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10.1146/annurev.anthro.32.061002.093116

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2003. 32:287–313

doi: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.32.061002.093116
Copyright ° c 2003 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved
First published online as a Review in Advance on June 17, 2003

RESOURCE WARS: The Anthropology of Mining

Chris Ballard
Division of Pacific and Asian History, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies,
The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia;
email: chris.ballard@anu.edu.au
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2003.32:287-313. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

Glenn Banks
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School of Geography and Oceanography, University College, University of New South

Wales, Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia; email: Glenn.Banks@adfa.edu.au

Key Words globalization, corporation, community, state, engagement

■ Abstract The scope for an anthropology of mining has been dramatically trans-
formed since the review by Ricardo Godoy, published in this review journal in 1985.
The minerals boom of the 1980s led to an aggressive expansion of mine development in
greenfield areas, many of them the domains of indigenous communities. Under consid-
erable pressure, the conventional binary contest between states and corporations over
the benefits and impacts of mining has been widened to incorporate the representa-
tions of local communities, and broad but unstable mining communities now coalesce
around individual projects. Focused primarily on projects in developing nations of
the Asia-Pacific region, this review questions the often-monolithic characterizations
of state, corporate, and community forms of agency and charts the debate among an-
thropologists involved in mining, variously as consultants, researchers, and advocates,
about appropriate terms for their engagement.

BOOM TIMES? MINING AND ANTHROPOLOGY

During the two decades since this journal published a seminal review of anthropo-
logical perspectives on mining (Godoy 1985), the field has been transformed by
dramatic developments in the global mining industry and corresponding shifts in
the nature and emphasis of related research and theory. An earlier focus on mining
labor and the threat posed by transnational mining capital to the sovereignty of
newly independent nation-states has given way to a much broader frame for en-
quiry that addresses the exceptional complexity of the relationships that coalesce
around mining projects. Yet, despite the potential of ethnographic studies of mining
to address questions of considerable contemporary interest in anthropology, such
as globalization, indigenous rights, and new social movements, the anthropology
of mining remains largely under-researched and under-theorized (see Knapp &
Pigott 1997). It is surprising, given the transnational nature of the industry, that
studies of mining have been persistently parochial and regional in their scope.
0084-6570/03/1021-0287$14.00 287
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Figure 1 Average annual gold and copper prices, 1970–2002.

This paper reviews the range of developments in the field since Godoy’s essay,
identifies a number of areas that warrant further consideration, and argues the case
for re-conceiving mining projects as sites for critical anthropological research.
The remarkable boom in mineral prices of the late 1970s and early 1980s
(Figure 1) promoted an explosion of mineral prospecting activity across the globe,
particularly in the largely under-explored Asia-Pacific region. Most of the mining
projects realized as a result of the 1980s exploration bonanza have been located
in greenfield territories or frontier zones, among relatively remote or marginalized
indigenous communities (Howard 1988)—often precisely those communities that
have been the classic focus of ethnographic research. These local communities have
swiftly assumed a pivotal position in the politics and analyses of the wider global
mining community, however unequally they might be positioned with respect to
the distribution of the benefits and the negative impacts of the industry.
At least two parallel developments over this same period have further con-
tributed to the strategic significance of mining projects for a broader range of actors.
The first has been the growing recognition of the rights of indigenous communi-
ties, a process marked by events such as the establishment of the United Nations
Working Group on Indigenous Populations in 1982, the subsequent development
of a U.N. Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the increasing
prominence of indigenous social movements and non-government organizations
(NGOs) dedicated to indigenous rights (Pritchard 1998, Ali & Behrendt 2001).
The second has been the institutionalization of impact assessment for large-scale
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RESOURCE WARS 289

mining operations (often the result of considerable external pressure), allowing for
the incorporation of local communities as key players in many of these resource
developments (Vanclay & Bronstein 1995, O’Faircheallaigh 1999). The introduc-
tion of local communities as stakeholders into the previously binary relationship
between states and corporations has led to the widespread adoption by industry an-
alysts of a three-legged or triad stakeholder model (e.g., Howitt et al. 1996a, p. 25).
Although the triad stakeholder model has served usefully as a provisional ana-
lytical device allowing for some flexibility in the identification of key agents and
their interests, it has not generally served to capture much of the complexity of
the relationships that form around mining as a site (Clark & Clark 1999; MMSD
2002, p. 58). As a sense of this broader mining community has developed, so too
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is there an increasing awareness of the internal complexity of what had previously

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been considered the monolithic entities of community, state, and corporation. The
involvement of national and international NGOs, legal agencies, and individual
lawyers, and a globalizing media served by novel means of communication such
as the Internet, has produced a multi-sited and multi-vocal arena for interaction
of exceptional proportions (Marcus 1995). By introducing this new global cast
of agents and a novel range of interconnected locations, mining has the potential
to extend conventional lines of anthropological enquiry and, through the engage-
ment of anthropologists as consultants and advocates, to pose a further challenge
to ethnographic reflexivity.
That said, mining is no ethnographic playground. Relationships between dif-
ferent actors within the broader mining community have often been characterized
by conflict, ranging from ideological opposition and dispute to armed conflict
and the extensive loss of lives, livelihoods, and environments. Several of the key
low-level conflicts experienced in the Asia-Pacific region during the 1990s have
revolved around mining projects, such as the Bougainville rebellion in Papua New
Guinea, which started at the Panguna mine (Filer 1990, Denoon 2000), the dispute
over the ecological disasters of the Ok Tedi mine (Banks & Ballard 1997, Kirsch
2002), and the human rights abuses associated with the Freeport mine in Indonesian
Papua or Irian Jaya (Abrash 2002). The positioning of anthropologists within these
“resource wars” (Gedicks 1993) is far from simple, and a parallel war of sorts is
being waged within the discipline about the nature and scope of appropriate forms
of engagement.
The open-ended nature of the global mining community militates against the
possibility of a comprehensive review, either of recent developments or of the
relevant literature, and this paper is thus necessarily limited in its focus. Our
principal concern is with recent engagements between indigenous communities
and large-scale hard-rock mines. Small-scale and artisanal mining, state-owned
corporations, and the oil and gas industries are not addressed here, though there
are substantial continuities in terms of practices and experiences between these
sites and the large-scale mines (for recent studies of small-scale mining, see Godoy
1990; MacMillan 1995; MMSD 2002, Chapter 13). We limit ourselves largely to
the literature published since the appearance of Godoy’s 1985 review and, through
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ignorance on our part, to English-language materials. Though we make reference

to broader global contexts and cases, our primary regional focus is Asia-Pacific,
where a considerable proportion of the post-1980 growth in mining and in related
literatures has taken place.
Although we seek to identify some of the limitations of the now-conventional
triad stakeholder model, the various institutions that relate to the three central
categories—corporation, state, and community—have a persistent presence, de-
manding that they continue to be treated as fundamental components of any analy-
sis. Accordingly, our review pans across these three principal categories, opening
with the corporations, as the primary global players in the field, before turning to
states and then local communities. The review closes by considering the politics of
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engagement for anthropologists and other social scientists embroiled in the arena
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of large-scale mining—a politics with immediate implications for the nature and
direction of academic inquiry.

