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Accepted Paper:

Life cycles at the Frieda River Mine  
Emilka Skrzypek (University of St Andrews)

Paper short abstract:

The paper proposes looking at the Frieda River Mine as a social relation through which life itself travels through form, distance and time. It provides an account of those relations and argues that although from the corporate and legal perspective the Mine may not yet exist, it is already happening.

Paper long abstract:

Hidden from view by the thick green overlay, and tucked behind the vast waters of the mighty Sepik River, Frieda River area of Papua New Guinea is home to a one of the largest undeveloped copper and gold deposit in the world. Frieda's mineral wealth was first officially noted during a regional mapping exercise in 1966. Three years later, in 1969, a Prospecting Authority was granted to an Australian mining company allowing for the exploration of Frieda's gold and copper deposits to begin. Work at Frieda has been ongoing ever since. Despite the over forty years of industry's on-site presence, from the corporate and legal perspective Frieda River is not a Mine, but a resource extraction Project at an exploration stage of development. This paper provides an ethnographic account of stakeholder relations as they were unfolding on the steep banks of the river over forty years after the first company began working at Frieda. Putting to the test the linear, corporate model of the Mining Project Life Cycle it argues that, in order to truly understand what is going on at Frieda, we must go beyond looking at a mine as a physical manifestation of maturity of geological and economic factors. Instead, we should look at a mine as a social relation, which shift would allow us to see that although it may not yet exist, the Frieda River Mine is already happening.

Panel Land01
Large-scale resource extraction projects and moral encounters
  Session 1