Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014. xiii, 314 pp. (Figures, maps, tables.) US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-520-28171-4.
Kirsch’s earlier book Reverse Anthropology (Stanford University Press, 2006) was multiply and favourably reviewed. Its focus on the Yonggom worldview was more conventionally anthropological, examining the way that Yonggom myth, ritual, and sorcery shaped their responses to the devastating environmental impact of the Ok Tedi copper-gold mine. The concept of “unrequited reciprocity” (akin to negative reciprocity) helped them to understand the damage in terms of Melanesian (and Melanesianists’) interest in systems of exchange. Now Kirsch has followed up with an equally well-written account that details the continued downstream impact of the mine from the theoretical perspective of political ecology.
In a multi-sited ethnography that takes him from Dome village to Melbourne, London, and beyond, he examines Yonggom efforts, with which he actively collaborated, to seek redress in the courts for environmental damages. They chose litigation rather than following the path of violent resistance that was pursued in Bougainville.
My husband Bill Townsend, the engineer employed by the Papua New Guinea government to monitor the construction phase of the Ok Tedi Mine, and I met Stuart Kirsch nearly 25 years ago as a young anthropologist naively hopeful that his consultancy with the mining company would insert Yonggom perspectives where they would make a difference in corporate policy. Scarred by experience in trying to influence the company’s environmental decisions, Bill knew better: apparent short-term advantage trumps long-term thinking. (In this case, BHP Billiton’s (BHP) long-term loss from walking away from its investment might amount to billions of dollars.) As Kirsch matured and inevitably acquired his own cynicism about corporate and state power, he stuck with the Yonggom, negotiating a role as anthropologist/activist that respected their ability to speak for themselves on an international stage, yet articulating their story in other places to which he had access.
The core of the book (chapters 2 and 3) is the insider account of the 1994 Australian court case against BHP, the return to court in 2000, and BHP’s exit from the mine in 2002. Yonggom activism led to the development of a coalition of international environmental organizations concerned with mining and the opposing effort of the mining industry to form a coalition to protect their interests through claims of self-regulation. In discussions of corporate responsibility in the mining industry, Ok Tedi/BHP was indeed central as the precipitating case. It deserved to be recognized in the title of this book, which aspires in its title to more general coverage of corporations and capitalism in mining than it achieves in actuality.
Despite Kirsch’s subsequent experience in other field sites, including Suriname, and brief reviews of five other mines in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands in chapter 1, this is indeed another book on Ok Tedi, and rightly so. Indeed we could use a few more books on the Ok Tedi mine by future anthropologists, including its impacts on communities located in the middle Fly River, on women in a male-dominated sphere, on the fate of subsistence agriculture as the staples sago and bananas are grown on now-polluted flood plains. A fuller science and technology study of Ok Tedi’s extensive environmental research and modelling would be valuable, despite Kirsch’s stab in that direction in chapter 4.
Ok Tedi represents only one form of mining capitalism, one in which the regulatory regime is very weak compared to developed countries. It is also somewhat of a special case in that Yonggom activists were able to exploit a moment of attention to indigenous rights in the 1990s, despite formally lacking indigenous minority status. That Ok Tedi Mining, Ltd. plans to continue to operate until at least 2025 speaks of the extraordinary conflict of interest that the state enjoyed as regulatory authority and shareholder from the beginning, a conflict of interest that has only escalated with the withdrawal of the corporate shareholders one at a time. Yet another form of mining capitalism is emerging in Papua New Guinea, as Chinese capital acquires mines formerly accountable to Canadian (Porgera) and Australian (Frieda) shareholders for their “social license to operate.”
The title Mining Capitalism mimics Tobacco Capitalism, the book by Peter Benson, with whom Kirsch has collaborated fruitfully in the study of corporate science and public relations in stigmatized industries (chapters 4 and 5 here and previous co-authored articles). This comparison presents a problem for an applied anthropology of mining. Copper is a major and respectable commodity used in wire and pipes and necessary to the environmentally favourable technology of hybrid automobiles and wind turbines. Some copper may be replaced by recycling or by using substitutes, but it is not so readily replaced in the producer economies of Chile or Papua New Guinea (or the United States, for that matter). Is there indeed no possibility of responsible mining, as Kirsch queries in chapter 6? If there is, it will only come when the industry is able to listen to its critics rather than working to silence them.
Mining Capitalism should be read with interest by university students and general readers seeking to understand global corporations and their operations.
Patricia K. Townsend
State University of New York, Buffalo, USA
pp. 725-727