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Accepted Paper:
Primitive industry: human rank in the age of extraction
Matthew Shutzer
(Duke University)
This paper examines the creation of a natural historical model of planetary extraction through the archives of colonial anthropologists studying tribal and outcaste iron-working groups in the Indian subcontinent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the ethnographic documentation of what would come to be called “primitive industry” by colonial anthropologists studying tribal and outcaste iron-working groups in the Indian subcontinent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While historians of empire have long noted the ideological significance of machine technology within European constructions of a temporally-advanced modernity, the recognition that the most “primitive” colonized subjects possessed both geological and metallurgical knowledge escaped colonial accounts of a unique technological culture. I show how the evidence of such practices shaped emergent universalizing ideas about humanity’s extractive relationship to the natural world, which became assimilated to both evolutionary anthropology and the early disciplinary practices of human ecology. Such ideas have gained new currency in the present moment as advocates of the so-called Anthropocene have turned to models of natural history to explain a putative universal human propensity towards extractive and energy-densifying ecological relations. Returning this model of human behavior to its historical origins challenges a transhistorical rendering of technological practices removed from their conditions of social valorization under global capitalism.