Farmers continued to cultivate part on the land since the open-pit was still in search of funding.
© 2014 Lu Guang (Contact Press Images)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Vol. 97, No. 2
SPECIAL COLLECTION
THE ADMINISTRATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE IN NEPAL
INTRODUCTION
Andrew Haxby | The Administration of Everyday Life
ARTICLES
Katharine Rankin, Shyam Kunwar, Lagan Rai and Elsie Lewison | Between Eating and Being Fed: Competing Ethics of Community-Based Road Building in Nepal
Sara Shneiderman | Equivocating Houses: Kinship, Materiality, and Bureaucratic Practice in Post-earthquake Nepal
Andrew Haxby | Financing a Middle Class Utopia: Income and Retail Loans in Kathmandu
SPECIAL COLLECTION
MINING THE ENERGY TRANSITION
INTRODUCTION
Angela Kronenburg García and Nikkie Wiegink | Mining the Energy Transition: An Introduction
ARTICLES
Doris Buu-Sao | Mining Hopes in Andalusian Wastelands: The Promises and Materiality of Greened Extraction
Mark Goodale | Of Crystals and Semiotic Slippage: Lithium Mining, Energy Ambitions, and Resource Politics in Bolivia
Antonio Maria Pusceddu | Energopolitics of Transition: The Political Ecology of Anticipation in the Portuguese Lithium Rush
BOOK REVIEWS
Caitlynn Carr | Allison Bloom’s Violence Never Heals: The Lifelong Effects of Intimate Partner Violence for Immigrant Women
Darlène Dubuisson | Erin Durban’s The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti
Talia Katz | Samuel J. Spinner’s Jewish Primitivism
Rayna Rapp | Thomas W. Pearson’s An Ordinary Future: Margaret Mead, the Problem of Disability, and a Child Born Different
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ABSTRACTS
Financing a Middle Class Utopia: Income and Retail Loans in Kathmandu
Andrew Haxby, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
This paper investigates the role of private finance in shaping social class in Kathmandu. Over the past thirty years, Nepal has developed a robust financial sector, and its services have become vital for residents dealing with rising cost of living. However, in a city where informal income has long been the standard, private banks are making loans dependent on “modern” forms of income, that is, income which has been clearly documented and formally registered. This paper argues that this financialization of income has created a new dimension to class politics in Kathmandu, wherein wealth must be bureaucratically legible to be recognized, where private banks attempt to monopolize this process of recognition, and where families search for new ways to maneuver around these requirements. [Keywords: bureaucracy, finance, informal economy, urbanization, middle class]
Equivocating Houses: Kinship, Materiality, and Bureaucratic Practice in Post-earthquake Nepal
Sara Shneiderman, University of British Columbia
What is a house? What about a household? How do they relate to each other? Different answers to these seemingly simple questions lie behind many of the conundrums that Nepali citizens experienced in the process of reconstruction following the country’s double 2015 earthquakes. This paper considers whether the widely varying definitions of “house” and “household” used by the Nepali state, the international community, and residents themselves to assess infrastructural loss, identify the citizens who experienced it, disburse private housing reconstruction grants, and implement the material work of reconstruction may in fact be equivocations. If this is indeed the case, is bureaucratic practice intended to regulate the earthquake-affected house and household—before, during and after the process of reconstruction—a means of translation, negotiation, or something else altogether? Does it bring different worlds into relation, through a shared desire to make something more of this basic unit of material and social structure than the singular name that appears on most land title deeds in Nepal? I explore these questions through ongoing ethnographic research in earthquake-affected districts as well as online, to consider how the ontological status of “the house” itself has been reconfigured through the process of reconstruction, along with the political domains in which it is embedded. [Keywords: Himalaya, Nepal, disaster, infrastructure, reconstruction, equivocation, land, citizenship, state, governance]
Mining Hopes in Andalusian Wastelands: The Promises and Materiality of Greened Extraction
Doris Buu-Sao, University of Lille, France
Drawing on discourses on “sustainable,” “green” or “climate-smart” mining, public and private actors in the sector are justifying the (re)opening of metal mines in certain rural areas of Europe. Andalusia, a Southern region of Spain, is a pioneer territory in this regard. In this region, mining revival is framed as a paradoxical remedy to the current economic but also ecological crisis, despite the regional history of mining environmental disasters and deep social crisis caused by economic bubbles. How are the new mines made desirable in a context where the local economic, social, and environmental history could jeopardize these projects? The article explores mining revival in Andalusia, from urban centers to mining installations, approaching this process as a combination of promises and material practices. It analyzes the multiple expectations and