UC Berkeley

Who controls the underground, how, and with what consequences? National resource management policies worldwide maintain that subsurface resources should be owned by states and extracted by permitted industrial firms. However, a rapidly growing number of small-scale miners across the globe challenge this longstanding governance maxim. They insist that mineral deposits are resources that should be open to direct use by local people. Today, an estimated 134 million people spanning 80 countries depend on this use for their livelihoods. In this dissertation, I examine an increasingly common form of resource conflict that has emerged from this context: the juxtaposition of, and competition between, large-scale and small-scale gold mining.

Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic research, I explore the history, dynamics, and consequences of competing claims to gold between industrial and small-scale mining. I examine the case of Pongkor, a mining region located in upland West Java just outside Indonesia’s massive Jabodetabek metropolitan area. In Pongkor, the state-owned mining company, Antam, and thousands of independent, technically illegal, miners have competed over the same gold deposits for more than twenty-five years. Antam insists that it alone holds legal rights to local minerals, but nearby residents have challenged this authority, claiming that informal extraction has benefited the community more than the company ever has. In my analysis, I complicate the outward appearance of this environmental “conflict,” showing the many ways Antam and informal, small-scale miners are entangled. Together, they have co-produced Pongkor’s overlapping extractive landscape—a space in which competition over gold has transformed livelihood strategies, labor dynamics, modes of governing territory, personal identities, and regional politics.

I describe these processes of transformation and their uneven effects on the people who live and work in Pongkor through five interlinked chapters. I focus especially on two groups of mining workers: Antam’s employees and small-scale miners. In Chapter One, I dive into Pongkor’s history, arguing that present conflicts between Antam and small-scale miners are rooted in earlier efforts by the state and industrial mining operations to order and extract profit from the region. In Chapter Two, I examine mining labor in Pongkor. I describe the social organization of local gold production, argue that small-scale miners are increasingly differentiated, and demonstrate that insecurities also plague industrial mining workers. I move underground in Chapter Three to examine how the materialities of the subsurface have shaped competing territorial projects in intersecting small-scale and industrial mining tunnels. By analyzing various ways of accessing, navigating, and knowing the subterranean, I demonstrate the specific, three-dimensional challenges entailed in maintaining and contesting vertical territory. In Chapter Four, I trace the movement of labor, capital, and information between Antam and small-scale miners and detail the interpersonal connections that tie them together. These forms of everyday entanglement blur the boundary between industrial and small-scale mining, undermining the discursive distinction that the state-owned company attempts to construct. Finally, in Chapter Five, I examine the battle over hearts and minds in Pongkor. Though Antam attempts to shape local residents into subjects amenable to corporate extractive development and to steer them away from unlicensed resource use, many have instead become politically active advocates of small-scale mining. I argue that the identities of all miners, both corporate and informal, in Pongkor have been remade in the process.