footage of the limestone quarry labourers, offering critical distance to examine the workings of the ideologies that perpetuate this status quo. The juxtaposition of documentary and poetic, philosophical and political narratives in the artwork offers a fertile space in the imagination for resistance and reclamation of agency through a search for truth beyond the ideologies that serve State and capitalist power.

Conflict surrounding the Kumtor gold mine in Kyrgyzstan is primarily about the equitable distribution of resources, but advocates for the nationalisation of the mine present it as a battle for the sovereignty of the country. The Government has sought to increase its shares in the mine to gain greater control and bigger revenues. While debates continue in Parliament on how this should be done, protests and violence have become people’s outlet for frustration at the drawn-out process. The proposed framework agreement is an achievement, but remains to be finalised. The deal, however, should not overshadow the need to address underlying challenges that communities affected by mining operations experience and the lack of communication between stakeholders. Without this, Kyrgyzstan’s attempts to reform the mining sector will fall far short of the goal and result in further conflict.

At the entrance of the Taroko Valley, in Taiwan, where geologists have launched their observatories of the Critical Zone, is located the mine of Asia Cement that threatens to collapse on aboriginal villages. This situation shows two dimensions of the critical zone: one is eroded by capitalism, the other by global warming related typhoons and landslides.

Sandoval, Ráfico (2017). Economía extractivista en Colombia:
Modelo minero energético destruyendo naturaleza y sociedad. Bogotá. Stilo Impresores Ltda. Espacio Abierto Cuaderno Venezolano de Sociología
Vol.27 No.1 (enero - marzo, 2018):245-249

AUTOSAR XML (.arxml) is a format introduced by the Automotive Open System Architecture consortium to contain the data used in and required by Electric Control Units which is based on Automotive Open System Architecture. Electric Control Unit development is done by 3 groups i.e. OEM like BMW, Tier1like Bosch, and Tier2 like a vector. Each one has its own data that is required for Software development. OEM shares the information with Tier1.Tier1 shares the same with Tier2 for implementing into Electric Control Unit. The DataBase Container (DBC) describes the properties of the Controller Area Network (CAN) / Controllable Area Network Flexible Data Rate (CAN FD). Data analysis in ECU Extract ARXML is very difficult due to the complex structure of data. Performing two-way and three-way comparisons/merges of XML files is difficult. To handle the mentioned challenges manually is a big task that requires huge manual efforts and time which may even result in a manual error. In this paper, we are presenting a newly developed Python-based tool that overcomes the above-mentioned drawbacks.

Die Chanten leben als Rentierzüchter in der Taiga Westsibiriens – eine Lebensweise, die durch die Erdölförderung verdrängt wird. Ihr Leben verläuft heute räumlich und sozial im Wechsel zwischen Wald und Stadt. Ihre Strategien, kulturelle Differenz und Autonomie durch Grenzziehungen mit Hilfe religiöser Praktiken und sozialer Normen aufrechtzuerhalten, werden am Beispiel des Festes zum „Tag des Rentierzüchters“ verdeutlicht. Der Autor zeigt, wie Menschen der Taiga in dieser Situation eigene Praktiken des Verbergens und Vermeidens, aber auch neue Wege der öffentlichen Repräsentation nutzen.

Two independent technical developments have transformed the metal mining industry in considerable ways: the increasing share of waste materials in the feedstock of metallurgical operations has partially transformed metal extraction into a recycling industry, and the employment of microorganisms in the extraction of metals from mineral ores has rendered metals mining a biologically based industry. Increasing industrial interest and research activity in the application of biotechnologies to the extraction of metals from waste, particularly electronic waste, intimate a potential intersection of those two processes, destabilizing further the analytical distinctions between extraction and manufacturing, biologically based and nonbiologically based production, waste and resources. This combined deterritorialization of metal extraction requires a theoretical deterritorialization: rethinking extraction beyond extractive industry narrowly defined and the role that nonhuman forms of life play in the production of value in nonbiologically based (extractive) industries. This article is a first step toward outlining the effects of such developments on understanding extraction. It begins by reflecting on the effects of recycling on the spatiality and materiality of the mine and then it proceeds to examine the productive role of microorganisms in mining, the limits of biomining, and the biotechnologies that have developed to transcend those limits. The conclusion draws out theoretical implications of those ongoing lines of deterritorialization and their combination on understanding the spatiotemporality of extraction and the active involvement of nonhuman nature in the production of value.