MINING CORPORATIONS, FROM

WITHIN AND WITHOUT
The central, common element in these contemporary resource wars, the stake-
holder category which unites the field, is the multinational corporation (MNC). In
the context of mining, however, corporations have not generally been subjected
to the same level of attention as the other categories of actor in the stakeholder
triad. Anthropologists have preferred to maintain their focus on the more familiar
“exotic,” addressing the position of local communities in the vicinity of mines in
preference over the less familiar multinational mining corporations. One conse-
quence of this focus is that the figure of “the mining company” lurks monolithically
and often menacingly in the background of many anthropological accounts of com-
munities affected by mining operations. This simple characterization is unfortunate
because the dynamics of the corporations involved in mining are often at least as
complex, revealing, and challenging as those of governments or local communities.
Closer attention to the internal structure and politics of mining corporations has
the potential to offer rich insight into the anthropology of multinational capital and
its global processes and local entanglements more generally. However, one of the
principal reasons for the enduring opacity of mining corporations is their notorious
reluctance to expose themselves directly to ethnographic scrutiny, a condition exac-
erbated by a corresponding willingness to monitor and enforce corporate security.
One outcome of recent studies, by anthropologists and other social scientists,
of corporate actors has been a more critical perspective on the nature and di-
versity of multinational mining corporations. This has led to an examination of
the ways in which these corporations function internally, particularly in terms of
hierarchy, power, and gender relationships within the corporation and their im-
plications for external relationships with states and local communities. Anthropo-
logical perspectives on multinationals have moved beyond the “corporate culture”
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RESOURCE WARS 291

approach popular in management literature (Rouse & Fleising 1995). Critical el-
ements of this new approach to corporations include analyses of the effects of the
new shareholder-driven capitalism on organizational behavior (Emel 2002) and the
role of institutions and individual investors in shaping corporate decisions (Evans
et al. 2001a), particularly in light of Enron’s collapse in 2001 (Bryce & Ivins 2002).
Similarly, attempts by corporations to come to terms with their place in a rapidly
changing world and to respond to the negative shift in public perception of the min-
ing industry can be revealing processes. One recent example is the controversial
Mining Minerals and Sustainable Development project (MMSD), a major “global”
initiative funded by a consortium of the largest mining corporations and admin-
istered by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).
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The MMSD process involved extensive stakeholder consultation and a series of

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regional and thematic reviews of the current state of the industry and its prospects
for contributing toward sustainable development, in anticipation of the Johan-
nesburg Rio+10 Earth Summit (MMSD 2002). Although a number of the larger
mainstream NGOs, such as The World Conservation Union (IUCN) and Conser-
vation International, became engaged in the MMSD process, the industry’s more
trenchant critics have contested the industry’s pretensions to sustainability and
condemned the project as a further instance of corporate greenwash (Mines and
Communities 2001). Under pressure from civil society groups, the World Bank
has also initiated a process of review of its participation in oil and mining projects
(Extractive Ind. Rev. 2003).
To date there has been little academic commentary on these processes (al-
though see Filer 2002) or their potential to influence the nature of the MNCs
themselves and the manner in which they operate. Likewise the effects of the emer-
gence of global NGOs specifically monitoring mining operations have yet to be
fully explored. These organizations include the U.S.-based Project Underground
and Mineral Policy Centre, MiningWatch Canada, the Mineral Policy Institute
(Australia), JATAM (Indonesia), and Partizans (England). Although primarily fo-
cused on environmental and human rights campaigns connected with mines, these
groups may potentially have an important influence over corporate behavior. Emel
(2002, p. 841) offers a useful case study of the impact of NGO-led shareholder
protest on the activities of Freeport-McMoRan, concluding that although such
strategies “are demonstrably plausible methods to reform the worst corporate so-
cial and environmental behaviour,” they “put an enormous strain on the scant re-
sources of NGOs.” Moves by some of the mining corporations to “constructively
engage” with critics have themselves sparked debates within the NGO community
about the ethics and effectiveness of such engagement (B. Burton 1998).

Laboring Within the Corporation

Mining has long provided a rich source of material for researchers interested in
labor issues and industrial relations, a central feature of Godoy’s 1985 review. The
“making and undoing of a working class” (Emberson-Bain 1994a, p. 1; Quamina
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1987), militancy, and the conflictual nature of labor relations at mine sites are
some of the more enduring themes associated with mining in both developed and
developing nations (Denoon et al. 1996, Session E). In an important study, the life
worlds of generations of African migrant mine workers, their collective organi-
zation, their experiences of and responses to violence (intertribal and interracial),
and the negotiation of sexuality within mining camps have been documented by
Moodie & Ndatshe (1994). A similar analysis of labor relations at the Ombilin
coal mines in Sumatra identifies both transformations and continuities in labor
conditions over more than a century (Erwiza 1999). Subcontractors can be an im-
portant, though often migratory, element in the local community and often are not
subject to the same labor standards (or attention from researchers) as mine workers
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themselves (J.T. Roberts 1995).

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Recent studies of indigenous mine workers in Papua New Guinea (Polier 1994,
Jorgensen 1998, Imbun 1999) build on the ground-breaking works of Taussig
(1980) and Nash (1979) on the intersection of tradition and modernity among
South American miner communities. Here the collision between industrialized
work practices and remote communities has resulted in the incorporation of mining
within indigenous frameworks for the comprehension and apprehension of global
processes. In an interesting reversal of the focus on indigenous workers, Cannon
(2003) has explored the discourses and practices of expatriates in the mining indus-
tries of Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. The strongly patriarchal nature of the
industry and its workforce fuels a transnational mining labor culture that places a
premium on expressions of masculinity, alcohol, and violence (see Emberson-Bain
1994b and further dicussion below). Prostitution forms a prominent part of this
frontier culture and has assumed a new significance in the AIDS era, particularly
among migrant labor in South Africa (Campbell 1997, Elias et al. 2001). Mining
towns have been a particular focus of studies that explore the dynamics of race and
class in Papua New Guinea (Imbun 1995, Polier 1994), Indonesia (Erwiza 1999,
Robinson 1986), Chile and the United States (Finn 1998), and Zambia (Ferguson
1999). The mining town frequently functions as a symbol and promise of moder-
nity for local communities and workers alike, though residents all too frequently
find themselves betrayed, cast aside, and disconnected from the processes of de-
velopment and modernity that globalization promises (Ferguson 1999, p. 236).

