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Stephanie Postar
(London School of Economics and Political Science)
Negar Elodie Behzadi
(University of Bristol)
Send message to Convenors
Stream:
Climate Change
Sessions:
Thursday 17 September, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Speaking from the Seam/Pit/Well/Field: Anthropological and Geographical Approaches to Telling the Stories of Extraction.
Panel C06b at conference RAI2020: Anthropology and Geography: Dialogues Past, Present and Future.
Anthropologists and geographers have worked for decades to share narratives about encounters with the extractives industry. This panel invites scholars to turn the lens inwards to examine and advance our (multi)disciplinary approaches to such story-telling in this time of climate crisis.
Long Abstract:
Anthropologists and geographers have worked for decades to share narratives about the lived experiences of encounters with the extractives industry (including oil and gas, minerals, as well as logging and other types of resource extraction), highlighting different forms of exclusions and resistances that result from such encounters. This panel invites scholars to turn the lens inwards to examine and advance our (multi)disciplinary approaches to such story-telling in this time of climate crisis. In particular, this panel asks to what extent conversations - methodological and theoretical - between anthropological and geographical perspectives and ways of writing on resource extraction, can contribute to (re)theorise, make visible, as well as challenge and resist extractive violence and exclusions. What are anthropologists and geographers' responsibilities for finding new ways to chronicle extraction in the Anthropocene (Deborah Bird Rose, Juanita Sundberg) and how can disciplinary cross-fertilisation help us do so?
To answer these questions, this panel invites contributions that open theoretical conversations on resource extraction and: 1) 'the non-human', indigenous knowledge and ontologies, and multispecies perspectives (Bakker, Sundberg, Nuttall, Tsing); 2) feminist post/decolonial approaches (Murrey, Behzadi); and 3) political ecologies of exclusion and resistance (Le Billon, Peluso), including through activism. This panel encourages interrogating researchers' role in challenging the extractive characteristics of research on resource extraction in geography and anthropology. We will discuss different disciplinary relationships with ethnography, as well as push the methodological boundaries of research on resource extraction by examining new 'earth writings' beyond texts through the use of visual, digital, performance and art-based approaches.
Social scientists perform contested tasks and adopt varied roles in the rapid and protracted timelines of extraction. We interrogate the fluctuating roles and influences of social scientists in the logistical, cultural, and economical administration of extractive projects.
Paper long abstract:
Social scientists perform contested tasks and adopt varied roles in the rapid and protracted timelines of extraction. Through a political economy that draws on the anthropologies of corporate entities and scholarship on the geo- and body-politics of 'expert' knowledge within international development and extractive logics in areas of Africa and Asia, we interrogate the fluctuating roles and influences of social scientists in the logistical, cultural, and economical administration of extractive projects. We analyse the work of social scientists as surveyors; economic and cultural consultants; mediators; external monitors in intergenerational extractive projects; and allies in anti-extractive resistances. We sketch four distinct conceptualisations for understanding and framing the role of social scientists in the generation, circulation and dominance of 'rationalising policy' about the extractive industry within society: flexians (Wedel), corporate counter-insurgency (Dunlap), racialized underdevelopment (Rodney) and unintended consequences (Murray Li). For this presentation, we focus on Walter Rodney's racialized underdevelopment and look at the important work of critical scholar-activists as allies in anti-extractive resistance in and beyond the classroom.
This paper reflects on the process of telling the stories of extraction in an emerging extractive landscape in Tajikistan through ethnographic film and animated portraiture. To what extent such earth writings can contribute to make visible gendered histories of extractive violence?
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I explore the lived, gendered and generational experiences of men, women and children in an emerging post-Soviet extractive landscape in Tajikistan - Kante - where I undertook ethnographic research in 2014-2015. I introduce two films that I co-directed: 'Komor (coal)', a video-ethnographic documentary portrait of Kante co-directed with a video-editor - Hattie Brookes-Ward, and 'Nadirah: coal woman' an animated ethnographic portrait based on the story of one female miner co-directed with a feminist animation artist - Kate Jessop. These two films, together, make visible men women and children miners' invisibilised stories of exclusion and gendered extractive violence in a context of economic desolation and politico-ecological transformation. In particular, they highlight the process through which the neoliberalisation of resources and its materialisation through the opening of a Sino-Tajik open-pit mine in the village led to the emergence of new forms of exclusions and hardships: men's restricted access to resources and loss of sense of worth, women informal miners' stigmatisation and shaming, and child labor. By presenting these two films, I interrogate the extent to which visual, embodied and art-based methodologies can participate in the broader project of creating alternative resource epistemologies and earth writings capable of making visible gendered (inter)generational hidden (hi)stories of extractive landscapes.
This paper will focus on the (re)production of social and environmental difference by new mining encounters in the peruvian Andes. Based on ethnographic and visual materials, it will argue that excavators, spirits and mountains have a lot to tell us about humans, and vice versa.
Paper long abstract:
The multiplication of large-scale open-pit mining operations deeply transform social and environmental at the local level. These transformations are not only a consequence of the physical and ecological modifications connected to mining : they are the product of new encounters between human and non-human beings - machines, spirits and resources - brought together by extractive activities.