两项独立的技术发展, 大幅改变了金属採矿业: 冶金作业原料中逐渐增加的废弃物质比例, 已将部分的金属萃取转变成回收产业, 从矿种萃取金属的过程中运用微生物, 则使得金属採矿成为以生物学为基础的产业。对于将生物科技应用至从废弃物、特别是电子废弃物中萃取出金属, 有着逐渐增加的产业兴趣及研究活动, 提示了上述两个过程的互动潜力, 并进一步挑战了萃取与製造、根据生物与非生物的生产, 以及废弃物与资源之间的分析区别。此般金属萃取的联合去领域化, 同时需要理论的去领域化: 在狭隘定义的冶金工业之外重新思考冶金, 以及非人类的生命形式在以非生物为基础的 (冶金) 工业的价值生产中所扮演的角色。本文是迈向概论此般发展对于理解冶金之影响的第一步。本文首先反思回收对于矿场的物质性及空间性的影响, 接着检视微生物在採矿中的生产性角色、生物採矿的限制, 以及克服上述限制的生物科技发展。研究结论部分, 从上述持续进行中的去领域化路径与路径的结合中汲取理论意涵, 以理解冶金的时空性和积极参与至价值生产的非人类本质 。


La industria minera de metales ha sido transformada de manera considerable por dos desarrollos técnicos independientes: la proporción en aumento de elementos de desecho en los materiales con los que se alimentan las operaciones metalúrgicas ha transformado parcialmente la extracción de metales en una industria de reciclaje, y el empleo de microorganismos en la extracción de metales de rocas que albergan el mineral ha convertido la minería de metales en una industria apoyada biológicamente. El creciente interés industrial y la actividad investigativa para la aplicación de biotecnologías en la extracción de los metales contenidos en desechos, en particular en la basura electrónica, permiten entrever una interacción potencial de los dos procesos, desestabilizando aun más las distinciones analíticas entre los procesos de extracción y manufactura, la producción de base biológica y la abiótica, residuos y recursos. Esta desterritorialización combinada de extracción de metales demanda una desterritorialización teórica: repensar la extracción más allá de la industria extractiva definida con estrechez y el papel que juegan formas de vida no humana en la producción de valor en industrias (extractivas) que no están biológicamente basadas. El presente artículo es un paso inicial hacia el enunciado de los efectos de tales desarrollos en el entendimiento de la extracción. El artículo empieza con una reflexión sobre los efectos del reciclaje sobre la espacialidad y materialidad de la mina y luego se procede a examinar el papel productivo de los microorganismos en minería, los límites de biominería y las biotecnologías que han sido desarrolladas para trascender aquellos límites. La conclusión extrae implicaciones teóricas de aquella líneas de desterritorialización y su combinación para tratar de entender la espacio-temporalidad de la extracción y la activa participación de la naturaleza no humana en la producción de valor.

South Gobi province is at the center of Mongolia’s mining boom, where companies began exporting
minerals over dirt-track roads in the early 2000s. This paper examines recent controversies surrounding
road dust near the Oyu Tolgoi copper–gold mine, the so-called coal road from Tavan Tolgoi mines, and the
Chinese border. At the time of the research, local residents, particularly nomadic herders, were concerned
that dust produced from unpaved mining roads was coating the pasture, causing illnesses among
livestock, and endangering their livelihoods in the region. The presence of dust rendered mining an
uncomfortably intimate experience as state and corporate actors negotiated responsibility for
infrastructure development. The paper builds on the concept ‘‘technologies of distantiation” to reveal
the complex ways that dust from unpaved roads creates distances and disconnections between people,
livelihoods, and landscapes, representing an enclosure of the pasture. Methods for the paper include
interviews, focus groups, and participant observation conducted in South Gobi province and
Ulaanbaatar in 2010, 2011, and 2012 as well as follow-up research carried out in spring 2015.