activities supporting mining redeployment, both from above and from below. Ethnography helps to unpack the plurality of the social conditions that enable the materialization of extractive promises as industrial activities: beyond the top-down imposition of these activities, the article argues that it hinges on the local expectations of the people on the frontline of extraction. At the same time, these expectations are partly shaped by corporate and public policy. People’s hopes can thus be thought of as being “mined”: aspirations, desires, and anxieties are extracted from societies and processed through media discourses, political speeches, and corporate practices. However, just like ores can oppose physical resistance to extraction due to their biophysical characteristics, so too can local aspirations and hopes come into conflict with the reality of mining. [Keywords: energy transition, “greened” extraction, anthropology of mining, wastelands, mining temporalities, hopes, Andalusia, Riotinto mine]
Of Crystals and Semiotic Slippage: Lithium Mining, Energy Ambitions, and Resource Politics in Bolivia
Mark Goodale, University of Oxford / University of Lausanne
The salares, or salt flats, of Bolivia are the site of the world’s largest proven reserves of lithium. Although different proposals were initiated over the decades, it was during the thirteen years (2006-2019) under the Movement to Socialism (MAS) governments of Evo Morales when the state-directed lithium project began in earnest. This is an ambitious project with a number of important dimensions, including evaporation mining in the region around Uyuni; the construction of an industrial plant where lithium salt is converted into “battery grade” lithium carbonate; the development of a battery research and production facility, which is producing—still at a pilot stage—lithium-ion batteries; and proposals to produce electronic vehicles (EVs) in Bolivia, which would mean a form of vertical integration of the lithium resource chain. This article examines one key ethnographic dimension of Bolivia’s still-unfolding lithium project: the ways in which its different materialities—geological, industrial, extractive, environmental—are reframed within pre-existing semiotic categories, including a well-established semiotics of resource extraction, as part of ongoing struggles for control over both the meaning and productive potential of a key resource at the center of the global “green” energy transition. The article argues that these semiotic struggles take place through illuminating slippages or “recraftings,” many of which cannot be reduced to the grand narratives within which lithium industrialization is conventionally studied and critiqued. After using selected examples from ethnographic research in Bolivia to examine some of the more important semiotic struggles, the article concludes by drawing out the wider lessons of the study for the anthropology of energy and resource politics. [Keywords: lithium, resource politics, energy transition, extractivism, neo-extractivism, EVs, Bolivia]
Energopolitics of Transition: The Political Ecology of Anticipation in the Portuguese Lithium Rush
Antonio Maria Pusceddu, Instituto Universitaário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia (CRIA)
This article examines the current mining revival in Europe, focusing on the dispute over lithium mining projects in Portugal. Lithium’s growing role in energy storage explains its global speculative boom and its popularity in the socio-technological imaginary of the energy transition. In Portugal, lithium mining applications have skyrocketed in the last decade following the European call for the internal supply of critical raw materials. In 2018, the Portuguese government launched the National Lithium Strategy to assess potential resources and the feasibility of industrial development projects. The lithium rush has quickly become a controversial topic in national debates on energy transition and sustainable development. Community participation has also become an issue, as a highly centralized decision-making process has turned a politically sensitive issue into a technocratic matter, triggering opposition from local communities who remain aware of the socio-environmental legacy of past mining booms and busts. The analysis focuses on a specific case in 2019, when the lithium rush came to public attention, to unpack the politics of time underlying the mining revival and opposition to it in the context of the energy transition. The latter is examined as a field of negotiation, friction, and conflict through which the different temporalities of the European periphery are articulated. Highlighting the relevance of internal and external unequal relations for understanding the conflict over lithium, the article argues that while the case of Portugal exemplifies lithium onshoring in the Global North, it also shows that the making of internal resource frontiers for the energy transition builds on —and reinforces—historical dynamics of dispossession and peripheralization; and that such stratification of unequal relations finds temporal refraction in the ways socio-ecological futures are anticipated and imagined in the dispute over the energy transition. [Keywords: anticipation, energy transition, Europe, mining, Raw Materials Initiative, temporality