The Anthropology of Resource Extraction

Lorenzo D'Angelo, Robert Jan Pijpers, Lorenzo D'Angelo, Robert Jan Pijpers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000505870
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Tecnologia e ingegneria
• Subtopic: Ingegneria mineraria

This book offers an overview of the key debates in the burgeoning anthropological literature on resource extraction.

Resources play a crucial role in the contemporary economy and society, are required in the production of a vast range of consumer products and are at the core of geopolitical strategies and environmental concerns for the future of humanity. Scholars have widely debated the economic and sociological aspects of resource management in our societies, offering interesting and useful abstractions. However, anthropologists offer different and fresh perspectives – sometimes complementary and at other times alternative to these abstractions – based on field researches conducted in close contact with those actors (individuals as well as groups and institutions) that manipulate, anticipate, fight for, or resist the extractive processes in many creative ways. Thus, while addressing questions such as: "What characterizes the anthropology of resource extraction?", "What topics in the context of resource extraction have anthropologists studied?", and "What approaches and insights have emerged from this?", this book synthesizes and analyses a range of anthropological debates about the ways in which different actors extract, use, manage, and think about resources.

This comprehensive volume will serve as a key reading for scholars and students within the social sciences working on resource extraction and those with an interest in natural resources, environment, capitalism, and globalization. It will also be a useful resource for practitioners within mining and development.

1

The anthropology of resource extraction

An Introduction

Lorenzo D’Angelo and Robert Jan Pijpers

DOI: 10.4324/9781003018018-1

1 Introduction

The extraction and use of resources has long been a defining factor for society, as evidenced by the links that have been established between natural resources and certain phases of human history. Expressions such as “stone age”, “bronze age”, or “iron age” underline the determining role of particular technologies based on specific materials in conditioning the economic and political organization of past societies (see Boivin and Owoc 2004; Knapp et al. 2002). Similarly, yet in a more contemporary context, scholars have coined terms such as “petrocapitalism” (Huber 2017) and “carbon democracy” (Mitchell 2011) to understand how dependence on fossil fuels affects our global political and economic organization. Jacka (2018), on the other hand, proposes the more all-encompassing term “mineral age” to describe the current historical moment which stands out for its unprecedented levels of production and consumption of mineral resources (see also Arsel et al. 2016) and in which “our entire livelihoods are utterly dependent on minerals” (Jacka 2018: 62).

This utter dependence on minerals that defines our current world and time is indirectly illustrated by a recent study published in Nature (Elhacham et al. 2020). For the first time in history, this study certifies, the mass of human-made things exceeds all living biomass on Earth, comprising the mind-boggling volume of about one teraton (10¹⁸gr). While this study draws attention to the force and scale which human beings now bring to shaping the environment and Earth systems, a situation encapsulated by many scholars in the concept of the Anthropocene (e.g. Steffen et al. 2007), it does not consider the processes of extraction that underpin the creation of these human artefacts. After all, these human-made things – bridges, roads, houses, stapling machines, cars, planes, cell phones, pens, dams, electricity poles, traffic lights, sports medals, heaters, railway tracks, and so forth – all require the extraction of mineral resources ranging from iron ore, sand, copper, tin, tantalum, lithium, and gold to oil, gas, coal, and uranium.

The processes of extraction that are needed to recover these and many other mineral resources are as diverse as they are complex. They materialize in (and connect) different social, political, historical, and economic terrains, use different technologies, assume different scales (ranging from the artisanal to the industrial) and involve a wide variety of actors. These actors are integrated into different networks, take up different positions and have different ideas, perceptions, and understandings, as well as different interests, dependencies, and powers. Crucially, they all exercise a certain degree of influence on shaping the processes of resource extraction, albeit on highly unequal terms. It is exactly these processes, and how they are entangled in – that is, both shape and are shaped by – the social relationships and lifeworlds of hundreds of millions of people globally, that are at the centre of this volume on the anthropology of resource extraction.

2 Understanding a global affair

Unmistakeably, resource extraction is more than ever a global, planetary affair (cf. Arboleda 2020; Labban 2014), subsuming increasingly large volumes of earth, land surface, and numbers of people. Resonating with processes of acceleration and exponential growth that can be observed in contemporary society more broadly (Eriksen 2016), the global annual volume of extracted materials has tripled in the last 50 years, growing from 27 billion tons in 1970 to 92 billion tons in 2017 (Oberle et al. 2019) – the equivalent of more than 9.1 million Eiffel Towers. In the last two decades or so, this growth has been particularly rapid due to the most recent commodity super-cycle, that is, a period marked by unusually high demand for and price increases in primary commodities, typically, but not exclusively, related to processes of industrialization (e.g. Burton et al. 2021; Ericsson and Löf 2019). Indeed, the most recent of such cycles began at the turn of the millennium and was largely driven by industrialization processes in the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China), particularly in China. While this cycle has just ended, the next one is already knocking on planet Earth’s door, and is this time likely to be linked to global “green” or “clean” energy and technology agendas that depend on the extraction of ever increasing quantities of minerals such as nickel, lithium, copper, and cobalt (IEA 2021). Not surprisingly, along with population growth and consumption patterns, the OECD anticipates that over the next 40 years the global annual amounts of extracted materials will double (OECD 2019).