Distributed ledger technologies (DLT) enable the creation of digital databases stored across multiple locations. In the most-advanced design of DLTs, blockchains record and publish transactions through a peer-to-peer and tamper-proof block structure, and operate securely through a consensus-based algorithm. Increasingly, DLTs and blockchain-based initiatives are deployed in the mineral sector to address the problem of conflict minerals, ensure respect for due diligence standards, and improve supply chain management and traceability. The fast adoption of this technology for governing natural resources by creating immutable digital records of sourcing and geological information engenders new opportunities and risks for mining communities across Africa. These include the creation, ownership and access of digital data, the participatory role of upstream actors, and the effects of monitoring and traceability for informal miners and the future of sustainable development in mining communities.

Les richesses naturelles de Madagascar font l’objet de fortes convoitises à l’échelle internationale. Les projets extractifs et l’accaparement des terres, à l’oeuvre avec l’aval de l’État national, génèrent des coûts socio-environnementaux et des contestations « glocales2 ». Pour autant, la société civile malgache peine à peser sur les rapports de force.

(If you're interested in copies of chapters, please let me know.) The last two decades have witnessed a dramatic expansion and intensification of mineral resource exploitation and development across the global south, especially in Latin America. This shift has brought mining more visibly into global public debates and spurred a great deal of controversy and conflict. This volume assembles new scholarship that provides critical perspectives on these issues. The book marshals original, empirical work from leading social scientists in a variety of disciplines to address a range of questions about the practices of mining companies on the ground, the impacts of mining on host communities, and the responses to mining from communities, civil society and states. The book further explores the global and international causes, consequences and innovations of this new era of mining activity in Latin America. Key issues include the role of Canadian mining companies and their investment in the region, and, to a lesser extent, the role of Chinese mining capital. Several chapters take a regional perspective, while others are based on empirical data from specific countries including Bolivia, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala and Peru.

This book is a compilation of research papers written by authors from East and Southern African and American based social and
environmental advocacy groups. The papers were prepared and presented during the 2009 Skills Share and Learning Exchange
Conference and Outreach Visit Programme held in Harare, Zimbabwe. The Skills Share and Learning Exchange Programme was designed
to act as a forum for social and environmental justice practitioners to share skills and experiences on strategies to secure and protect the
rights of natural resource dependent communities in East and Southern Africa with the technical and financial support of the Ford
Foundation. Additionally, the programme was established in order to strengthen and broaden the capacities of social and environmental
justice activists to advocate, litigate and research on community rights. The 2009 edition was running under the theme “securing
environmental, economic, social and cultural rights of communities in mining areas”. It was aimed at ensuring that participants understand
and share their ideas about how best community assets and rights in mining areas can be promoted and protected.

L’industrialisation est de tout temps considérée comme le socle du développement économique de l’humanité de part sa production de richesses grâce à la transformation des matières premières et à l’exploitation des sources d’énergie. Cependant, elle n’est pas sans incidence sur le milieu naturel (air, eau, sol), les employés à l’intérieur de l’usine de production et les populations riveraines. Des dommages environnementaux résultent des déversements ou rejets d’effluents ou de polluants au travers de cheminées industrielles et/ou canalisations diverses. L’exploitation cimentière au Togo entraîne des atteintes au paysage naturel dans les zones d’exploitation et s’accompagne de pollutions et nuisances diverses. L’intérêt de cette recherche est de montrer comment différents instruments juridiques peuvent être utilisés pour canaliser la pollution industrielle et permettre aux entreprises de tendre vers un développement soutenable. Elle aura pour mérite de procéder à une analyse détaillée des risques et dommages liés à l’extraction du calcaire, sa transformation en clinker puis en ciment et envisagera des approches de solutions pour une industrialisation écologiquement responsable.

This PhD dissertation explores how private security companies co-constitute political order in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as a case through which broader questions regarding the relationship between security governance and political order can be investigated. The thesis explores the spatial distribution of private security companies in Congo, and investigates their predominant entanglement with internationalized governance processes.
Furthermore, it explores how this contemporary instance of the relationship between security governance and political order resonates with and reproduces longer-standing patterns of internationalized political ordering in Congo.
This thesis raises questions around how it may be possible to theorize the relationship between security governance and political order to capture the historical ways in which that relationship has been articulated in Congolese history. Specifically, it asks whether broadening our conception of political order to encompass both security governance and the infrastructural arrangements underpinning modern political order might bring into view durable patterns of political ordering that otherwise remain hidden—patterns of extraversion, where key domestic ordering processes in Congo are reproduced as the properties of international power relations.

