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No Ethnographic Playground: Mining Projects and Anthropological Politics. A Review Essay

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2016

Marina Welker
Marina Welker*
Affiliation:
Anthropology, Cornell University
*
mwelker@cornell.edu
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Extract

“Mining is no ethnographic playground,” Chris Ballard and Glenn Banks warned in their 2003 review of the anthropology of mining. The deep conflicts that characterize the industry find echoes in “a parallel war of sorts …waged within the discipline about the nature and scope of appropriate forms of engagement” (p. 289). This review essay examines how authors of recent ethnographic studies of large-scale, capital-intensive mining projects in Papua New Guinea, South Africa, and the United States have politically positioned themselves as researchers, and the insights into mining companies that derive from these situated perspectives.

Information

Type
CSSH Discussion
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 58 , Issue 2 , April 2016 , pp. 577 - 586
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2016 

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References

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