New Approaches in Mining Studies
Timothy James LeCain (Montana): Do Coal and Oil Drive History? The New Materialism and the Question of Mineral Agency
In recent years, as the new materialism, more-than-human history, and other theoretical and methodological innovations have gained influence, scholars have begun to rethink the potential agency of minerals. Conventional anthropocentric histories have generally viewed minerals as largely passive objects that human beings extract, process, and use. More recent scholarship, however, has suggested that we must consider that minerals have certain material natures and potentials—what James Gibson termed “affordances”—that exercise significant influences over how humans feel, think, and act. This potentiality has become a matter of especial concern regarding the two most significant climate-warming minerals, coal and oil. Dipesh Chakrabarty famously, and controversially, asserted in 2009 that, “The mansions of modern freedom stand on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use.” Other scholars have probed the nature of carbon itself—the element that gives coal and oil their energetic potential—suggesting that humans have been lured and trapped into close relationship with these minerals that they cannot easily escape. Others disagree, arguing that such readings are mistakenly deterministic and thus neglect the true anthropocentric causes of global warming, such as colonialism or capitalism. In this talk, I argue that these debates over mineral agency and determinism are really debates about whether human cognition and culture exist primarily in our brains, or whether they extend out into the world around us. I conclude that the second may be the more convincing stance, and if so, there is a strong case that coal and oil should stand alongside of humans as central drivers of history.
