Read more
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 possible-and gold's profound costs for those who have lived in its shadow and dreamt of its transformative power.
List of contents
Preface: Ground—Preliminary Definitions
A Note on Orthography and Capitalization
1. Clearing Ground
Part I. Groundwork
2. Letters, Ruin: Migrancy’s Remainders
3. Gold Fools: Or, What Is a Gold Rush?
4. Cyanide Dreams and the Redemption of Waste: Or, Snowballs in Hell
5. “We’re Ground Underfoot”: Movements Without Mobility
6. Down, in Africa: Women Surpassing Protest
Part II. The Deep
7. Figure, Ground, and Sinkhole
8. The Sky’s the Limit: Visions and Divisions of the World
9. Utopia on the Highveld
10. Good as Gold: Standards and Margins of Value
11. Catalytic Conversions: Becoming Organized
12. Go Underground: Or, When Was Youth?
13. Zombies Sing Pata Pata: The Impossible Subject of Political Violence
Part III. Surfacing
14. Terrain of the Fetish: Dislocations Relocations, and the Difficulty of Moving On
15. Rush, Panic, Rush: A New Book of the Dead
16. Magic Mountain: Debt and the Ancestors
17. Gambling on Gold Again
18. Afterward, Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index
About the author
Rosalind C. Morris is professor of anthropology at Columbia University. A writer, cultural critic, and documentary filmmaker, she has received numerous awards for her scholarly and artistic work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Summary
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 possible—and gold’s profound costs for those who have lived in its shadow and dreamt of its transformative power.
