Commodity Frontiers
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers
<p><em>Commodity Frontiers</em> explores the history and present of capitalism, contestation, and ecological transformation in the global countryside. Each themed issue includes articles and interviews with experts about studying and teaching commodity frontiers in theory and in practice. The Journal features reflections and reviews on the dynamics of capitalist expansion, social change, and ecological transformation on global as well local scales, in the past and at the present.</p>
Commodity Frontiers Initiative
en
Commodity Frontiers
2667-243X
-
Cover Materials
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/18167
Cover Materials
Mindi Schneider
Copyright (c) 2021 Commodity Frontiers
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
2021-12-01
2021-12-01
-
Livestock Frontiers
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/18166
<p class="p1">The word <em>livestock</em> itself suggests the reduction of animals as living things to animals as economic goods. Disaggregating the term into its component parts—live and stock—also suggest the difficulty of rendering things that are alive into things that are stocked, especially on large or predicable scales. The be alive is biological; living things breathe, eat, defecate, move, sleep, grow, reproduce, connect with others, get sick, die. To be stock, on the other hand, is economic; stocks are things held and exchanged. In capitalist relations specifically, livestock (and livestock parts) are owned, quantified, rationalized, commodified, specialized, simplified, contracted, accumulated, speculated upon, traded, sold.</p> <p class="p2"> </p> <p class="p1">Ongoing attempts to make living things into stocks, or commodities, are rife with contradictions and impossibilities. Fundamentally, biological bodies are barriers to accumulation. The unruliness of living stocks—including their biological needs, the time they take to grow and mature, their propensities toward genetic diversity, and their vulnerabilities in environments where diversity is strictly denied—make them particularly difficult to standardize and simplify for the market. Just as Karl Polanyi (1944) unveiled the fiction of land, labor, and money as commodities, animals must join this list.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p>
Editorial Introduction
livestock
metabolic rift
pastoralism
commodity frontiers
livestock frontiers
Mindi Schneider
Samuël Coghe
Copyright (c) 2021 Commodity Frontiers
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
2021-12-01
2021-12-01
i
viii
10.18174/cf.2021a18166
-
Review of Joshua Specht’s "Red Meat Republicâ€
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/18164
<p class="p1">Jonas M. Albrecht's review of Joshua Specht, <em>Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America</em>. Princeton University Press 2019, ISBN (Paperback): 9780691209180, $18,95/£14.99, 368 Pages.</p>
Publications
meat, US-History, capitalism, commodity chain, 19th century
Jonas Albrecht
Copyright (c) 2021 Commodity Frontiers
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
2021-12-01
2021-12-01
57
62
10.18174/cf.2021a18164
-
Peasant Frontiers and the Enigma of Peasant Work
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/18163
<p class="p1">Peasant households produce most of the food in the world today, as they have for millennia. Concentrated in China and India, and spread across the Global South, the variegated persistence of differentiated peasantries and their labor remains one of the most fundamental questions of the 21st century. In this contribution, Eric Vanhaute argues that peasants have underwritten and fueled the expansion of civilizations, empires, states, and economies for the last ten millennia, embodying what he calls “peasant frontiers.†He reflects on how peasant work is foundational for resolving contemporary socio-ecological crises, including those related to capitalist industrial livestock production. The contribution is based on his new book, <em>Peasants in World History</em>, Routledge, 2021.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p>
Labor Frontiers
peasant, peasantries, peasant question, labor, subsistence
Eric Vanhaute
Copyright (c) 2021 Commodity Frontiers
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
2021-12-01
2021-12-01
51
56
10.18174/cf.2021a18163
-
Livestock, Colonialism, and Commodity Frontiers in the U.S. Southwest
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/18162
<p class="p1">Commodity frontiers are a useful way to think about the expansion and rearticulation of capitalist modes of production across the globe. A weakness of this approach is to miss deeper histories of colonialism and domination at the sites of the metaphorical frontier. This commentary thinks through Diné relationship with sheep to think through how livestock often contains older relationships that transcend colonial limitations.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p>
Commodity Frontier Political Ecology
Navajo, livestock, settler-colonialism, commodity frontier, decolonization
Andrew Curley
Copyright (c) 2021 Commodity Frontiers
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
2021-12-01
2021-12-01
27
30
10.18174/cf.2021a18162
-
From Tale to Tail: Unwinding the Twisted Life Story of PIG 05049
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/18160