Increasingly, a range of 'things' (e.g. infrastructure, data, knowledge, bodies, etc.) are configured and/or reconfigured as assets, or capitalized property. Accumulation strategies have changed as a result of this assetization process, which characterizes a particular form of technoscientific capitalism. Rather than entrepreneurial strategies based on commodity production, technoscientific capitalism is increasingly underpinned by rentiership, or the appropriation of value through ownership rights (e.g. intellectual property), monopoly conditions, and regulatory or market devices and practices (e.g. investment dispute courts, exclusivity agreements, etc.). While rentiership and rent-seeking are often presented as negative phenomena (e.g. distorting markets, unearned income) in both neoclassical and Marxist literatures – and much in-between – it is my intention in this paper to unpack rentiership as an increasingly constitutive political-economic process underpinning technoscientific capitalism. Rather than being framed as a problematic 'side-effect' of capitalism, I argue that rentiership can help us to understand how different forms of value extraction are constituted by and come to constitute different forms of technoscience. This has significant analytical, political, and normative implications for understanding the relationship between science, innovation, and business (e.g. how do rentier rationales configure research agendas, how does innovation enable rentiership, what are the consequences for social equity, etc.).

The pace of mineral extraction has greatly accelerated since the mid-1950s, with a major mineral boom taking place in the past decade. Responding to growing demands for more material resources, mining projects have met with frequent resistance from local communities. Yet, not all communities oppose mining projects. Based on an extensive literature review, this paper identifies and discusses factors affecting the likelihood of resistance to mining projects by local communities. Case study evidence suggests that dependency towards mining companies, political marginalisation, and trust in institutions tend to reduce resistance likelihood. In contrast, large environmental impacts, lack of participation, extra-local alliances, and distrust towards state and extractive companies tend to increase resistance, while economic marginalisation, corporate social responsibility activities, remoteness and attachment to place have mixed effects. Systematic assessments of these factors could further confirm patterns of resistance, clarify the needs for local consent processes, and help inform the creation of 'no-go' areas for mining projects to the mutual benefit of companies, communities, and government authorities otherwise affected by socio-environmental impacts and costly deadlocks.

This article surveys fifty-two empirical studies on relationships between extractive industries and poverty, addressing both poverty impacts and possible linkage mechanisms. Distinguishing these studies by mode of resource extraction, we find industrial mining to be more frequently associated with poverty exacerbation, and artisanal mining with poverty reduction. Poverty exacerbation findings are more pronounced in cross-national statistical studies and ethnographic local case studies, especially when relative deprivation and longer-term impacts are taken into account; while sub-national census- based studies tend to show lower poverty levels in areas with extractive sector activities. A review of thirteen specific linkages between extractive industries and poverty highlights the importance of governance institutions and the limited effects of Corporate Social Responsibility activities. Methodologically, our survey points to the dominance of industrial mining-related data in cross- national and sub-national studies and the overlooked effects of artisanal and small-scale mining on poverty reduction at analytical scales larger than community-level. Such findings call for integrated studies assessing effects on poverty at various scales and attending to the specificities of mining-related livelihoods. Nested mixed-methods including place-based ethnographic observation, longitudinal surveys, as well as socioeconomic and political analysis across multiple scales are needed to provide more robust contextual understandings of the relationships between extractive sectors and poverty.

