""This is Roz Morris's magnum opus on gold, a book she has been researching and writing for 20 years. Unstable Ground is an ethnographically informed, disciplinarily expansive book that pursues two simple and intimately related questions of world-historical significance: what has gold done to people and what has it made them do? It poses these questions with reference to a particular place-the social worlds of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, where the largest gold reserves and the deepest mines in the world are located. Although its focus is there, and on a number of individuals whose lives she depicts, it is her thesis that the lives and afterlives of the gold industry in South Africa can be read as a harbinger of changes that are today visible throughout the world. This book testifies to the lived experience of those whose worlds were made, remade, and sometimes undone by gold. It examines the ways in which social and economic forces have been inscribed in aesthetic forms and practices of both valorization and insurrectionary opposition. Morris's book is written from the margins, and in the penumbra of the industry's gradual demise-as reserves are depleted, mines are closed, and the specter of post-material currency is linked to the displacement of production by scavenging. In this manner it documents how the transformation of waste into surplus value was intensified in the glow and shadow of gold. The communities at the heart of the ethnographic portion of her book coincide with the origin and duration of apartheid, as well as its demise and "spectral persistence." The unfolding of historical narrative and analysis is interwoven with personal testimony, intensely described accounts of the present, the space of gold mining's end. The method goes beyond ethnography, however; it could also be described as history, political economy, and social analysis. It is the author's effort to understand the effects of this most fetishized metal""--
What has gold done to people? What has it made them do? The Witwatersrand in South Africa, once home to the worlds richest goldfields, is today scattered with abandoned mines into which informal miners known as zama zamas venture in an illicitoften deadlysearch for ore. Based on field research conducted across more than twenty-five years around these mines, Unstable Ground reveals the worlds that gold made possibleand golds profound costs for those who have lived in its shadow and dreamt of its transformative power.
From the vantage point of the closure of South Africas gold mines, Rosalind C. Morris reconsiders their histories, beginning in the present and descending into the pasts that shaped them. Anchored in evocative descriptions of mining in the ruins, this book explores the social worlds built on gold and the lives that were remade and sometimes undone by the industry over a century and a half. Viewing this industry from its margins, against the backdrop of the cyanide revolution, the gold standards demise, and recurrent sinkholes, as well as the insurrectionary protests and violence that continue to this day, it recasts the history of South Africa and the incomplete effort to overcome apartheid amid the transformations of the global economy. In writing that is by turns immersive, incisive, and poetic, Morris unearths a history that was born of imperial aspiration and that persists as a speculative mirage. Interweaving ethnography, history, personal testimony, and political thought with striking readings of South African literary texts, Unstable Ground is a work of extraordinary ambition and depth.
Based on field research conducted across more than twenty-five years around abandoned mines in South Africa, Unstable Ground reveals the worlds that gold made possibleand golds profound costs for those who have lived in its shadow and dreamt of its transformative power.