Mining Discourses
Recently, there have been some provocative explorations into the discursive realms
of multinational corporations. Trigger’s (1997) exploration of the rhetoric of min-
ing multinationals, and particularly the language and the ethos that underpin re-
lations between corporations and the landscapes and the local communities with
which they engage, opens up additional fertile ground for anthropologists (see also
McEachern 1995). Tsing’s analysis of the Bre-X scandal—an investor bubble built
upon a nonexistent gold find in Indonesia—highlights the performative aspects of
speculative multinational mining capital, noting that “the self-conscious making
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RESOURCE WARS 293

of a spectacle” (2000, p. 118) is a critical component of the strategies of mining

corporations seeking to raise capital for further exploration. In this context the cri-
tique of political economy accounts of global capital advanced by Gibson-Graham
(1996) is instructive. Building on work that has its origins in part in the coalfield
communities of Australia, Gibson-Graham argues for a querying of globalization
and the discourse of a capitalist hegemony. The process of producing discourses
of capitalism and anti-capitalism has created a hegemonic “beast” that has “es-
tranged rather than united understanding and action” (1996, p. 1). The implications
of this perspective for our understanding of multinational mining corporations
are potentially far-reaching and provide an imperative to interrogate conceptions
of multinational miners as homogenous, powerful, hierarchical, rational, profit-
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seeking beasts. Schoenberger (1994) and O’Neill & Gibson-Graham (1999) offer
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insight into the intensely personal, political, contradictory, and discursive nature of
decision making among management within various multinational corporations,
suggesting that the logic of capital is routinely undone by other contingent factors:
Capitalist forms and processes are continually made and unmade; if we offer
singular predictions we allow ourselves to be caught by them as ideologies . . . .
Attention to contingency and articulation can help us describe both the cul-
tural specificity and the fragility of capitalist—and globalist—success stories.
(Tsing 2000, pp. 142–43)
Further fragmentation of the monolithic image of multinational mining capital
occurs in the interactions between local, national, and expatriate workers and man-
agement, which span cultural, spatial, and temporal divides. Tensions frequently
arise within corporations between jobsite staff and headquarters management, par-
ticularly in the area of social or community issues (Burton 1996). As Dirlik (2001,
p. 26) notes, “corporations as agents of globalization internalise the contradictions
that are implicit in the incorporation of different cultural situations with their own
productive procedures.” The proliferation of functions within mining multination-
als over the past two decades contributes to this contradiction, creating departments
with conflicting mandates, such as community affairs and company security. In
the case of corporate joint ventures, or many of the recent spate of mergers, the
intersection of different corporate cultures and agendas can produce further inter-
nal tension, such as the unhappy declaration of irreconcilable differences between
the cultures of the recently merged BHP and Billiton corporations (FitzGerald
2003). The diversity contained under the rubric of multinational mining capital is
a significant, though often overlooked, element of encounters between corpora-
tions and other stakeholders. A cursory examination of the World Mining Direc-
tory, a comprehensive global directory of mining companies, reveals substantial
variation in corporate structures, with complex webs of subsidiaries and shared
project ownership (Moreno & Tegen 1998). The links between national corporate
management and political elites, extensively documented in the cases of Freeport-
McMoRan’s Indonesian operations (Leith 2002) and Rio Tinto Zinc’s failed Cerro
Colorado Copper Project in Panama (Gjording 1991), provide valuable insight into
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global corporate governance that might usefully be pursued by anthropologists

elsewhere.
The outwardly opaque, monolithic, and often overwhelming presence of a multi-
national mining corporation then tends to mask considerable complexity. Mining
companies are temporally, spatially, and socially differentiated entities that, as
Jackson observed, “are by no means as omniscient or as fiendishly clever as they
are usually depicted but are capable of the same lack of foresight and blessed with
the same proclivity to create monumental stuff ups as everyone else” (1993, p. 169).

CHALLENGES FOR AND TO THE STATE

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Globalized Miners
Globalization marks a useful point of departure for discussion of the role of the
state in mining. Hirst & Thompson (1995, p. 409), among others, have argued
convincingly that the death of the nation-state has been greatly exaggerated by
both critics and proponents of globalization: “While the nation state’s capacities for
governance have changed and in many respects [. . .] have weakened considerably,
it remains a pivotal institution.” This holds particularly true in the case of mining
because governments tend to play “an exceptionally large role in the resources
sector of almost all developing countries” (Ross 1999, p. 305; MMSD 2002, p. 66)
for a number of reasons. First, the legal and administrative institutions of nation-
states still regulate the entry of multinational miners into a country, despite World
Bank and International Monetary Fund prescriptions throughout the 1980s and
1990s that encouraged the relaxation of conditions for foreign investors in the
mineral sectors of developing countries (Sassen 2000, p. 228). Although this trend
has been reversed in some cases (the Philippines, for example), most states are now
inclined to view investment by multinational miners more favorably than in the
past (MMSD 2002, p. 172). Nationalization is not currently the threat for mining
houses in their dealings with states that it was in the 1970s; indeed, the privatization
of existing national companies and mining operations is a more common trend.
A second continuing role for states, and one that is increasingly critical in a
competitive global economy, is the setting of financial, labor, and environmental
regulations for mining operations and corporations. Here the danger identified by
industry critics is of a race to the bottom in terms of environmental and labor regu-
lation, and fiscal regimes, as countries reduce standards in order to secure a share of
diminishing global mining exploration funds (Evans et al. 2001b). State responses
to the concerns of offshore NGO critics have been couched almost universally
in the language of national sovereignty, arguing that independent countries and
not western-based NGOs should set these standards. In terms of the relationship
between states and the minerals sector, Shafer (1994) advances an argument that
the state itself will be shaped fundamentally by the nature of the leading export
sector in mineral-dependent economies. Where a small number of large firms with
large, fixed capital investments dominate the country’s exports, the state tends to
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RESOURCE WARS 295

focus on tapping revenue from these sectors to the neglect of other sectors of the
economy and conflates the interests of the dominant sector with the broader long-
term interests of the nation. In this sense, mineral resource exploitation and state
policy direction are intimately connected.

Cursed States?
Mining has been central to the evolution of the notion that resources can be a curse
that gives rise to a lack of development, internal tensions, human rights abuses, and
conflict at the national level. Auty (1993, p. 1) first provided the resource curse label
and systematically demonstrated that “not only may resource-rich countries fail to
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benefit from a favourable endowment, they may actually perform worse than less
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well endowed countries.” In particular, the ore-exporting, resource-rich economies

recorded a significantly lower average growth (in the period 1970–1993, it was a
0.2% decline in GDP/capita per annum) than small resource-poor countries (Auty
& Mikesell 1998, p. 87). Explanations for this trend have varied but tend to focus
on economic and political factors, with an emphasis on the economic distortion
that export booms can induce in a mineral-dependent economy. The effects on the
non-mining sectors of the economy (including agriculture and manufacturing) can
be stifling, with exports becoming less competitive and wages more expensive. In
terms of political factors, the mismanagement (or inappropriate economic man-
agement) of the economic boom is a key factor. Increased government revenue can
lead to myopic policy formulation; greater rent-seeking behavior by individuals,
classes, sectors, or interest groups; and the general weakening of state institutions,
with less emphasis on accountable and transparent systems of governance (Ross
1999; MMSD 2002, p. 174). Ross (1999, pp. 319–20) contends that a further prox-
imate cause of the resource curse for a country may hinge on the failure of a state
to enforce property rights, allowing criminal gangs, private militias, or nascent
rebel armies to extract rents themselves from the resource developer.
Collier & Hoeffler (2000) have elaborated on the resource-curse thesis by ar-
guing that economic aspects are only part of the challenge posed to the state
by resource wealth. A more sinister characteristic of a dependency on natural
resources, and on mineral resources in particular, has been their link with civil
conflict (see also MMSD 2002, pp. 192–93). In their analysis of the causes of
73 civil conflicts between 1965 and 1999, Collier & Hoeffler found that the most
powerful explanatory factor was whether or not the country derived a substantial
share of its GDP from the export of primary commodities. Minerals rate a special
mention for Collier (2000, p. 9), as they are especially “vulnerable to looting and
taxation because their production relies heavily on assets which are long-lasting
and immobile.” Switzer (2001) suggests that mining can become a source of con-
flict over the control of resources and resource territories, the right to participate
in decision making and benefit sharing, social and environmental impacts, and
the means used to secure access to resources and to personnel; mining operations
can then be used to finance conflict but may also both benefit from conflict and
themselves become targets for conflict. The presence of mineral wealth has also
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296 BALLARD ¥ BANKS

