Paper short abstract:

Based on the analytical concept of “minescape" and the ethnographic material collected in New Caledonia, this paper explores how mining can be analysed as cultural and social productive sites.

Paper long abstract:

Recently Oceania's ethnographic literature has investigated indigenous narratives about the relationship between mineral wealth and landscape, particularly in Melanesia and Australia. These studies show us how "traditional" ritual practices can be renewed and/or revisited reflecting the processes of accommodation and resistance to change. Mining and the world of ancestral spirits are not in themselves irreconcilable: their relationship largely depends on the positions that local people take towards mining projects and companies. In this direction, the recent industrial breakthrough of New Caledonian Kanak independentists proves to be a fertile ground through which to observe how mining capitalism is being domesticated and reconceptualised from the complex human-environment relationship. Anthropological analysis of the ways in which peaceful and "productive" coexistence between the mining industry and the spirits of the mountains is negotiated, allows us to look at culture and economy as integrated into nature. Based on ten months of fieldwork in the northern region of New Caledonia, this presentation aims to overcome the idea that mining can be reduced to economic, rational and emotionless spaces (as advocated by a certain mainstream environmentalist discourse). On the contrary, ethnography shows us how these mining spaces become complex socio-cultural terrains and places of relationships characterised not only by a temporal dimension but also by an emotional and sentimental one.