ABSTRACT
The chapter analyses “the vertical turn” in the anthropology of resource extraction. It focuses on the politics of ways of knowing the underground and valuing subterranean extraction. It outlines how distinctions between the geological and the social, and between the human and non-human feature in debates on climate change and social justice. It argues that ways of knowing the underground are cosmologies which propose morals for exchange relations. They contain (ontological) postulates about the agency or inertness of underground matter, and about the senses permitting knowledge of subterranean worlds; the capacity to see or not to see mineral wealth features prominently in discourses on the underground. Subsequently, the chapter examines innovative ethnographic work on the underground as target for governance and corporations. Anthropological studies show how the vertical dimensions of governing resources play out in hybrid arenas of authorizers and civil actors within national territories and beyond, underground and in the deep sea. Moreover, the anthropology of mining companies details the prominence of speculation about underground wealth, as well as agency of workers who are carving out their voluminous work place while extracting minerals. The conclusion links these situated, in-depth ethnographies to wider perspectives on global infrastructure and the planetary mine.