Dos suizos, dos libros, una única obsesión: la explotación del “oro negro” de la selva amazónica, en la época del auge cauchero en el Oriente de Bolivia. Con apenas unos meses de diferencia, Franz Ritz y Ernst Leutenegger trabajaron en la misma barraca gomera durante la primera década del siglo XX, y ambos publicaron luego sus recuerdos en su país natal. Son estos relatos que, traducidos por primera vez al español, nos propone descubrir aquí Lorena Córdoba. La mirada más entusiasta de Ritz y la visión más melancólica de Leutenegger evocan ambas tópicos de la fiebre cauchera en la selva boliviana: la dura vida en las barracas; la ley del más fuerte en un mundo donde el Estado está ausente; los enganches tramposos, las deudas hereditarias, la explotación de los indígenas. Sin embargo, estos relatos permiten ir más allá de los clichés y matizar en gran parte las visiones en blanco y negro sobre esta época crucial para la economía boliviana, la paulatina incorporación del Oriente al país y el destino también de los pueblos indígenas amazónicos. Con su lectura, la Historia gana en humanidad, en matices enriquecedores, en profundidad y credibilidad.

El artículo analiza la explotación de hevea brasiliensis en la región amazónica boliviana y la relación establecida entre dicha industria y la etnicidad regional. Dicha actividad puede rastrearse desde la mitad del siglo XIX en adelante, cuando se registran los primeros contactos entre el frente cauchero y los diferentes grupos étnicos que habitaban la zona. A través del análisis de diversas fuentes de misioneros, exploradores, políticos y de los mismos caucheros, el objetivo del trabajo es dar cuenta de las múltiples relaciones que los diferentes actores sociales trabaron en dichos encuentros desde el punto de vista de la larga duración. Se trata de cuestionar la visión tradicional sobre las sociedades indígenas y su presunta actitud pasiva frente al colonizador, contemplando en cambio un abanico de respuestas multiformes y situacionales que incluyó los tratos comerciales, los enfrentamientos armados, las relaciones amistosas e incluso de compadrazgo entre otras tantas opciones posibles.

This book offers an overview of the key debates in the burgeoning anthropological literature on resource extraction.

Resources play a crucial role in the contemporary economy and society, are required in the production of a vast range of consumer products and are at the core of geopolitical strategies and environmental concerns for the future of humanity. Scholars have widely debated the economic and sociological aspects of resource management in our societies, offering interesting and useful abstractions. However, anthropologists offer different and fresh perspectives – sometimes complementary and at other times alternative to these abstractions – based on field researches conducted in close contact with those actors (individuals as well as groups and institutions) that manipulate, anticipate, fight for, or resist the extractive processes in many creative ways. Thus, while addressing questions such as: "What characterizes the anthropology of resource extraction?", "What topics in the context of resource extraction have anthropologists studied?", and "What approaches and insights have emerged from this?", this book synthesizes and analyses a range of anthropological debates about the ways in which different actors extract, use, manage, and think about resources.

This comprehensive volume will serve as a key reading for scholars and students within the social sciences working on resource extraction and those with an interest in natural resources, environment, capitalism, and globalization. It will also be a useful resource for practitioners within mining and development.

