Unstable Ground: The Lives, Deaths, and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa

by ROSALIND C. MORRIS

What has gold done to people? What has it made them do? The Witwatersrand in South Africa, once home to the world’s richest goldfields, is today scattered with abandoned mines into which informal miners known as zama zamas venture in an illicit—often deadly—search for ore. Based on field research conducted across more than twenty-five years around these mines, Unstable Ground reveals the worlds that gold made possible—and gold’s profound costs for those who have lived in its shadow and dreamt of its transformative power.

About the Author

Rosalind C. Morris is a professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Rosalind Morris’ work is addressed to the histories and social lives—including the deaths and afterlives—produced in the interstices of industrial and resource-based capitalism in the Global South. Those interests extend to the technological and media forms that attend or undergird these economies, and the forms of subjectivity produced in their midst.

About the Speakers

Mamadou Diouf is the Leitner Family Professor of African Studies and the Director of Columbia University’s Institute for African Studies. His research interests include urban, political, social, and intellectual history in colonial and postcolonial Africa.

Brian Larkin is a professor at Barnard College as well as the Co-Founder and Codirector of Columbia University’s Center for Comparative Media. His research examines how it is media technologies organize the world in which we live and the modes of political and cultural life that result.

Claudio Lomnitz is the Campbell Family Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. He works on the history, politics and culture of Latin America, and particularly of Mexico.

Lisa Stevenson is an Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University. As an anthropologist, she has attempted to trace and describe such imagistic forms of thought in the everyday worlds of people in situations of violence.

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