Udvindingsindustri

Resource extraction exists in diverse settings across the world and is carried out through different practices. The Global Life of Mines provides a comprehensive framework examining the spatial and temporal relationships between mining and postmining as interrelated and coexisting features within the global minescape. The book brings together scholars from various fields, such as anthropology, geography, sociology and political science, examining ethnographic case studies throughout the Americas (Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, USA), Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo) and Europe (Italy, Arctic Norway and Spain).

Through diverse engagements with natural resource extraction and ecological vulnerability in the contemporary Arctic, contributors to this volume apprehend Arctic resource regimes through the concept of abstraction. Abstraction refers to the creation of new material substances and cultural values by detaching parts from existing substances and values. The abstractive process differs from the activity of extractive industries by its focus on the conceptual resources that conceal processes of exploitation associated with extraction. The study of abstraction can thus help us attune to the formal operations that make appropriations of value possible while disclosing the politics of extraction and of its representation.