been a factor in attempts at secession, with Zaire and Bougainville (Papua New
Guinea) offering examples of this tendency.
The recent MMSD report (2002, p. 188) notes that human rights abuses as-
sociated with mining are most likely to occur where a corporation is “willing to
work with repressive regimes or in countries with weak governance or rule of
law.” In examples of the first case, the presence of an authoritarian, rent-extracting
state and a complicit corporation is likely to lead to abuses against opponents of
mining operations and particularly local communities (Handelsman 2002; MMSD
2002, pp. 188–89). Dinnen (2001, Chapter 5) provides an example of the second
case, suggesting that state violence around mining projects can also manifest in
weak states, although in a more chaotic and less deterministic way. In weak states,
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strategic assets such as mines have been secured by engaging mercenaries, as in

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the cases of Angola and Ghana in Africa and the failed Sandline affair in Papua
New Guinea (Dinnen 1997).

States and Mining Communities

Mineral resources, along with oil, pose particular challenges to states in terms
of their relationships with local communities in the vicinity of a project. In part,
this stems from the multiple and often conflicting interests being pursued by el-
ements of the state. As one obvious example, departments of finance regularly
clash with those involved in regulating the social and environmental impacts of
mining projects (MMSD 2002, p. 66). More fundamentally, though, the problems
confronting states in the development of natural resources are issues of legitimacy
and national identity. Among local communities on the remote resource frontiers
of Asia-Pacific, Africa, and South America, the state’s claims to mineral owner-
ship are frequently greeted with scepticism or even outright denial. In large part,
this derives from the lack of an effective state presence in these resource frontiers:
“Where the institutions of the state have little or no presence, material or symbolic,
in the village, the ability of the state to insist upon its sovereignty—its voice—is
open to challenge” (Ballard 1997, p. 49).
The material evidence of a state’s presence has proved to be critical in Papua
New Guinea, as elsewhere; a state that delivers services to the village, such as
education, health, justice, security, and development, will usually find its claims
to authority and legitimacy (and thus its claims to mineral ownership) respected,
although not necessarily uncontested. Where state capacity to deliver these services
is limited (through political or economic constraints), communities are likely to be
more inclined to have less regard for the authority and claims of the state. J. Burton
(1998) provides a case study of a “mal-administered mining province” in Papua
New Guinea that highlights how “pathologies of provincial administration” can
leave regions with no evidence of state or corporate local development initiatives.
In such cases, the response of communities is likely to mirror the blunt contention
of Lihir Landowners Association Chairman, Mark Soipang, during negotiations
over the development of the mine: “The developers are foreigners and the State
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RESOURCE WARS 297

is only a concept. It is us, the landowners, who represent real life and people”
(Filer 1996a, p. 68). Under these conditions, communities are likely to pursue and
protect their own interests directly with potential developers, effectively seeking
to bypass the state. In Papua New Guinea this has resulted in major concessions
by the state in favor of mine-affected communities and increasing pressure on
states in the region from host communities to relinquish revenues, control, or
even sovereignty over mineral resources. In both the Porgera and Ok Tedi cases,
control over government mine-derived development revenues has been returned to
the mining companies, with the support of local communities. To developers, this
process appears to be, in Filer’s (1996b, p. 94) colorful phrase, “the ‘Melanesian
Way’ of menacing the mining industry,” a process that is marked by a characteristic
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diversity and instability of the political relationships between persons, institutions,

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and communities that constitute their national policy process. There is a multitude
of menaces then but very little in the way of moral messages or purposes. The end
result is that the development of mineral resources is central to the reshaping of the
ideologies and discourses of the state, a political variation on Shafer’s economic
argument noted above.

CONSTITUTING LOCAL COMMUNITIES

Local Communities and Resource Control

Of the three core categories of stakeholder in the mining community, the so-called
local communities are both the most recent addition and the most flexible and
extensible group. The boundaries and roles within the mining community of the
corporations and the relevant government agencies appear relatively prescribed
and, in some respects, mutually complementary. In contrast, local communities
are only summoned into being or defined as such by the presence or the potential
presence of a mining project. This is not to deny somehow the existence of other
forms of community prior to the mine’s presence or to suggest that these com-
munities do not play an instrumental role in their own definition. Our intention,
instead, is to stress that the composition of the local community in the context
of a broader mining community is in no way certain or predictable. Particular,
contingent histories of engagement around mining projects yield specific forms of
local community, which are themselves subject to continuous processes of trans-
formation over the life of a mining project.
Howard (1994/1995, p. 112) identifies at least four possible constituents of an
indigenous local community in the context of mining in Southeast Asia: indigenous
communities with pre-industrial life styles; agriculturalists interested in securing
benefits from mining; small-scale miners, often in competition with large-scale
operations; and mineworkers. Whereas, in some locations such as Kalimantan
(Kunanayagam & Young 1998), these different interest groups may map onto dis-
tinct communities, in Papua New Guinea all four are likely to be represented within
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298 BALLARD ¥ BANKS

