Pits – post/poster from August 2005 at least
This old poster is on a notice board outside the old council houses across the road from my flat – its survived 20 years or so I guess…
Tag: mining
Critical Metals, Magic Tricks, and Energy Transition: A Social Biography of Lithium
A passage from the novel Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor reads: La Matosa was slowly dotted once more with shacks and shanties raised on the bones of those…
Mapoon
#circa 1995. From the look of Daniel I knew that he had been away too long. -Maaaate, how are… His cutting off grunt and wave of shaky hand…
The Many Worlds of Brine: Disputed Water Worlds in the Argentine Puna and Beyond
By Melisa Escosteguy (Non-Conventional Energy Research Institute-INENCO-CONICET, Universidad de Salta) and Maria Labourt (Department of Sociology, University of Southern California). Transform…
Riotinto – multi-scalar defeat, yaay!
This one is a welcome defeat for the mining corp… See more on riot Tinto on this blog here: https://hutnyk.wordpress.com/?s=Riotinto (note, reposting this article is not meant to…
As Above, So Below: Vertical Territory in Northern Sweden
Space exploration in northern Sweden often gains meaning in relation to mining. In this blog post, I ask: how does mining serve as a “speculative device” (McCormack 2018)…
Ep #102: Gender in the Mines & Anthro Origin Stories: This Month on TFS
The Familiar Strange · Ep #102: Gender in the Mines & Anthro Origin Stories: This Month on TFS We are back for 2023! This month we welcome our…
Toxicity, Violence, and the Legacies of Mercury and Gold Mining in Colombia
Stubborn substances and toxic legacies Toxic substances are often portrayed as stubborn molecules that resist being restricted to the places where we would like to contain them in…
Counting on Montane Birds: Biologists, Verticality, and Territorial Defense in Colombia
This piece is about the unforeseen and sometimes overlooked connection between (i) birds living in the forests of Colombia’s high tropical Andes, (ii) local biologists supporting an anti-mining…
Extractivism en Papier: Chronotopes of Settler-Colonial Capitalism in Australia
What if the greatest legacy of uranium mining is not its localized radioactive toxicity, but the seemingly mundane set of bureaucratic practices it catalysed? In this post, I…
Miner Riotinto is rotten and racist to the core.
From Crikey today : “DISTURBING” CULTURE AT RIO Tinto Mining giant Rio Tinto have released the shocking details of a company-wide cultural review, which found sexism, bullying, and…
Coal, Care, and Climate change: When Things Remember What People Forget
As the US moves toward greener energy futures, how we remember coal – or do not – has significant implications for how we create more just energy transitions.…
Knowledge Production, Toxic Corporate Capital, and the Anthropologist’s Entangled Ethics
The dominant disciplinary literature on cultures and practices of extractivism relies on a separation of “the field,” and the insights gained there, from our professional lives as anthropologists…
Felix Lussem: Alienating “facts” and uneven futures of energy transition
We are in the middle of the Rhineland’s lignite mining region, a semi-urban to rural area in the west of Germany. The landscape is considerably altered by past…
Mercury’s Toxic Touch
In Peru’s gold-rich Amazonian region of Madre de Dios (the Mother of God), the global demand for the precious metal has incentivized migration from the Andes to the…
#Reviews: Fires of Gold
As of 2019, Ghana is the country with the largest gold-mining industry in Africa, overtaking South Africa, after two South African gold mining companies shifted focus on the…
Rio Tinto: the Highest stage of rampant plunder Capitalism of the very worst kind
by Calla Wahlquist @callapilla Rio Tinto blasts 46,000-year-old Aboriginal site to expand iron ore mine Mining company was given permission to blast Juukan Gorge cave, which provided a…
Bougainville Independence in 10 Days to shake the world…
A long time coming, it is likely that Bourgainville will be independent – and still may or may not reopen the mine that made Riotinto billions. 15k dead…
The ruins of a mining economy, by Danny Hoffman
Still from the film Uppland Around the 23-minute mark in the short film, Uppland, an unidentified voice speaks over a series of historical images of Yekepa, Liberia. Male…
This Is Not a Goldmine: Capital, Conservation, and the Politics of Recruitment in the Deep Bismarck Sea
Editorial Note: This post is part of our series highlighting the work of the Anthropology and Environment Society’s 2018 Roy A. Rappaport Prize Finalists. We asked them to outline the…
Bodies of Flesh and Ore: Geosocial Formation of Miners and Metal in Highland Bolivia
Editorial Note: This post is part of our series highlighting the work of the Anthropology and Environment Society’s 2018 Roy A. Rappaport Prize Finalists. We asked them to outline the…
Commentary: Toxic Bodies, Part II
By Kristina Lyons, University of California, Santa Cruz § The president of the communal action committee whom I call Doña Marta ushered me to a more secluded corner behind…
Eeva Kesküla: How capitalists think about labor dynasties and corporate ethics
This contribution looks at the implications of how capitalists think about corporate ethics and moral obligations in monoindustrial towns. I present the cases of two mining towns in…
On Contamination: Conservation Science in Devilish Landscapes
By Meredith Root-Bernstein, Institut National de Recherche Agronomique, Grignon, France § When you first see the gold mine in Alhué you are impressed by how massive the cascade of…