Table of Contents

Preface

1. The Anthropology of Resource Extraction: An Introduction
Lorenzo D’Angelo and Robert Jan Pijpers

2. Corporations
Elana Shever

3. Development
Robert Jan Pijpers

4. Environmental Change
Mark Nuttall

5. Governance
Jeroen Cuvelier, Sara Geenen and Boris Verbrugge

6. Materiality and Substances
Elizabeth Ferry

7. Mineworkers
Benjamin Rubbers

8. Positionality and Ethics
Nick Bainton and Emilia E. Skrzypek

9. Sustainability
Cristiano Lanzano

10. Technology
Lorenzo D’Angelo

11. Underground
Sabine Luning

12. Water and Conflict
Fabiana Li and Teresa A. Velásquez

13. Final Reflections and Future Agendas


Robert Jan Pijpers and Dinah Rajak

El ´boom cauchero´ es un fenómeno histórico ineludible para entender la integración de la selva amazónica a la economía global. En efecto, entre 1870 y 1920 la mayoría de los países amazónicos se vuelca a la explotación y comercialización de la goma. ¿Cómo fue posible que medio siglo de expansión económica no haya desembocado en algún tipo de desarrollo sustentable? El artículo analiza particularmente el caso de Bolivia. Se describe el papel del boom gomero como ´hecho social total´ que impulsó la figuración del Oriente boliviano -hasta entonces relativamente ignorado- en el imaginario nacional e internacional. Además de la migración masiva, el apogeo del caucho provoca la fundación de ciudades y redes de comunicación, las incipientes leyes de concesión de tierras, las exploraciones hidrográficas, geográficas y topográficas de la parte selvática del país, la incorporación de territorios hasta entonces marginales a la administración estatal y la delimitación de las fronteras republicanas. Se describe luego la importancia del crédito en la maquinaria gomera, los postulados fundamentales de la lógica extractiva y la retórica modernizadora del ´orden y progreso´ basada en tres tópicos recurrentes: la oposición entre ´civilización´ y ´salvajismo´, la percepción de la selva como tierra de oportunidades y la idea de que la misma es una fuente de recursos prácticamente inagotable. Asimismo se analiza la coexistencia de voces alternativas o disonantes que permiten relativizar ese consenso, ligadas con la percepción más o menos humanitaria de la mano de obra, con las diferencias internas de la industria y la variedad de estrategias nacionales a la hora de enfrentar el problema de la sustentabilidad a largo plazo de la industria.

Over the last decade, shifting strategies of capital accumulation have deepened the integration of land and associated primary commodities into circuits of investment. More than merely an economic revalu-ation of land, such integration involves an iterative rearrangement of the social and natural processes determining land's material and symbolic qualities. Highlighting these shifts through a comparative study of investment processes for large-scale agricultural and extractive projects, we posit investment processes as assemblages proceeding in the context of different ontologies, valuations, and uses of land, which coalesce and compete with one other in complex ways, producing new spaces and subjectivities. Such assembling, we suggest, notably involves a discursive component involving the narration of the need for investment, an institutional component reforming regulatory arrangements, and an operational component enrolling labour, infrastructure, and ancillary resources associated with agricultural and extractive production. After examining each of these components in turn, we conclude with a discussion of tensions and contradictions inherent in 'opening' lands for investment and the business of harnessing agricultural and extractive resources.

This introductory book adopts an interdisciplinary and critical perspective, incorporating contributions from economics, politics, ecology and more. An exploration of negative local impacts, such as ecological and health degradation and violence, along with spillover effects that redefine democracy and justice. Presented for the first time in English this is a comprehensive overview of the theoretical innovations currently being discussed in the South, such as the distinction between appropriation and production modes, a redefinition of surplus to include social and economic features and new
understandings on conflict dynamics. An evaluation of extractivisms under both conservative and new-left governments, making clear that it has very deep roots in culture and ideologies. Finally, an overview of postextractivists alternativas.

En este artículo se analizan los mecanismos de democracia directa activados en medio de conflictos socioambientales en América Latina. Demuestra que dichos mecanismos están jugando un papel fundamental, al convertirse en un importante recurso de movilización y acción colectiva «desde abajo», mientras los gobiernos centrales, «desde arriba», han tratado de limitar su alcance o prohibir su implementación, en la medida que ponen en el debate público las consecuencias del modelo económico orientado a la apropiación extractivista de los recursos naturales.

A B S T R A C T Academics across disciplines are increasingly employing political ecology lenses to unpack conflicts related to resource extraction. Yet, an area that remains under-researched and under-theorised is how environmental impact assessments (EIAs) are embedded in politics and imagined as sites of power relations. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Zimbabwe engaging small-scale gold miners, EIA consultants and government officials, this article examines the changing social significance of EIAs during and after a nationwide police operation that was framed by authorities as targeting non-compliance with environmental policy, illegal mining and illicit trading. Among other articulations of dissent, small-scale miners associations protested that EIA enforcement rhetoric served unjustly as a rationale for halting livelihoods and extracting rent from miners in times of economic difficulty. The article challenges EIA narratives that focus narrowly on risk management or governance failure, exploring technocratic obfuscations and how enforcement rhetoric was perceived in relation to criminalisation and coercion, expert environmental consultancy cultures and adapted legacies of colonial practice in contemporary dynamics of rule. Heavy-handed policing under the banner of enforcing order impinged on livelihoods and had counterproductive effects in addressing environmental problems, while complying with expensive EIA report-producing requirements was far beyond the means of most small-scale miners. The article rethinks how technical EIA rhetoric becomes entangled in spaces of contentious politics, the perils of looking only at particular scales of relations to the exclusion of others, and what it means to re-engage Donald Moore's notion of " shifting alignments and contingent constellations of power. " Suggesting future directions in political ecology theorising in relation to extractive sectors, it calls for careful attention to the situated politics of EIAs – situated in time and space, amid varying relations of power – and how multiple hegemonic practices are con-ceptualised and challenged.

