I recommend you read the whole blog entry.
While my dissertation project is not
incredibly obscure, it usually only matters to a small number of
people -- most of whom live in Australia, Papua New Guinea, or Vancouver.
So I've been really amazed to see the New York Times's series on the impact of gold mining that has been running
recently -- suddenly my area of expertise is literally news. How do I feel
about the article, and how do I feel about the gold industry more
generally?
I study the relationship between
indigenous people in Papua New Guinea and the white senior management
of a gold mine that they work with. As someone who had studied
Melanesia for years before I lived there, and who lived in a local
community, the biggest problem I had was fitting in with the white
mining executives and not the local Papua New Guineans. Call it the
narcissism of small difference. Culture shock and fieldwork with Papua
New Guineans was easy in some sense, since no one really expected me to
fit in when I first arrived. Mine management, on the other hand, were
supposedly 'from my culture.' Learning to like and respect these men
(they were almost entirely men) was one of the hardest parts of my
fieldwork. They were mostly Australian and Canadian, and had the usual
Commonwealth suspicion of Yankees. I was an artist and an intellectual,
and over-educated to boot. While many of my informants in the mine had
some form of tertiary education it tended towards the vocational, or
the physical sciences. And they were MEN in
a way that I was not -- they talked about rugby and worked with their
hands and had pictures of naked (or nearly naked) women on their walls,
in there calendars, on their screen savers. And, of course, in the
struggle between landowners and company, I was sympathetic to my
indigenous hosts.
Of course, I can imagine how strange I
must have appeared to them: hopelessly young, over-educated, exotically
Jewish, under-nourished and unshaven. In fact of all of my fieldwork
experiences, one of the things that I am most proud of is the fact that
I established as close a rapport with them as I did. It was, for me,
one of the classical lessons of anthropological relativism: no matter
how savage and barbaric your natives -- in this case, Canadian
capitalists -- may seem to you, you need to learn to understand them....
The power of the Times article comes from
its title: Thirty tons an ounce. The massive amount of effort
undertaken -- and hardship inflicted -- for a single ring's worth of gold is
tremendous. And yet for the post-fieldwork me it is also emblematic of
the nature of the primary industry which supports first world
lifestyles. As one mine executive once remarked to me "if it's not
grown, it's mined." When staring at an open cut or touring float mills
its impossible to escape this fact. But the existence and extent of
primary industry is occluded from the view of most Americans. Times
readers may be disturbed by the process of gold mining, but what this
should really cause them to do is rethink not just gold mining, but
their lifestyle in general. Look up from your computer screen for a
moment and look around the room -- how much metal do you see? Imagine the
copper wires and metal pipes and lines of nails that stretch around you
for thousands of miles. Where did they come from?...
As for me, I own a computer and nice
knives and pots and pans. After two years of living in rural Papua New
Guinea I am more than ready to have the earth pay the price for my
current abode[base ']s indoor plumbing and electrification. But I've never
owned a car, don't want to, and I have various other idiosyncratic
personal commitments to simple living. I know my adopted family in
Papua New Guinea wants the same standard of living that I have (except
for the car part, which they can get behind), and I think they should
have the opportunity to have it as well. I just hope that the readers
of the Time's new series realize, as I did, that they have something to
come to grips with beyond just the problems of the gold industry.
Yes indeed, much to come to grips with.
8:57:34 PM 
|
|
