Unstable Ground

""This is Roz Morris's magnum opus on gold, a book she has been researching and writing for 20 years. Unstable Ground is an ethnographically informed, disciplinarily expansive book that pursues two simple and intimately related questions of world-historical significance: what has gold done to people and what has it made them do? It poses these questions with reference to a particular place-the social worlds of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, where the largest gold reserves and the deepest mines in the world are located. Although its focus is there, and on a number of individuals whose lives she depicts, it is her thesis that the lives and afterlives of the gold industry in South Africa can be read as a harbinger of changes that are today visible throughout the world. This book testifies to the lived experience of those whose worlds were made, remade, and sometimes undone by gold. It examines the ways in which social and economic forces have been inscribed in aesthetic forms and practices of both valorization and insurrectionary opposition. Morris's book is written from the margins, and in the penumbra of the industry's gradual demise-as reserves are depleted, mines are closed, and the specter of post-material currency is linked to the displacement of production by scavenging. In this manner it documents how the transformation of waste into surplus value was intensified in the glow and shadow of gold. The communities at the heart of the ethnographic portion of her book coincide with the origin and duration of apartheid, as well as its demise and "spectral persistence." The unfolding of historical narrative and analysis is interwoven with personal testimony, intensely described accounts of the present, the space of gold mining's end. The method goes beyond ethnography, however; it could also be described as history, political economy, and social analysis. It is the author's effort to understand the effects of this most fetishized metal""--