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Entangled Territories in Small-Scale Gold Mining Frontiers: Labor Practices, Property, and Secrets in Indonesian Gold Country

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  • Peluso, Nancy Lee

Abstract

Small-scale gold mining territories emerge at the nexus of land use, property, and labor relations in some of Indonesian Borneo’s most vibrant and populated spaces, entangling state actors while sitting comfortably beyond the reach of formal state authority. Based on 7months of field research in a key gold-producing region of West Kalimantan, I argue that gold’s presence, discovery, and informal extraction creates resource frontiers, and that within these frontiers, mining labor practices, property relations, and gold mining-related secret knowledges converge to generate resource territories. While development practitioners, agrarian scholars, and government officials represent mining sites as chaotic and lacking institutional order, I show that a clearly understood organization of life and work animates the territorial subjects and territorialized spaces that small-scale mining populates in both urban and rural mining territories. The article challenges views of territory and territorialization as an imposition of government on the people and resources within spatial boundaries. Territories with no formalized boundaries in Indonesian gold country emerge through specific production practices engaging labor, resource access, and situated knowledges. The complex entanglements of legalities and illegalities suggest that smallholder gold production spaces are ungovernable through centralized state regulatory institutions.

Suggested Citation

  • Peluso, Nancy Lee, 2018. "Entangled Territories in Small-Scale Gold Mining Frontiers: Labor Practices, Property, and Secrets in Indonesian Gold Country," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 101(C), pages 400-416.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:101:y:2018:i:c:p:400-416
    DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2016.11.003
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    Cited by:

    1. Vélez-Torres, Irene & Vanegas, Diana, 2022. "Contentious environmental governance in polluted gold mining geographies: The case of La Toma, Colombia," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 157(C).
    2. Vuola, Marketta, 2022. "The intersections of mining and neoliberal conservation," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 152(C).
    3. Hook, Andrew, 2019. "The multidimensionality of exclusion in the small-scale gold mining sector in Guyana: Institutional reform, landlordism, and mineral uncertainty," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 123(C), pages 1-1.
    4. Rosales, Antulio, 2019. "Statization and denationalization dynamics in Venezuela's artisanal and small scale-large-scale mining interface," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 63(C), pages 1-1.
    5. Rodriguez, Luz A. & Velez, María Alejandra & Pfaff, Alexander, 2021. "Leaders’ distributional & efficiency effects in collective responses to policy: Lab-in-field experiments with small-scale gold miners in Colombia," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 147(C).
    6. Boone, Catherine & Lukalo, Fibian & Joireman, Sandra, 2021. "Promised land: settlement schemes in Kenya, 1962 to 2016," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 109307, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    7. Thaler, Gregory M. & Viana, Cecilia & Toni, Fabiano, 2019. "From frontier governance to governance frontier: The political geography of Brazil’s Amazon transition," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 114(C), pages 59-72.
    8. Obed Adonteng‐Kissi & Barbara Adonteng‐Kissi, 2018. "Precarious work or sustainable livelihoods? Aligning Prestea's Programme with the development dialogue on artisanal and small‐scale mining," Natural Resources Forum, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 42(2), pages 123-137, May.
    9. Hook, Andrew, 2019. "Over-spilling institutions: The political ecology of ‘greening’ the small-scale gold mining sector in Guyana," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 85(C), pages 438-453.

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