a single ethnic community and to be bound in common alliance against immigrants

(or squatters in contemporary parlance) from neighboring communities. The fol-
lowing discussion draws heavily on the extensive literature of the past decade on
local communities in Papua New Guinea as one of the better-documented locations
for the engagement between mining and indigenous communities.
Membership often poses a substantial problem for local communities (in ways
that it does not for governments or corporations) and is the source of much internal
and external competition and conflict. The identity of local communities appears
in most instances to be constituted largely through discourses of rights claimed (to
land, to membership, to compensation, etc.) or rights abused (human rights, land
rights, environmental rights, exclusion from membership, etc.), though Gardner
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(2001, p. 102) issues the important caveat that the “language of rights,” read too
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literally by those seeking to generate legally binding settlements, can obscure “the
complex processes which distribute people in space.” Li (2000, p. 149) neatly
captures the process whereby a local community is generated when she observes
that the self-identification of a group as tribal or indigenous is not natural or
inevitable, but neither is it simply invented, adopted, or imposed. It is rather a
positioning that draws upon historically sedimented practices, landscapes, and
repertoires of meaning and emerges through particular patterns of engagement
and struggle.
In the process of self-definition in order to represent their interests to government
and corporate agencies, or to other local communities, communities in the vicinity
of a mining project employ both traditional and novel strategies of inclusion and
exclusion. The bases for membership of local communities derive from the tension
between competing strategies of inclusion and exclusion, which often turn upon
rhetorics of land, kinship, myth, and cosmology. Over time, these strategies have the
capacity to introduce inequalities of distribution and marginalization among local
communities, along the classic fault lines of gender, age, class, and group identity.
Many local communities in the vicinity of mining projects have been subjected
to massive dislocation and negative impacts. Indigenous communities have borne
the brunt of much of the exploration and mine development associated with the
1980s boom and are often already marginalized both economically and politically
within the nation (Howard 1991). The log of mining-related grievances endured by
these communities is remarkable, with countless instances of grave abuses of basic
human rights, including dispossession of land and livelihoods, individual murder,
and mass killings (Handelsman 2002). A vast reservoir of often well-grounded
suspicion harbored by local communities and their supporters thus attaches to the
intentions and operations of governments and corporations alike in the context of
mining projects.
However, in contrast with analyses that would view grievances over specific
issues such as ecological damage as the dominant impetus for local community
engagement with mining projects (Hyndman 1994, Kirsch 2001), we contend that
most local communities are fundamentally concerned with questions of control
over their own destinies, both in relation to the state and in terms of the management
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RESOURCE WARS 299

of projects, the flow of benefits, and the limitation or redistribution of mining

impacts (Wesley-Smith 1990, p. 18; Banks 2002). Community protest over en-
vironmental destruction is, at one level and quite obviously, in response to and
about environmental destruction; but such protest is not always reducible to a pri-
oritization of environmental concern over other interests, however strongly this
image might resonate with western notions of indigenous ecological stewardship
(Conklin & Graham 1995).
Distinguishing or singling out ecological from other community interests is a
curiously archaic argument, given current anthropological thought on the essen-
tial entanglement and integration of the different facets of social life previously
conceived of as distinct institutions. Our intention is not to replace an ecological
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basis for protest with narrowly defined economic interests, as some authors have
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implied (Hyndman 2001, p. 39; Kirsch 1997, pp. 128–29), but is rather to suggest
that a concern with control over fundamental questions of community sovereignty
is expressed through a multitude of channels and means and must often appeal
to more powerful (and often western) audiences through the most potent and fa-
miliar tropes, such as abuses of basic human rights or environmental destruction
(Macintyre & Foale 2002).

Strategies of Inclusion and Exclusion

The various strategies of inclusion and exclusion adopted by local communities
in the process of defining themselves and their interests cannot be seen as purely
instrumental. Seemingly capricious changes in traditional law or in the means of
determining community membership reflect both the inherent flexibility of local
communities (in defiance of ethnographic attempts to establish fixed forms) and
a politics rendered necessary by severe imbalances in the distribution of power
(Guddemi 1997, p. 647; Zimmer-Tamakoshi 1997, p. 659): “Complexity, collabo-
ration, and creative engagement in both local and global arenas, rather than simple
deceit, imposition, or reactive opportunism, best describe these processes and re-
lationships” (Li 2000, p. 173).
Disputes over access to and ownership of mineral resources have generated
protracted confrontations between the legal apparatus of the state and the precepts
of local communities, many of which first encounter the full power of the state’s
sovereign claims to resources only through this process of dispute (Howitt et al.
1996a). Much of the fiercest opposition to mining from local communities has been
generated as a consequence of dispossession of land, degradation of a community’s
resources, and physical relocation of resident communities (Connell & Howitt
1991, Asian Dev. Bank 2000).
For most local communities in Papua New Guinea, land serves as a convenient
discursive point of reference to ties to locality and to kin: “A claim to land, rather
than some abstract notion of citizenship, is how the majority of Melanesians se-
cure a foothold on the political stage and gain the attention of the state” (Ballard
1997, p. 48). This holds particularly true in the case of mining, where the industry
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300 BALLARD ¥ BANKS

is concerned primarily with securing access and leasehold rights to territory and
only secondarily with questions of engagement with local residents. Residence
and land ownership thus emerge as the principal bases for corporate and govern-
ment identification and recognition of local community membership—a priority
often swiftly appreciated and strategically incorporated by prospective community
members (Jorgensen 2001). The apparent simplicity and neatness of this cadastral
form of identity is deceptive, however, precisely because land condenses a host
of social relationships for which territory serves as a form of shorthand reference.
Filer (1997, pp. 162–68) and Jackson (1992) have both noted how the resources
boom of the 1980s led to the development of an ideology of landowners in Papua
New Guinea, in which land assumed a new relationship with identity in the na-
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tional context. As the relative power of local communities in negotiating processes

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has grown from one mining agreement to the next, that power has increasingly
become vested in ever more narrowly defined landowner groups, occasionally to
the detriment of neighboring communities.
The self-identification of local communities based on kinship is a critical arena
for strategies of inclusion and exclusion. The exceptional diversity among indige-
nous peoples of modes of social organization, and the flexibility and mobility of
social identities, confound easy registration by states and corporations of prospec-
tive local community members. For some communities, recognition of their rights
(or claims, from the perspectives of the state or corporation) requires some modifi-
cation in conventional forms of presentation. Ernst (2001, p. 126) describes moves
by Papua New Guinea’s Onabasulu communities to establish or renegotiate social
boundaries in anticipation of the requirements of modernity’s outriders, such as
mining and oil projects, as a process of “entification”: “the making of ‘entities,’ or
things from what have been either implicit or contingent categories.” The complex
and shifting politics of claims to membership in a local community “becomes an
exercise in alignment and self-definition in which the calculus of advantage inter-
sects with questions of identity, all of which is played out against a backdrop of
regional political relations” (Jorgensen 2001, p. 93).
Knowledge of myth and cosmology provides a further means through which
local communities dispute membership and seek to gain recognition of their
sovereignty and rights. Local cosmologies combine and crystallize indigenous
understandings of the land and social relations within spatial and temporal frame-
works of belief. Respect for indigenous beliefs has slowly, and not without oppo-
sition, entered the arena of negotiations and agreements over large-scale mining,
particularly in Australia (Gelder & Jacobs 1998, Rumsey & Weiner 2001) and the
Pacific (Horowitz 2002).
In the western highlands region of Papua New Guinea, where the Porgera and
Ok Tedi mines and the Nena and Mount Kare prospects are located, the presence
of regionally extensive rituals and cosmographies has provided a fertile ground
for representations to corporations and governments and for competing claims by
local communities. Telefol claims to both the Nena prospect and the Ok Tedi mine
are founded on the centrality of Telefol ritual experts and sites in regional sacred
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RESOURCE WARS 301

geography (Jorgensen 2001). More ambitious still is the ownership asserted by

more distant Huli-speakers to all of these mining projects, as well as to the oil
and gas projects at Lake Kutubu and Hides, on the basis of their pivotal location
within a Huli-centric sacred geography that overlaps its Telefol-centric counterpart
(Ballard 1994). Ownership of the Mount Kare alluvial gold prospect, which was
the site of a spectacular goldrush during 1988 and 1989 (Vail 1995), is similarly
disputed in terms of the identity of its ritual custodians and its position within
the interlinked sacred geographies of three different ethnic groups (Clark 1993,
Biersack 1999, Haley 1996, Wardlow 2001, Stewart & Strathern 2002).
Claims based on ritual knowledge are frequently heard at the District and
Supreme courts in Papua New Guinea, yielding decisions as bewildering to the
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claimants as the substance of the claims must appear to the presiding judges (e.g.,
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Amet 1991 on the decision at the Hides Gasfield). The perceived success of some
of these claims has played a part in the widespread revival of interest in the contin-
uing communication and enactment of this knowledge through ritual and initiation
(Guddemi 1997, p. 644). Beyond their more limited function of providing further
evidence in support of rights to ownership, the mythology and cosmology of a
community are also creatively reconfigured to account for disparities in power and
for changing circumstances (Kirsch 2001, Wardlow 2001).