All these materials require different types of operation to be extracted. However, a common aspect of all extractive activities – whether carried out by artisanal miners using spades and buckets or large-scale companies employing automated excavators – is “the need to move earth” (Bridge 2004: 209). It follows that the large volumes of extracted resources mentioned above require the movement of an even greater amount of earth. Illustratively, it is estimated that to obtain an ounce of gold, 30 metric tons of rock need to be processed, while some of the largest mines in the world move up to half a million metric tons of earth a day in order to obtain these 30 tons (Perlez and Johnson 2010). All this movement of earth is estimated to potentially have an impact on 50 million km² of our planet’s surface (Sonter et al. 2020; see also Maus et al. 2020) – which is more than the surface of Africa and Latin America combined. Among the territories concerned are those that have an important ecological role (Oberle et al. 2019) and, according to the United Nations International Resource Panel, 90% of biodiversity loss and global water stress is caused by the extraction and processing of natural resources, while the metal and mineral industries contribute to about 50% of the emissions of greenhouse gases, that is, those gases that are most worrying because of their role in atmospheric and climate changes (ibid.).

This large-scale significance of resource extraction also features in other domains. In many (mostly low and middle-level income) countries, for example, extraction takes a more-than prominent position in national economies. In Suriname, almost 20% of the country’s total GDP derives from mineral rents, while in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mongolia, and Bolivia, about 91%, 85%, and 43% of total export values, respectively, are extraction-related (ICMM 2020). Moreover, in terms of livelihood opportunities and employment, it is estimated that artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) offers a direct livelihood opportunity to approximately 40 million people globally, while the number of those dependent on ASM is estimated at 150 million (IIED 2017). Moving from the artisanal and small-scale to the industrial scale, and from global to national-level figures, shows that in 2017, for example, the minerals sector employed 634,000 individuals in Canada,¹ 240,000 in Australia² and 457,698 in South Africa, where another 4.5 million people are being considered so-called dependents.³ Yet, in contrast with this large number of people to whom extraction offers an opportunity, many also face severe challenges and risks due to the extraction of resources within or near their living environments. In this regard, the number of conflicts reported in the Environmental Justice Atlas (Temper et al. 2015), although far from complete, as well as the estimation that coal mining in India alone caused the displacement of more than 2.55 million people between 1950 and 1990 (Downing 2002), are as equally telling as they are striking.

Taking all of the above into account, it is clear that “the power of the mineral world is difficult to ignore” (Boivin 2004: 1), and understanding the wide variety of dynamics that are connected to extraction seems to be more pertinent than ever before. The question is how to give shape to this attention and grasp the full complexities and effects of resource extraction. After all, as much as these flows, volumes, and numbers reveal that resource extraction is a factor that concerns humanity as a whole – and one marked by high degrees of inequality, contestation, and ambivalence, to say the least – they can only offer abstract, incomplete, and homogenizing representations of what are complex and variegated processes. As such, these flows, volumes, and numbers reflect both a disconnection of extractive environments from larger production systems (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016; see also Bunker 1984; Ciccantel and Smith 2009) and a “depersonalisation that has dominated accounts of the political economy of resource extraction” (Gilberthorpe and Rajak 2016: 8). Consequently, many of the dynamics that inform how resource extraction is entangled in social, political, economic, and physical environments and how a wide variety of actors attempt to shape this entanglement are left unaddressed or even obscured.

One may wonder, for instance, exactly what the environments in which extraction materializes look like. What is the range of values and moralities attributed to them and the mineral resources that they contain? What livelihood activities do these environments enable or foreclose? What are the histories of these environments, and what role does extraction play in these histories? Who are the people inhabiting and giving shape to these environments? What are their aspirations, dreams, challenges, and fears? And how does extraction, which generates both opportunities and extensive forms of disruption, affect their lives in all their different facets? These questions point to the social worlds in which extraction is situated – and which are, to varying degrees, shaped by extraction – as well as the processes through which extraction materializes and comes to exist in these social worlds. After all, extractive practices are dependent on a range of processes whereby transnational corporations or individual artisanal miners attempt to seek and maintain acc...