Starting from the diachronic impact of salt on humanity's numerous activities and spiritual reflexes, the author calls for establishing a new humanist discipline: the anthropology of salt. This first exertion lists the themes developed around salt and the sciences/disciplines involved primarily or sectorially in researching this mineral. The anthropology of salt is a discipline of the future, which will gradually become autonomous as the inter-and trans-disciplinary approaches to common salt will prevail over the mono-or multidisciplinary ones.

Au Burkina Faso, le secteur aurifère est en plein essor et les sites d’extraction artisanale en sont une composante importante. Si l’exploitation artisanale échappe en large partie aux tentatives de contrôle par la législation formelle, des formes variées de gouvernance réelle se mettent en place pour assurer la régulation de la vie et du travail dans les sites d’orpaillage. Dans le cas présenté ici, un rôle central est assumé par les représentants locaux d’une société privée de commercialisation de l’or, « entrepreneurs de la frontière » qui se posent en médiateurs entre différents registres normatifs et niveaux d’autorité dans un environnement institutionnel en construction.

The Frontiersmen of Gold : Private Trading Companies and Artisanal Gold Mining in Burkina Faso
In Burkina Faso, gold mining is rapidly growing and artisanal sites constitute an important share of the sector. While non-industrial production mostly escapes attempts of control through formal legislation, different forms of everyday governance ensure the regulation of daily life and work in small-scale sites. In this paper we present a case study showing the central role assumed by the local representatives of a gold trading private company : these “frontier entrepreneurs” act as mediators between different normative spheres and levels of authority, in a constantly evolving institutional environment.

Il clamore suscitato dai cosiddetti 'blood diamonds' ha contribuito ad attirare l'attenzione internazionale di esperti dello sviluppo, giornalisti, analisti ed accademici sulle attività estrattive dei minatori di diamante africani. A partire da una ricerca etnografica svolta dall'autore in Sierra Leone (2007-2016), questo libro esamina le molteplici sfaccettature della realtà sociale dell'estrazione dei diamanti (es. il lavoro, l'economia, la tecnologia, le relazioni sociali e gli immaginari religiosi dei minatori) al fine di mettere in discussione alcune rappresentazioni stereotipate di questa stessa realtà. L'obiettivo è offrire al lettore una panoramica sulla letteratura mineraria più recente poco nota in Italia ed una prospettiva critica sulle diverse forme di rappresentazione e marginalizzazione degli Altri. Il libro si rivolge pertanto ad un ampio pubblico di studenti universitari, esperti dello sviluppo e dell'umanitario, o semplici lettori curiosi.

In Ghana, an artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) activ­ ity called galamsey is considered illegal because operators have not formally registered their sites with the government. Because of recent cases of the involvement of non-Ghanaian nationals in this activity, the government has established the Inter-Ministerial Task Force Against Illegal Mining to curb its growth. However, this endeavor has failed to account for how the absence of socioeconomic safety nets in most mining com­ munities has led many families, including children, into such a business. Drawing upon primary data gathered at Abosso, a galamsey site in the Western Region of Ghana, this article argues that until the underlying causes of socioeconomic mar­ ginalization and unemployment are properly addressed, the quest to regularize these operations will remain far-fetched.

The research presented here is based on one-month of fieldwork, during which forty-two interviews were conducted in and around Tabubil in Papua New Guinea's Western Province. I argue that non-renewable resource extraction creates particular forms of inequality in Papua New Guinea, based on the legal status of customary landownership, an emerging class system associated with a form of nationalism which draws on imagery of a generic notion of kastom, and the need for mining companies and the state to identify clearly (geographically and territorially) bounded landowning groups as the recipients of royalty and compensation payments. While local actors may be deeply concerned about the prospects for continued access to morally and materially desirable forms of development following mine closure, elites working for Ok Tedi Mining Limited valorise kastom and 'village life' in such a way that they at times refuse to frame the inevitable closure of the mine as a problem.