<p class="p1"><em>Pig 05049</em> is a book and research project by Dutch designer Christien Meindertsma that chronicles the many consumer products that were made from a pig called 05049. The book offers an insightful look into how this one animal, a single source, provides raw material for a vast number of everyday objects. Meindertsma’s clinical presentation of each laboriously researched object, page by page, organised by body part, follows the progress of the dissection of <em>Pig 05049</em> and the subsequent use of each part. Some products, she found, are expected and familiar, whilst other diverge dramatically: ammunition, medicine, photo paper, cigarettes, conditioner, and bio diesel. <em>PIG 05049</em> is currently in its 5th edition. The book won the Dutch Design Award in 2008 and the Index award in 2009 in the category <em>Play</em>. The article is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation between Commodity Frontiers editor, Maarten Vanden Eynde and Christien Meinderstma in September 2021.</p>
Creative Frontiers
animal welfare, bio-industry, pigs, globalisation, food chain, design journalism, product design, memory, remembering
Maarten Vanden Eynde
Copyright (c) 2021 Commodity Frontiers
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
2021-12-01
2021-12-01
31
38
10.18174/cf.2021a18160
-
Learning to Resist(ance) in Gujarat
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/18159
<p class="p1">The Banni grassland, of Gujarat state of western India, has emerged as a site of multipronged contestations over land and livelihoods. Structural transformations seek to refashion Kachchh’s economy, society, and nature along capitalist and neoliberal lines threatening the livelihood of the 25000 mobile pastoralists inhabiting the grassland. Embedded within this context, the Salim Mama Youth Course, initiated through the a collaboration between local civil society, research and academic organizations, trains the youth in the region to recognize connections between pastoralism and their ecosystems. It achieves two main goals: firstly, the course attempts to secure the long-term sustainability of the grassland by developing the technical know-how of the youth as well as generating enthusiasm for pastoralism. Secondly, it contributes to the ongoing resistance against state induced corporate capture both practically, by providing information and tools to sustain contestations, and ideologically by reimagining the role and value of pastoralism in the region. This article unpacks the pedagogical approach of the course as a form of active and positive grassroots resistance against neoliberal environmentalism.</p>
Teaching Commodity Frontiers
pastoralism, pastoral pedagogy, youth, education and resistance, Banni Grasslands
Natasha Maru
Copyright (c) 2021 Commodity Frontiers
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
2021-12-01
2021-12-01
10.18174/cf.2021a18159
-
Fieldwork in the Poultry Capital of the World
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/18158
<p class="p1">Hanne Cottyn and Stha Yeni of the CFI spoke with Carrie Freshour about cheap meat, workers’ care and resistance, and fieldwork in Georgia, USA, which has been named the “poultry capital of the world.†The article is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation from 5 August 2021.</p>
From the Field
poultry, fieldwork, labor, abolition, structural racism, carceral geographies
Hanne Cottyn
Stha Yeni
Copyright (c) 2021 Commodity Frontiers
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
2021-12-01
2021-12-01
19
25
10.18174/cf.2021a18158
-
Cattle Grazing and Forest Devastation in Brazil
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/18157
<p class="p1">This article examines the history and present-day dynamics of deforestation and cattle grazing in Brazil’s Amazon. It discusses the long-standing strategic alliance between agribusiness and the Brazilian state, as well as the role of livestock grazing in Brazil’s developmental ideology of the frontier. It shows how the livestock industry is enlaced with soy production in the deterritorialization and deforestation of the Amazon, as well as the legalized theft of indigenous lands. It places these<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p> <p class="p1">Brazilian dynamics into larger international context and analyses the class structure and state capture of Brazil’s agro-industrial sector.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p>
Historians Take on the Present
Joana Medrado
Copyright (c) 2021 Commodity Frontiers
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
2021-12-01
2021-12-01
15
20
10.18174/cf.2021a18157
-
Animals as and on Resource Frontiers
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/18154
<p class="p1">This paper attempts to locate changing interspecies relations in the dynamism and violence of capitalist expansion on a world scale, setting out two primary ways that the rising exploitation of non-human animals contributed to the development of settler-colonial economies, destabilization of indigenous societies, and transformation of ecosystems. One path was set by burgeoning demand essentially turning some wild animal species into increasingly valuable commodities and driving the rising scale and systematization of extraction and trade, which tended to quickly undermine conditions of abundance and make these animal frontiers very mobile. The second way started from the introduction of domesticated animals, with the muscle power and bodily commodities derived from proliferating populations valued not only in the expansion of agricultural landscapes but also in the formation and functioning of other resource frontiers, and ultimately bound up in waves of enclosures and expulsions. This framework seeks to simultaneously pose challenges for historical analysis and provide insights that help to understand the trajectory of animal life today. </p>