Modes of Marginalization
In addition to their position in classic patterns of exploitation of local or migrant
labor at large-scale mines (Godoy 1985, p. 206; Robinson 1986, p. 239ff), mem-
bers of indigenous communities experience marginalization or exclusion on the
basis of several other forms of discrimination, including ethnicity or group identity,
age, and gender. Encounters with the state and with mining corporations commonly
result in a variety of assaults on local understandings of community sovereignty, in-
cluding dispossession of resources and lands, relocation of communities, and other
abuses of fundamental human rights. Exclusion from decision-making processes
or from the possible benefits of mining revenues are further forms of marginaliza-
tion. Kirsch (1997, 2001) has documented the systematic exclusion from decision
making about impacts to the environment of Yonggom communities downstream
of the Ok Tedi mine. Marginalization on the basis of ethnicity or “race” has also
been documented for the area of the Bougainville mine where, in reaction to their
own previous experiences of discrimination, indigenous Nagovisi and Nasioi have
expressed a common “black” identity in opposition to “redskins” from other parts
of Papua New Guinea (Nash & Ogan 1990).
Filer (1990) describes the impact of the systematic marginalization of younger
members of the local community at the Panguna mine by older kinsmen identified
as the recipients of compensation payments. Filer’s argument, which hinges upon
the role played by younger men in leading the protests that culminated in the
closure of the mine and civil war between Bougainville and the Papua New Guinea
state, extends to a prediction that compensation agreements with landowners ossify
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302 BALLARD ¥ BANKS

social relations and act, in the long run, as time bombs that explode after about 20
years, with the passing of decision-making power from one generation to another.
Polier (1996, p. 5) records a different dynamic for the Ok Tedi mine, where the
fortunes of four different age cohorts are shown to vary considerably, reflecting
the opportunities increasingly available to younger Min with better education.
Still more starkly drawn are the forms of marginalization experienced by women
in local communities within the ambit of mining projects (see Macdonald &
Rowland 2002 for a recent overview). Mining is an exceptionally masculinized in-
dustry, in terms of the composition of its workforces, its cultures of production, and
its symbolic despoliation of a feminized nature; mining, argues Robinson (1996,
p. 137), “is so ‘naturally’ masculine [that] its gender effects are invisible.” There
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are limited employment opportunities for women in the industry—in either the
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corporations, the relevant government departments, or the local community work-

forces (Ranchod 2001). Loss of land and of resources to mining projects impacts
most heavily the women of local communities as the key subsistence providers
(Emberson-Bain 1994b, Macintyre 1993, Pollock 1996), and women’s rights to
land, and their role in the transmission of land and other rights, are also commonly
diminished (e.g., Guddemi 1997, p. 634), as are their rights to representation within
the mining community. Mining often generates additional pressure on women to
perform as the maintainers of kinship networks and observers of attendant obli-
gations owing to male absenteeism and the further feminization of subsistence
(Polier 1996, p. 10)—a demand that is being met through the emergence of highly
effective women’s organizations operating both locally and internationally (e.g.,
Bonnell 1999, Carino 2002). The rapid influx of cash to local communities is also
associated with augmented domestic violence and with transformations in patterns
of marriage and sexuality (Bonnell 1999; Gerritsen & Macintyre 1991, pp. 47–48;
Robinson 1986, 1996), leading to increases in the transmission of HIV/AIDS and
sexually transmitted diseases to women of local communities.

Strategies of Engagement
In addition to the issue of control over resources, crucial questions surround “the
mechanism and locus of decision-making at the local level” (Weiner 2001, p. 18).
The forms of representation generated by local communities to enter into what are
often novel engagements with agents of the state and corporations must balance
both the requirements of their interlocutors and the internal needs of the commu-
nity (O’Faircheallaigh 1995). At many mining projects, the initial structures of
local community representation tend to be introduced by corporations, state agen-
cies, or consultants acting for either category and are often modeled on similar
structures at other projects. Land councils and associations in Australia (Levitus
1991), incorporated land groups in Papua New Guinea (Weiner 2001), and com-
munity foundations (yayasan) and institutes (lembaga) in Indonesia are just some
of the structured forms of representation adopted in this way by local communities.
Over time, those organizations that persist tend to assume a distinctive, localized
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RESOURCE WARS 303

character that better suits the needs of the community and that is often more active
in the pursuit of community interests.
R. Roberts (1995) describes a continuum of public involvement in decision
making that spans the range from persuasion (which can involve considerable vi-
olence at mining projects), to consultation, to the selective delegation of authority,
and ultimately to self-determination. The history of negotiations for successive
large mines in Papua New Guinea illustrates at least part of this progressive se-
quence (Filer 1999a). During the late 1960s, at the first major mine, Panguna on
Bougainville, community “participation” consisted largely of receiving lectures
on the impending benefits of the mine for the wider nation (Denoon 2000). As
the costs of failing to involve local communities in decision making have become
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apparent, the community share in financial benefits has gradually been augmented
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from one mining project in Papua New Guinea to the next, and community rep-
resentatives increasingly have been introduced into negotiations. Formal project
development agreements involving local communities are now almost standard
practice in North America, Australia, and Papua New Guinea (Howitt et al. 1996,
pp. 17–19; O’Faircheallaigh 2002). In Papua New Guinea, mining agreements have
been struck for the Porgera and Lihir mines through a Development Forum pro-
cess, now incorporated into the national Mining Act and applied retrospectively to
other existing projects, which formally identifies project stakeholders and provides
a framework for negotiations (Filer 1996b). However, transformations in the extent
of community involvement are by no means uniformly progressive. In the case of
the Ok Tedi mine, the Papua New Guinea government has repeatedly returned
to earlier practices in overriding community concerns about ecological damage
and mine rehabilitation (Kirsch 2002). Elsewhere, as in Australia and Canada,
considerably more active states have enacted forms of legislation, such as the
Native Title Act 1988 in Australia, which place powerful restrictions on the rights of
indigenous communities to negotiate with resource developers (O’Faircheallaigh
2002).
The potential significance of the benefits of mining for local communities can be
considerable, particularly for many indigenous communities that “are often badly
in need of the additional economic opportunities which mining can generate”
(O’Faircheallaigh 1991, p. 230). The principal forms of benefit include direct
compensation for lands resumed and damages incurred, royalties on the mineral
resource, wage income, equity participation and joint ventures, and access to mine-
related infrastructure and services (O’Faircheallaigh 2002). There is enormous
variation from project to project in the provision for and scale of such benefits (on
compensation in Papua New Guinea, see Banks 1996, Bedford & Mamak 1977,
Connell 1991, Filer et al. 2000, Toft 1997). The community share of mining royalty
payments in Papua New Guinea rose from an initial 5% at the Ok Tedi mine in
the early 1980s (Jackson 1993) to 50% of royalties and an additional 15% equity
share at Lihir in the late 1990s, and ultimately to 100% at the Tolukuma mine
(Filer 1999a). Another area of increasing prominence for local communities in
negotiation over mining agreements is that of ancillary business contracts, though
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304 BALLARD ¥ BANKS