This paper will focus on the (re)production of social and environmental difference by new mining encounters in the northern Peruvian region of Cajamarca. To do so, it will build on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2011 and 2013, as part of my PHD research on social change and political mobilisation in this new mining region. This ethnographic data will be complemented with an analysis of media images and discourses on Otherness and resistance to mining in the region, between 2014 and 2016.
I will show how mining development over the last three decades has transformed local social categories, producing new forms of social and ethnic boundaries while gradually erasing others. Mining development has also radically reconfigured relationships to the environment, leading to the domestication of certain places and spirits while "wilding" and "angering" others. Social and environmental change, I will argue, are also best understood where they overlap : social categories are generally represented as "natural", and the natural world is deeply "social". The interactions of excavators, spirits and mountains therefore has a lot to tell us about social relations between humans, and vice versa.
The paper explores how the discourse of sustainability suffuses the water industry's understanding of its practice of water removal as one of abstraction as opposed to extraction. The paper asks how this discourse survives in the face of d(r)ying chalk rivers in the South-East of England.
As forgotten actors in South America's extractive landscape, the perspectives of small-scale gold miners are often overlooked or derided. This paper explores their stories of animist and nonhuman encounters as central to their emerging economic subjectivities.
Paper long abstract:
The forests of Amazonia have always been exploited, and in the past few decades increasingly by bands of prospectors seeking the valuable resources therein. Despite the destruction and contamination that often ensues, these remote extractive activities have continued largely unrecognised, particularly by global media outlets and researchers. Only more recently - since the election of Bolsonaro and the catastrophic forest fires of last year - have prospectors been thrust into the limelight and denounced for their myopic greed. But who are these people? How do they make sense of their activities in relation to broader economic and environmental concerns? Providing narratives from small-scale gold miners in Peru, this paper challenges traditional tropes of exploitation and economic motivations that have emerged from geographical and anthropological research on extraction. Far from seeing the forest as an alienated realm of inert 'nature' ready for the taking, prospectors (predominantly Andean migrants) find themselves entwined (and indeed trapped) in a mysterious and formidable animist cosmos - full of devils, dangerous beings and supernatural events - that they must learn to navigate as part of their emerging new subjectivities. Descriptions of this other-worldly context are interwoven with their evaluations of economic forces beyond their known world, rumours of environmental disaster and their own personal transformations brought about by these new activities. Ethnographic descriptions thus reveal the little-recounted viewpoints of the miners themselves, accounts that uncover the multifaceted motivations and imaginaries that make up contemporary extractive frontiers.
Focusing in particular on the relationship between the recalcitrance of the oil sands and the bodily experience of oil sands workers, this paper will examine moments of human and non-human resistance that challenge the profitability of this extractive industry.
Paper long abstract:
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the allure of oil and riches has tantalised settlers in Northern Alberta. Yet for many years the extraction and profitable processing of the oil sands proved elusive. This is in part the result of their physical properties - in particular the ways in which the oil sands are resistant to extraction. While crude oil can flow with ease through pipelines, oil sands are viscous and stuck in place. This presents a barrier for those seeking the liquid profitability often promised by the oil industry. In order to overcome this material challenge, any friction within the oil sands assemblage must be minimised. In this context, the recalcitrance or resistance of oil workers and oily particles of sand threatens the profitability of the oil sands industry.
Focusing in particular on the relationship between the recalcitrance of the oil sands and the bodily experience of oil sands workers, this paper will examine moments of human and non-human resistance that challenge the profitability of this extractive industry. More specifically, I will explore the visceral sense of vulnerability that many oil sands workers develop when brought into intimate bodily contact with oily materiality and large and dangerous machines. By searching for moments of both human and non-human resistance, one can provide a glimpse into the divergent futures possible in an era of global heating.
Focusing on a delayed industrial resource extraction project in Tanzania, this paper considers the stories that emerge to explain this not-yet project and commodities in-the-making. How can taking these stories seriously reveal the multiple meanings being made in these transitional times and spaces?
Paper long abstract:
Extractive industries appear to be deploying new technologies of resource exploitation at breakneck pace to meet energy demands by accessing previously excluded areas and financially unviable deposits. At the same time, delays, pauses, and slowdowns in mines continue to be a function of these ventures within the capitalist economy. Social scientists telling the stories of these not-yet projects, communities in limbo, and resources in-the-making document the multiple meanings being made in these transitional times and spaces. This paper focuses on rural southern Tanzania, where the country's first uranium mine is quiet as it completes its eighth year of delays. Based on 15 months of ethnographic and archival fieldwork, this paper examines the (hi)stories of how Tanzanian uranium came to be and the stories explaining why the project is on hold. While geological and colonial archival material illustrate the ways in which the subterranean sedimentation of the Karoo formation repeatedly became the site of mineral exploration in the twentieth century, oral histories contextualize Tanzania's recent process of permitting uranium mining within a longer history of interest in this radiant mineral. People living in the area make sense of delays and uncertainty regarding the development of the project by weaving stories of ongoing political intrigue. These stories of encountering Tanzanian uranium (past, present, and future) invite us to theorize the ways in which resources materialize through the narratives we (re)tell, revealing languages for, and possibilities of, contestation and resistance to efforts to incorporate radioactive soils into global nuclear commodity chains.
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