Paper short abstract:

A multi-sited ethnography of the mining elite which supports France's mining renewal reveals certain facets of the State : the entanglement of public and private's sectors ; a colonial way of seeing future spaces of extraction and its inhabitants ; the world as a playground for geological conquests.

Paper long abstract:

We propose to analyze the French State through what we call its mining elite: the one supporting the mining renewal policy. The multi-sited ethnography we conducted on its members shed light on some aspects of the State.

First, circulations of the mining elite between various sectors (from State's technical organisms or high-level administration to multinational firms, and vice versa), as well as the way the renewal policy is constructed (with mining firms and historical corporatist associations) tend to show a consequent entanglement between 'private' and 'public' sectors.

Second, specific spatial imaginaries emerge from mining elite's discourses. They reveal a colonial register, through the way the elite considers future mining projects' territories (as empty spaces that need to be developed and defined by resources they contain), moreover its inhabitants (as violent and-or ignorant). Dissymetric discourses insures a duality between the inhabitants (colonized populations) and the elite (colonizers), and show a more global process of detachment from the sensible world. The renewal policy can be thus seen as a form of 'internal colonization' by the State of some parts of its territory.

Also, the world appears to be the reference's spatial scale in these discourses. The mining elite tends to consider the State's space and the world's the same way: as a gigantic playground for geological conquests. This refers to the way the French State constructed itself: through resources' exploitation of other territories than its own ; through a position that makes the most of globalized resources' flows in the various world-ecologies.