the success of these community businesses is by no means certain (Filer 1997,

Banks 1999a).
The extent to which mining “benefits” actually benefit local communities, and
the internal mechanisms for their distribution and consumption, are particularly
poorly documented (but see Banks 1999b, Connell 1991, Gerritsen & Macintyre
1991, O’Faircheallaigh 2002). Social disruption following the massive influx of
cash from gold rushes has been described for the Mount Kare rush in Papua New
Guinea (Vail 1995), and Filer (1990) has argued that the payment of compensation
is itself a major cause of the process of social disintegration within local commu-
nities because of the absence of traditional mechanisms for the distribution of cash
and other benefits.
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The Fourth Estate

One of the major developments associated with the 1980s mining boom has been
the rapid expansion in the significance of additional stakeholders, including a
wide variety of NGOs, financial intermediaries, lawyers, business partners, and
consultants. Most enter the broader mining community by virtue of connections to
or alliances with (rather than membership of) one of the three principal stakeholder
categories.
NGOs are a particularly amorphous category, including both those organiza-
tions engaged in dialogue with or directly contracted by mining corporations and
activist NGOs operating in support of the environment or of local communities,
and are often implacably opposed to mining. Several of the major global NGOs,
such as Conservation International, have elected to become involved in mining in-
dustry initiatives, including the MMSD project (see above). Others operating at a
regional level, such as Oxfam Community Aid Abroad in Australia, have assumed
a monitoring or ombudsman role, while maintaining their distance from the indus-
try (Atkinson et al. 2001). A loose international alliance of environmental, human
rights, and indigenous rights, NGOs have been able to direct attention to particular
mining projects through a series of campaigns. Although these campaigns have
created substantial negative publicity for certain mining corporations, and may
have provoked some of the recent shifts in corporate social and environmental pol-
icy, the constraints of limited resources and personnel have tended to reduce the
effectiveness of this NGO alliance beyond the horizons of reactions to particular
events or the short-lived mobilization of public opinion around a specific topic,
such as human rights abuse or ecological damage (Downing et al. 2002, p. 26).
Finally, there are also NGOs hired directly by mining corporations to play a media-
tor or broker role with local communities, as part of a corporate trend to out-source
non-core functions conventionally associated with (if in practice often neglected
by) state agencies, supplying services such as health or education or assisting
communities in negotiation.
In addition to NGOs, mining has begun to attract the involvement of lawyers,
particularly in the aftermath of the partial success of the lawsuit brought against
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RESOURCE WARS 305

BHP on behalf of the Yonggom people living downstream of the Ok Tedi mine
(Kirsch 2002); similar lawsuits have now been lodged against the operators of
the Freeport (Indonesia), Panguna (Bougainville), Gold Ridge (Solomon Islands),
and Awas Tingni (Nicaragua) projects (Downing et al. 2002, p. 27). As opportu-
nities for business projects develop on the margins of large-scale mines, a host of
novel alliances have been formed between local community representatives and
entrepreneurs at the national and local levels (e.g., Banks 1999a). Finally, the in-
crease in social impact analysis that has followed in the wake of the 1980s minerals
boom has provided a point of entry to a very wide range of consultants, including
anthropologists (Goldman 2000). The ethical implications and choices available
for consultants are addressed further below.
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Human Rights and Mining

In conjunction with the recognition of the scope for legal challenges to mining
there has been a convergence on human rights instruments as the most compre-
hensive and convenient frameworks for monitoring respect for many of the basic
rights of local communities and workforces (Handelsman 2002), and a move to
hold corporations, and not just states, accountable for abuses (Jochnick 1999).
Conceived broadly, human rights comprise five basic categories, including civil,
cultural, economic, political, and social rights, which extend to cover issues of
property, development, health and safety, and environment (Handelsman 2002);
human rights thus potentially address most aspects of mining impact. This is one
area in which there has been a relatively constructive dialogue between corpora-
tions and NGOs, with groups such as Amnesty International (Sullivan & Frankental
2001) and the Australian Asia Pacific Mining Network (1998) proposing standards
for industry practice. The process of defining the relevance and comparative sig-
nificance of different human rights is still being hotly debated, with the supposedly
competing claims of economic and other rights as the principal area of contention.
The most recent advance in this area has been the development by mining
companies of individual corporate codes of conduct which subscribe to certain
fundamental standards, as laid out in the various universal declarations and con-
ventions (Handelsman 2002, Attachment A). The signing of a set of Voluntary
Principles in 2000 by a number of British and American mining and energy com-
panies (Bur. Democracy, Hum. Rights, Labor 2000), and the adoption by individual
corporations of operational strategies to ensure and to publicize compliance (e.g.,
Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold 2001, Rio Tinto 2001), may come to mark
an important watershed in the scrutiny of conditions at mine sites. However, “it
remains to be seen whether [these initiatives] constitute genuine recognition of the
importance of corporate integrity, or simply an extension of corporate public rela-
tions in the search for comparative advantage within the industry” (Ballard 2001,
p. 9). Certainly most corporations, and the states that host their mining projects,
have been reluctant to submit to independent, external monitoring; but, while in-
dustry critics are unlikely to attribute these developments to corporate philanthropy,
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306 BALLARD ¥ BANKS

a gathering market interest in compliance may render respect for human rights a
financial imperative (Spar 1998).

