ABSTRACT
Is the term ‘mining community’ an oxymoron? Any meaningful discussion must begin by challenging the myth of the isolated ‘mining camp,’ in which are found-putatively-the rude cabins and tents of temporary residents, exclusively male. In place of community, or so goes this myth, there is only an aggregate of adventurous, violent men, united only by greed and the pursuit of some valuable metal. Their society, if it can be so dignified by the use of that term, is controlled and shaped by its extreme dependence on resource extraction; if the resource disappears, what passes for community also disappears. To one rather unsympathetic observer, mining and its social relations more closely resemble an ‘addictive disorder’ than a normal human community (Freudenberg 1991).