Studying Commodity Frontiers
Tony Weis
Copyright (c) 2021 Commodity Frontiers
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
2021-12-01
2021-12-01
1
13
10.18174/cf.2021a18154
-
Agrarian Frontier Expansion and Conflicts over Labor
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/18093
<p>This article explores large-scale industrial agriculture and related conflicts over labor in Brazil. It does so through an analysis of the industrial transformation of the sugarcane sector in São Paulo state, a representative case of recent agricultural changes and their effects on wage workers, trade unions and their struggles.</p>
Labor Frontiers
labor, trade unions, industrial agriculture, sugarcane, conflict, agrarian frontier, Brazil
Jan Brunner
Copyright (c) 2021 Commodity Frontiers
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
2021-04-30
2021-04-30
64
69
10.18174/cf.2021a18093
-
Cover Materials
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/18090
Cover Materials
Mindi Schneider
Copyright (c) 2021 Commodity Frontiers
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
2021-04-15
2021-04-15
10.18174/cf.2021a18090
-
Stimulant Frontiers
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/18089
<p class="p1">Stimulants have, in their own ways, played a leading role in shaping today’s globalised world. Their world-shaping power stems from their double role: as “agents†that stimulate bodies, and as things that “rouse and incite†capital. In this issue of <em>Commodity Frontiers</em>, contributions center on the histories and presents of some of the leading stimulant crops and the sites and processes of their cultivation, expansion, and transformations. Contributors variously consider stimulants from the perspectives of bodies and capital, sometimes touching on their overlaps.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p>
Editorial Introduction
Mindi Schneider
Ulbe Bosma
Copyright (c) 2021 Commodity Frontiers
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
2021-04-15
2021-04-15
i
iv
10.18174/cf.2021a18089
-
Events and Announcements
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/18085
<p class="p1">This section aims to improve communications between initiatives, artists, activists, scholars, and research groups engaged in the study and politics of commodity frontiers. Here you will find the latest news recommended by people from the Commodity Frontiers Initiative.<span class="Apple-converted-space">Â </span></p> <p class="p2">Â </p> <p class="p1">This is a first selection, and we would be happy to add further events on our website, in social media, and in future volumes of <em>Commodity Frontiers</em>. Please send your announcements to Claudia Bernardi (<a href="https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/workflow/index/18085/5/mailto:clod.zeta@gmail.com%22%20%5Co%20%22mailto:clod.zeta@gmail.com"><span class="s1">clod.zeta@gmail.com</span></a>), or contact us through the <a href="http://www.commodityfrontiers.org/"><span class="s2">website</span></a>, <a href="http://@Cmdty_Frontiers"><span class="s2">Twitter</span></a>, or <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Commodity-Frontiers-Initiative-103257818127164"><span class="s2">Facebook</span></a>.</p>
Events and Announcements
Claudia Bernardi
Copyright (c) 2021 Commodity Frontiers
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
2021-04-15
2021-04-15
60
63
10.18174/cf.2021a18085
-
Malthus in Smith Clothing
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/18084
<p class="p1">In this op-ed, Robert Fletcher reviews <em>The Dasgupta Review</em>, a report commissioned by the UK Treasury Department on <em>The Economics of Biodiversity</em>, which was released in February 2021. Fletcher argues that rather than offering a fresh or timely analysis of biodiversity loss and how to counter it, the Review continues a long line of similar reports that leave capitalism in the background as a given, and lay blame for what ails the world at the feet of "population." Such disavowed capital-centric Malthusianism, Fletcher argues, renders the popular report a distraction from desperately needed analyses of the political economy of biodiversity loss. </p>
Op-Eds
Robert Fletcher
Copyright (c) 2021 Commodity Frontiers
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
2021-04-15
2021-04-15
54
59
10.18174/cf.2021a18084
-
Labor Commodification in the Sugarcane Plantations of Alagoas, Northeast Brazil
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/18083