MINING AND ANTHROPOLOGY: TOWARD

AN ETHICS OF ENGAGEMENT
Anthropologists have become engaged as auxiliaries to all parties in the resource
wars that revolve around the global mining industry: as consultants to industry,
state agencies and local communities, and as advocates in debates both for and
against mining. There is no natural position for anthropology in such a contested
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field, and anthropologists have adopted bitterly opposed stances at several mining
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projects, such as the Coronation Hill gold prospect in Northern Australia, where
debate revolved around claims of neutrality and accusations of partisan advocacy
from either side (R. Brunton 1992, Keen 1993). Two broad visions of an appropriate
role for anthropologists have been articulated, the first proposing that anthropol-
ogists are best suited to an intermediary role as brokers (Downing et al. 2002,
p. 22; Filer 1999b; McNamara 1987), and the second that anthropologists must
choose between an illusory neutrality, which states and corporations are best posi-
tioned to exploit, and a commitment to advocacy on behalf of local communities
(B. Brunton 1997, Hyndman 2001, Kirsch 2002).
Although there may be some truth to the observation that anthropologists in
resource wars often have an inflated sense of the importance of their contribution,
albeit one occasionally shared by local communities (Jorgensen 2001, p. 82), this
hardly absolves us of the requirement for sustained reflection on the implications
and consequences of our interventions. There is indeed scope for the co-optation
of anthropological consultation owing to structural inequalities between different
sides in mining disputes (Whiteman & Mamen 2001). State agencies and mining
corporations are usually much better positioned to commission and direct ethno-
graphic research or to exploit ethnographic knowledge, though they exercise no
monopoly in this respect. However, the distinction between pro- and anti-industry
stances appears overdrawn. A number of critics of resistance studies have ob-
served the dangers inherent in oversimplifying or “sanitizing” the politics of local
communities in conditions of conflict (Edelman 2001, pp. 310–11; Ramos 1998;
Trigger 2000, p. 203)—an often-strategic essentialism characterized by Ortner
(1995) as a form of “ethnographic refusal.” They instead call for close attention
to the contingencies of any given site and for the reclamation of the specific social
and historical contexts for particular conflicts (Marcus 1999, p. 12). An adequate
ethnography of contemporary resource industries such as large-scale mining will
require work at multiple sites and over a sustained period, and the ethics of en-
gagement will vary considerably from one mine site to another, over time at the
same site, and from one perspective to the next within a project.
Without seeking yet to prescribe such an ethics, it is possible to predict that
the nature of ethnographic research around mining will need to depart in at least
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RESOURCE WARS 307

one important respect from conventional or existing modes of enquiry. Godoy’s

(1985, p. 211) concluding plea for an “integrative” approach to the anthropolog-
ical study of mining, which would combine an understanding of the geological
and economic as well as social and cultural dimensions of mining, prefigures at
least part of the vision articulated by Marcus (1995) of a multi-sited ethnogra-
phy: “if anthropology is to be responsible for its own contexts of meaning and
the forging of its own arguments from inside the ethnographic process of research
itself,” argues Marcus (1999, p. 12), then the full spectrum of activities which
contribute to and contextualize mining as a site for research must be addressed,
if only at the level of the multi-sited “imaginary.” Curiously, in his questioning
of the orthodoxies of ethnographic practice, Marcus does not appear to place at
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2003.32:287-313. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

risk the romantic ideal of the solitary scholar, and yet the pursuit of a multi-sited
by University of Alabama - Birmingham on 01/17/13. For personal use only.

ethnography of mining appears to lie beyond the competence of any individual

researcher. If the complexities of agency, of relationships, and of scales sketched
briefly in this review are to be imagined ethnographically and adequately ad-
dressed, we shall need to mobilize flexible coalitions or alliances of often-unlikely
partners, including industry think-tanks, NGOs, academics, and community ac-
tivists among others. Jesuit researcher Gjording (1991, pp. xi–xii) describes a
transnational coalition formed along these lines to research the potential impact
on Guaymı́ Indians of the proposed Cerro Colorado copper project. The conflicted
nature of mining as a site for research and the compelling sense that anthro-
pological skills can contribute to the moderation or resolution of resource wars
demand some form of engagement or activism—not necessarily the activism of
causes or allegiances but rather a “circumstantial activism” (Marcus 1995, p. 113)
that mimics and exploits the labile structure of its own field for enquiry in order
to make or re-make the sense of mining, both for the researchers and for their
interlocutors.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Colin Filer, Martha Macintyre, Ciaran O’Faircheallaigh, and Kathy Robinson all
kindly offered comments on drafts of this paper. Numerous other colleagues, cited
or otherwise, have assisted with materials, ideas, and debate.

The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at http://anthro.annualreviews.org

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Annual Review of Anthropology

Volume 32, 2003

CONTENTS
Frontispiece—Ward H. Goodenough xiv
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2003.32:287-313. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

OVERVIEW
by University of Alabama - Birmingham on 01/17/13. For personal use only.

In Pursuit of Culture, Ward H. Goodenough 1

ARCHAEOLOGY
Mississippian Chiefdoms: How Complex?, Charles R. Cobb 63
It’s a Material World: History, Artifacts, and Anthropology,
Elizabeth M. Brumfiel 205
Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology in South America, Vivian Scheinsohn 339
BIOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Developmental Biology and Human Evolution, C. Owen Lovejoy,
Melanie A. McCollum, Philip L. Reno, and Burt A. Rosenman 85
Environmental Pollution in Urban Environments and Human Biology,
Lawrence M. Schell and Melinda Denham 111
The Neolithic Invasion of Europe, Martin Richards 135
The Social Brain: Mind, Language, and Society in Evolutionary
Perspective, R.I.M. Dunbar 163
Intergroup Relations in Chimpanzees, Michael L. Wilson and
Richard W. Wrangham 363
LINGUISTICS AND COMMUNICATIVE PRACTICES
Context, Culture, and Structuration in the Languages of Australia,
Nicholas Evans 13
SOCIOCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Gender and Inequality in the Global Labor Force, Mary Beth Mills 41
Complex Adaptive Systems, J. Stephen Lansing 183
Urban Violence and Street Gangs, James Diego Vigil 225
Sustainable Governance of Common-Pool Resources: Context, Methods,
and Politics, Arun Agrawal 243
Urbanization and the Global Perspective, Alan Smart and Josephine Smart 263

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CONTENTS ix

Resource Wars: The Anthropology of Mining, Chris Ballard and

Glenn Banks 287
The Anthropology of Welfare “Reform”: New Perspectives on U.S. Urban
Poverty in the Post-Welfare Era, Sandra Morgen and Jeff Maskovsky 315
Maddening States, Begoña Aretxaga 393
Highlights and Overview of the History of Educational Ethnography,
Daniel A. Yon 411
Children, Childhoods, and Violence, Jill E. Korbin 431
Anthropology, Inequality, and Disease: A Review, Vinh-Kim Nguyen and
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2003.32:287-313. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

Karine Peschard 447

by University of Alabama - Birmingham on 01/17/13. For personal use only.

THEME I: URBAN WORLDS

Environmental Pollution in Urban Environments and Human Biology,
Lawrence M. Schell and Melinda Denham 111
Urban Violence and Street Gangs, James Diego Vigil 225
Urbanization and the Global Perspective, Alan Smart and Josephine Smart 263
The Anthropology of Welfare “Reform”: New Perspectives on U.S. Urban
Poverty in the Post-Welfare Era, Sandra Morgen and Jeff Maskovsky 315
THEME II: INEQUALITY
Gender and Inequality in the Global Labor Force, Mary Beth Mills 41
Anthropology, Inequality, and Disease: A Review, Vinh-Kim Nguyen and
Karine Peschard 447

INDEXES
Subject Index 475
Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 24–32 485
Cumulative Index of Chapter Titles, Volume 24–32 488

ERRATA
An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Anthropology
chapters (if any, 1997 to the present) may be found
at http://anthro.annualreviews.org/errata.shtml