Today, we are all coal miners.You turn on the stove. It lights up. You turn on the heat. The house gets warm. You turn on the lights. You can see where you misplaced your wallet. You go down in the mines, or you ride out to the offshore rig in the rig-tender, and you risk your life. Turn on the stove, turn on the heat, turn on the lights; you are involved.
If you aren't clear on the long term global climatological impact of the irresponsible overuse of fossil fuels (and you should be, by now), at least it should be clear that the hydrocarbon industry takes an immediate toll on human lives. But is it the industry? Is it irresponsible mine or oil rig managers? Wasteful consumers? Lame regulation? Crappy technology? Is it "culture"?
Sure it is; all of these things. But even old-school anthropologists should know that studying what's happened in the past and what is happening now are windows to see possible scenarios of what might be. Too few in my discipline take this view, but this is changing.
I've read a damn big pile of monographs and articles by anthropologists, good ones, insightful ones, that end with something like, "until structural contradictions are resolved," or "as long as powerful forces disregard the long-term consequences of (fill in the blank)", without exploring just how this is to be done. I won't point fingers; I'm guilty, too. Its not just a political question. Its an empirical one. What the hell can all this study, all this theory, do for anybody if it can't suggest where, exactly, the levers might be to re-direct our attention from unseen hands and hidden mechanics of power, and move them to influence real people whose views and actions must become, shall we say, more enlightened?
So this is a call for more ethnographic work focused on specific industries, studies set in clearly demarcated temporal and political contexts, studies that can point to where things are broken, and how human suffering may be reduced. There is an anthropological literature on mining, and Godoy summarized it twenty years ago. Historians like Colin Davis at the University of Alabama at Birmingham do this with mining history. Anthropologists like Donald D. Stull and Michael Broadway (and team) at Kansas University (and elsewhere) do this with poultry and beef-factory workers. And Gillian Tett, whose Ph.D. in Anthropology afforded her the methodological and theoretical tools to study of bankers, has done it for the recent fiscal collapse.
If I hear another potential client (or student) ask, "But what are some products that anthropologists have helped to design?" I think I'll answer by referencing not only anthropologists but careful scholars from any discipline, and journalists and pundits too, who provide detailed and clear descriptions of the reasons for corporate failure and government inaction. Reasons that can be unpacked, explored, discussed, and acted upon. We need more of this. And we need it now.
To say that in China, workplace safety generally and mine safety in particular is a problem, is putting it mildly. Thousands of miners are killed there every year in the service of the economic growth the country needs to keep factories running and to lower the already high levels of disorder and conflict between everyday folk and the government. And government there is responding with inspections and new regulations. (The nature of the response to disorder in China may look different, but too often when China takes dramatic action like removing a party-poss from a horribly troubled province, as they've done recently, it is lost in the maelstrom of red-carpet movie journalism and the momentary politics of the day). Will China's actions be enough? Probably not. Beijing doesn't have all the regulatory reach, nor the technical resources—yet. But it is a step in the right direction.
Will the US revamp the regulatory framework that keeps miners and rig workers safe? Will they do enough? Probably not. And no one will until mine and rig safety, indeed, workplace safety generally, are part of a broader empirical exploration that goes beyond bromides from left and right about "the market." Generalizations don't hold water when workers are killed and injured and when families and whole communities are devastated by an unwillingness to confront the specifics behind the broader structural drivers that push managers and operators to consider short-term gain ahead of global responsibilities. Not that doing that is easy. It ain't. But the conversation better ramp up pretty damn soon.
We're all miners, today.
Photo credit: from Michael Coyne's blog at Black Star.
