Dear colleagues

at this year’s European Association for Social Anthropology congress in Milano, we got a session accepted on extractive industries where we want to go beyond the usual social impacts of industry evidence – as important as this is. Acceptance of our session proposal was already a success, because there were WAY MORE session proposed than the organisers actually accepted.

You are warmly welcome to submit paper proposals to this session, from whereever field in the world you are. The conference is from 20-23 July 2016.

The deadline for submission of presentation abstracts is February 15, and for this purpose you need to go to the webpage of the panel: http://nomadit.co.uk/easa/easa2016/panels.php5?PanelID=4366

Looking forward to many interesting submissions.

Short Abstract

Beyond the anthropology of oil and indigenous peoples, this session explores cultures of relating to the subsurface. Papers analyse the relation of different resource users’ engagement with resources, their worldview, their environment and how these relations influence resource extraction

Long Abstract

People’s corporeal, spiritual, and cultural engagement with subsurface resources are the subject of this session. Many indigenous people worldwide associate taboos, notions of death, darkness and dangers with the subsurface. On the other hand, human life – including indigenous life is dependent on the extraction of subsurface resources (most notably energy and mining). Underlying these processes is the worldview of extractivism (Acosta 2013), the idea that only through processes of extraction can resources become valuable and acquire meaning for humankind. The meaning of resources in extractivism is being used for the good of humans, whose goal is in turn ‘open up’ more untapped resources in a “big carbon” approach (Klein 2014). This is in stark contrast to many indigenous and local cosmologies where the underground is a sacred (albeit maybe dangerous) sphere that must be left in peace for the spirits. This session aims to overcome such a dichotomy by inviting papers on extractive industries focusing on the corporeality and spirituality of the resource(s), and on the lived experience of people living on top of subsurface resources. Rather than reifying the distinction between indigenous and incomer-people, or between traditional indigenous economies and extractive industries, we encourage papers to analyse the complex mutual influence between people’s cosmologies, their relation to the environment, their way of life and their way of relating to and extracting resources. In doing so, we hope to break new ground in the theoretical positioning of an anthropology of extractive industries and the environment.

Convenors:
Florian Stammler (University of Lapland) (chair)
Dmitri Funk (Moscow State University)
Vladislava Vladimirova (Uppsala University)
Hugh Beach (Uppsala University) (discussant)