Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

I am going through the final, painful thicket of ideas that is the ‘theoretical’ section of my dissertation. “This is what my brain feels like”:http://www.geocities.com/heartland/ranch/1201/oandkrh400.html?200528. These two paragraphs just took me literally an hour to write/revise:

“But mining, like cannibalism, “is always symbolic, even when it is ‘real’” (Sahlins 1983:). It is important to realize that both the semiotic and technical aspects of mining are flip sides of the same coin. As the “pragmatic-poetic turn” of contemporary linguistic anthropology (the term is from Silverstein 2004:623; other prominent statements regarding this turn might be found in Silverstein and Urban 1996 and Baumann and Briggs 1990) has demonstrated, all human interaction requires the deployment of a shared set of sociocultural concepts in order to ensure that interaction coheres to create “a coherent, intersubjectively accomplished interactional text, the interpersonal achievement of a ‘doing’ of something – an instance of some generically understood social act – to which more than one individual has contributed” (Silverstein 1998:270) This is true even of perilinguistic interactions such as those that occur in Porgera’s open pit, where the operators of, say a Catepillar 769 haul truck and an O&K RH8 excavator, must work together to dislodge material from the open pit and transfer it from the bucket of the excavator to the back of the 769 without either of the operators being killed — a remarkably easy thing to do in a line of work where the tires of your vehicle are taller than you are. While the complex figuration of text in context in the course of the linguistically mediated interaction of Mr. A and Mr. B described by Silverstein (2004:623-625) may be poetically more complex than the ‘doing-something’ of shoveling ore into the back of a truck, it is none the less true that even miners must invoke sociocultural conceptions, inhabit roles, and share a set ‘standard operating procedures’ that will regiment action if the most elemental aspect of mining is to occur without mishap. This “mutual tuning-in relationship,” as Schutz (1964:161) called it, is always metapragmatically regimented, regardless of the antintellectualism inherent in the ethnometapragmatics of any single miner who is engaged in the improvisational performance of ‘mining’ in realtime discursive practice.

The question of how to keep the mine open, then, is shot through with two dimensions which are interrelated, rather than opposed. Looked at from the point of view of engineering – moving the physical materials which are insensible to the semiotics of our lives – the logistics involved in keeping the mine open requires ‘practical’ and ‘real’ action: you can not talk the gold out of a mine and modulo the inevitably culturally shaped means and ends that determine what and how ought to be mined, the physical nature of the resource creates technical imperatives which must be met. But every human being who is part of the complex chain of logistics that runs from machine operators in the open pit to people signing checks in Vancouver deploys some sort of narrative about who they are and what they are doing which permits the technically complex coordination of action of thousands of individuals that results in the creation of bars of pure gold. Keeping the mine open is thus shot through with both engineering and signification.”