The Global Life of Mines

Antonio Maria Pusceddu is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Anthropological Research (CRIA), University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal. Recent publications include Southern Chronicles: The Political Ecology of Class in the Italian Industrial Periphery (Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2022) and Grassroots Ecologies of Value: Environmental Conflict and Social Reproduction in Southern Italy (Antipode, 2020). Filippo M. Zerilli is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cagliari, Italy. Since 2015, he has served as editor-in-chief of Anuac, Journal of the Italian Society of Cultural Anthropology.

List of Illustrations



Introduction: Timescapes of Extraction

Antonio Maria Pusceddu and Filippo M. Zerilli



Chapter 1. Frontier Spaces in the Arctic and the Andes: The Miner, the Smuggler and Performances of (Post)extractivism

Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard

*This chapter is is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) with support from the University of Bergen



Chapter 2. Technological Promises of ‘Green’ Extractivism in Historical Minescapes: Narratives and Materiality of Mining Revival in Andalusian Wastelands

Doris Buu-Sao



Chapter 3. Unearthing the Buried Past of Brazil’s Former Gold Mines

Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos



Chapter 4. How Industrial and Artisanal Extraction Shape a City: On Urban Planning Flaws, Encroaching Open Pits and Backyard Mining in a Congolese Mining Town

Kristien Geenen



Chapter 5. Mining Life Cycles and Indigenous Land Dispossession in North America: A View from the American West

Paul White



Chapter 6. Contentious Legacies: Post-Mining and Heritage-Making in the Italian Alps

Roberta Clara Zanini



Chapter 7. Uranium Mining in New Mexico: Global Entanglements, Earth Relations, and Awkward Ways

Targol Mesbah



Afterword: What’s to Come: Mining in a Fevered World

David Kideckel