This piece compares two award-winning books on indigenous peoples in very different parts of the world who were confronted with large-scale mining projects and forged new identities to win recognition of their relationships to land. Both books also tackle the more basic questions of how political orders and cultural traditions get constituted, contested and reconfigured, and who – or what – gets to be counted as part of them. In an influential 2010 Cultural Anthropology article, ‘Cosmopolitics in the Andes’, Marisol de la Cadena introduced discussions by Jacques Rancière, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour and others on the boundaries of the social under Latour’s ‘modern constitution’ (1991) to a wider anthropological audience. She described a Peruvian indigenous struggle to upgrade ancestors and other ‘earth-beings’ usually treated as mere cultural ‘beliefs’ to full-fledged political subjects in order to dispute a mining project. De la Cadena’s book Earth Beings fleshes out the connection between her theoretical discussion of cosmopolitics and her respectful, affectionate, yet incomplete dialogue with two indigenous informants. In both texts, she deploys her Francophone philosophical interlocutors to challenge the premise that ‘the public presence of earth-beings in politics is ontologically unconstitutional in states ordered by biopolitical practices that conceive human life as discontinuous from (what those same practices call) nature’ (89). But it’s crucial to stress that even for indigenous Peruvians, the earth-beings’ ontological status only emerged in a specific historical crisis: when activists produced accounts for broad publics – themselves formed in response to the neoliberal conjuncture – about how a mine would threaten the mountain/being Ausangate. The ontological emergence also owed much to a new cultural tourism industry that had ‘shed the shame associated with addressing earth-beings’ and made them ‘conspicuously public’ (165–168). This pragmatic approach to identity is one reason I compare Earth Beings to Alex Golub’s Leviathans at the Gold Mine, another ethnography of a world-scale mining operation that focuses on indigenous political agency. Instead of Peru, where the globalized extraction of precious metals dates to the decades following the sixteenth-century Spanish invasion, in Golub’s case a gold mountain presides over the Porgera valley in Enga Province, Papua New Guinea (henceforth PNG). There, direct colonialism – and again, mining – only began in the mid-twentieth century. The fact that this book adopts a more classic social anthropological approach and that it addresses people with a much more recent insertion into Western property relations makes connecting the two ethnographies both challenging and productive of new perspectives on extractivism, ontology and history.

中文翻译：

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现代土著世界中的提取主义，本体论和历史

本文比较了两本关于世界上不同地区的土著人民的屡获殊荣的书，这些书籍面临着大规模的采矿项目，并伪造了新的身份以赢得对其土地关系的认可。这两本书还讨论了更基本的问题，即政治秩序和文化传统如何形成，争夺和重新配置，以及谁（或什么）被算作其中的一部分。在2010年颇有影响的文化人类学文章《安第斯山脉的世界政治》中，马里索尔·德拉·卡德纳（Marisol de la Cadena）介绍了雅克·兰西埃（JacquesRancière），伊莎贝拉·斯蒂格斯（Isabelle Stengers），布鲁诺·拉图尔（Bruno Latour）等人在拉图尔的《现代宪法》（1991年）下对社会边界的讨论。人类学的观众。她描述了秘鲁土著人为争取祖先和其他通常被视为纯粹文化“信仰”的“土生土”而升级为成熟的政治主体的斗争，以便对采矿项目提出异议。德拉卡迪纳（De la Cadena）的著作《地球存在》阐明了她对世界政治学的理论讨论与她与两位土著线人的尊重，亲切但不完整的对话之间的联系。在这两种文本中，她都部署了法语系的哲学对话者来挑战这一前提，即“在生物政治实践所命令的国家中，政治中地球存在的公共存在在本体论上是违宪的，这些国家认为人类生命与自然界是不连续的” （89）。但必须强调的是，即使对于土著秘鲁人，地球的本体论地位仅在特定的历史危机中出现：当激进主义者为广大公众（他们是为响应新自由主义形势而成立的）做出关于矿山将如何威胁这座山脉/奥桑盖特的说明时。本体论的出现还应归功于一种新的文化旅游业，它“摆脱了与应对地球生物有关的耻辱”，并使它们“显眼地成为公众”（165-168）。这种务实的身份认同方法是我将地球众生与金矿的Alex Golub的Leviathans进行比较的原因之一，这是另一种有关世界规模采矿业务的民族志，着眼于土著政治机构。秘鲁取代了十六世纪西班牙入侵之后的几十年，开始在全球范围内开采贵金属，在Golub的案例中，一座金山位于巴布亚新几内亚恩加省的Porgera山谷中（此后称为PNG）。在那里，直接的殖民主义-再一次是采矿-始于20世纪中叶。这本书采用了更为经典的社会人类学方法，并且针对的是西方财产关系中最近介入的人们，这一事实使这两个人种学联系起来既具有挑战性，又对提取主义，本体论和历史产生了新的视角。