Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. xv, 243 pp. US$99.99, cloth. ISBN 978-3-319-50309-7.
It is often said that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. But it is probably not unreasonable to expect a book’s title to reflect its content. Anthropology in the Mining Industry: Community Relations after Bougainville’s Civil War has a good deal to say about the development of the “community relations” function since the mining industry was put on notice after the social impacts of the Bougainville copper mine in Papua New Guinea sparked a full-scale civil war in 1989. The book has rather less to say about anthropology in the mining industry, or even the anthropology of the mining industry. Readers looking for an anthropological critique of community relations in the mining industry (the “social relations of community relations”), or fresh insights into stale debates over so-called “pure” and “profane” forms of anthropological practice will be disappointed. Instead, Glynn Cochrane offers a series of critical insights and home truths on the failure of the mining industry to fully engage with the social aspects of mining and the basic elements for building stronger relationships with host communities.
Following several years as a district administrator in what was then the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, in 1968 Cochrane completed a D Phil in social anthropology at Oxford University, and then went on to teach anthropology. In 1973, the World Bank asked him how they might apply anthropological methods in their overseas lending operations, which provided the opportunity in 1974 to produce the “Social Soundness Analysis” program used by USAID to determine the cultural feasibility of development projects. It was a short step from the Bank to the offices of the global mining giant Rio Tinto, where Cochrane spent the rest of his career implementing his ideas on community development and his recommendations on the establishment of a community relations function.
The book begins with an account of the violent conflict that unfolded around the Panguna mine in Bougainville and its forced closure, the litigation that was later launched against Rio Tinto as the parent company of the mine operator Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL), and Rio Tinto’s recent dumping of BCL to dissolve any future liabilities associated with the conflict. The book notionally hinges on the lessons that the global mining industry learned from the events that took place on the island of Bougainville, which is only a short boat ride from the Solomon Islands where Cochrane started his career. While we learn relatively little about the lessons that local Bougainvilleans taught Rio Tinto executives, or the kind of debates that played out within the company, or how different parts of the organisation made sense of the company’s role within the conflict, we do learn a lot about the lessons that were missed. The implications of the Bougainville crisis for resource development across the rest of PNG are given a cursory nod. This could be further developed, especially since Bougainville—as an event and a trope—looms large in the collective consciousness of the region, which is idiomatically expressed via threats from landowners to companies to listen to their wishes or “face another Bougainville.”
Throughout the rest of the book Cochrane unpacks various aspects of community relations practice, delving into topical areas such as land tenure, community development, indigenous peoples, social data collection and baseline studies, and resettlement. The tone of the book is forthright, interspersed with recollections and anecdotes. While the presentation is sometimes a little muddled, the book provides a kind of potted history of the ways in which the industry—or more specifically Rio Tinto—has responded to the development of international expectations for corporate social responsibility (CSR), and a series of frank comments on the failures of these CSR instruments. For example, his assessment of the relationship between resettlement practice and international standards is damning and to the point: “The International Standards provide little help or guidance about the lethargy, apathy, and depression which are commonly seen in resettled communities…It is important to recognise that the community that is moved, and not the International Standards and the agencies that enforce those standards, is the ultimate judge of how well the move has been carried out” (182).
As a classically trained anthropologist and long-term industry insider, Cochrane might have written the sort of “insider’s ethnography” that is typically beyond the reach of most anthropologists who would like to deconstruct the inner social workings of these large-scale corporations. If there is any anthropology to be found in this book, it is lodged in Cochrane’s practice framework that marries his practical experience as a district administrator with the fieldwork skills he learnt as a younger anthropologist that enable him to “get inside” a community. This is the basis for his uncompromising message to companies to “know your community” and invest in “hands-on community skills.” As such, this is less a work of anthropology, and more an argument for embedding anthropological perspectives in the private sector so that companies might better understand the complex social landscapes where they operate and hopefully minimize the harm they create. At the same time, questions remain as to why anthropology is more suited to this task than other social science disciplines, such as human geography for instance.
In the end the book is really more about Rio Tinto than the global mining industry. If Cochrane sometimes sounds like an apologist for Rio Tinto this might be because he is trying to demonstrate that Rio Tinto has managed to learn some lessons over the years, or because this book is better read as an autobiography of his legacy within the company. If that is the case, then the final chapter that charts the recent dismantling of the community relations function within Rio Tinto would suggest that the legacy of their in-house anthropologist was easily ignored, and that very few long-term lessons have been learned since the Bougainville crisis. From this perspective, the book is perhaps better understood as an extended memo to his former employer to heed the lessons of history.
Nicholas A. Bainton
The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia