ABSTRACT
Mineral resources – gold, diamonds, or oil – are classically described as
‘gifts of nature’, the outcome of geological and hydrothermal processes that
operate over time scales and at temperatures and pressures not replicable by
society. These strong biophysical tethers make mineral resources analytically
distinctive: like fish, water, game and land described in other chapters in this
part, minerals exemplify Polanyi’s (1944) category of ‘fictitious commod-
ities’. Although such distinctions are valuable, analyses which emphasize the
physical provenance of ores and minerals can quickly end up naturalizing their status as socially-valued resources. This obscures the extensive socio-
political work that must be done to commodify the invisible space of the
underground and produce it as a bankable mineral deposit. Gold, oil and
diamonds may be ‘non-produced goods’ from the perspective of classical
political economy, but transforming the underground into an extractable,
exportable commodity rests on the creation – and reproduction over time –
of quite particular social relations. The ‘resource space’ must be nurtured as
a site into and through which capital can flow, via knowledge claims which establish (and make legible) the mineralogical content of the underground,
and by instituting property relations to the underground that enable its
enclosure and the appropriation of its mineralogical values.
