Anthropology, Indigenous Peoples and Resource Extraction

(7.5 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This module focuses on the social and cultural relations produced by resource extraction and explores the global and local frames through a series of worldwide case-studies. Resource exploration and extraction has historically played an important part in the interface with non- western and indigenous peoples and the forces of colonialism and globalisation. The module examines a series of diverse historical and geographical case-studies from different world regions and resources, including mining, oil, gas and logging - and uses these to illustrate and discuss debates in anthropology. The module takes an exploratory ethnographic approach to resource extraction sites and encounters as significant venues and vantage points for analysing knowledges and cosmologies - indigenous and anthropological - to understand the positions and consequences afforded by different ontological perspectives.