<p class="p1">Since the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, Brazil's ruling classes - who have always disputed labor regulations and protections with the complicity of state authorities - reorganized themselves around an authoritarian project of power. This project is widely backed by agribusiness and industrialists, given Bolsonaro’s promises to boost market freedoms by reducing social and labor rights. In this article I focus on the case of the sugarcane plantations of Alagoas, Northeast Brazil, where I have been carrying out fieldwork since 2012 to explore a couple of questions around labor precarity and job formalization using oral history interviews, documents, and labor process observations. Between May and August 2019, I returned to the field to undertake exploratory fieldwork about the consequences of the labor reform in terms of the working conditions and rights of the sugarcane cutters.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p>
From the Field
Brazil, sugarcane cutters, labor commodification, labor reform, precarity
Allan S. Queiroz
Copyright (c) 2021 Commodity Frontiers
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
2021-04-15
2021-04-15
41
47
10.18174/cf.2021a18083
-
A New Museum Order
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/18082
<p class="p2">In the framework of the 2nd Commodity Frontiers Initiative Journal with the theme of ‘Stimulants’ I could not have wished for a better-suited match to interview than Roger M. Buergel and Sophia Prinz from the Johann Jacobs Museum, which owes its existence to the coffee and cacao trade, but more importantly is unique in its endeavour to lay bare the intrinsically interwoven histories of commodities. The museum is dedicated to the global interdependencies of our life-world that become especially clear when tracing the history of important trade goods and their transport routes. Products such as coffee, cocoa, petroleum, opium, sugar, silk, watches and diamonds have had a hand in shaping our planet, impacted cultures and revolutionized societies.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p>
Creative Frontiers
museology, art, human history, raw materials, globalization, colonial heritage, relational aesthetics, interdependency, transculturalism, temporality, memory, remembering
Maarten Vanden Eynde
Copyright (c) 2021 Commodity Frontiers
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
2021-04-15
2021-04-15
33
40
10.18174/cf.2021a18082
-
Illicit Crop Frontiers
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/18081
<p class="p1">Today, many zones of cultivation for plants like coca, khat, kratom, and cannabis are thriving, in some cases despite protracted, violent, and lethal attempts at containment through state re-territorialization -- and often, state terror. These plants straddle the borders of legality in many places where they are grown, participating in the cultivation of agriculture frontiers characterized by uncertain and unpredictable openings and closings, and changing distributions of harms among plants and human communities. Scholars and activists question the ideology and efficacy of transnational and state programs to eradicate crops and criminalize farmers, bringing new attention to these commodities and the impacts of their contested legal status. There is also a rising appreciation of indigenous and traditional cultivation and of the importance of decolonizing uses of plants, against backdrops of botanical speculation, piracy, colonization, and trauma. Finally, these illicit agricultural frontiers stand to be dramatically reconfigured by changes potential to drug law regimes.</p> <p class="p2"> </p> <p class="p1">For this essay, we invited three scholars to comment on the frontiers of coca, khat, and kratom where they have long been embedded in research: Asmin Fransiska (hereafter AF) in Indonesia, Lisa Gezon (hereafter LG) in Madagascar, and Kristina Lyon (hereafter KL) in Colombia. We, the authors, edited these comments, and put them into a conversation exploring illicit crop frontiers today, and what is shared and distinct among these frontiers, the frictions and countermovements within them, and their actual or potential connections to broader agrarian movements. As we relay the commentaries, we offer a few contours of what (il)licit crops frontiers bring to our understanding of uneven and unequal histories of capitalism and the unending drive for crop commodities in marginal landscapes. We offer a brief typology of these frontiers to punctuate the conversation, and some directions for ongoing study.</p> <p class="p2"> </p>
Conflicts, Frictions, and Counternarratives
coca, khat, kratom, “war on drugs”, prohibition, development
Serena Stein
Katie Sandwell
Copyright (c) 2021 Commodity Frontiers
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
2021-04-15
2021-04-15
24
32
10.18174/cf.2021a18081
-
The True Price of Quality
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/18080
<p class="p1">In Kenya, tea is a “political crop†(Ochieng 2007). Tea is one of Kenya’s largest exports and is an important foreign exchange earner and source of revenue. At the same time, tea is key to the livelihoods many smallholder farmers in central Kenya and west of the Rift Valley, so that the price of tea is a recurrent focus of political campaigns. Keenly aware of tea’s political and economic value, county governments grapple with the national government over tea policy, while key industry actors challenge and resist attempts at reform. These politics around the “true†price of tea are situated in and regenerated through the infrastructures through which Kenyan tea is produced, processed and marketed. </p>
Commodity Frontier Political Ecology
Hannah Elliott
Martin Skrydstrup
Copyright (c) 2021 Commodity Frontiers
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
2021-04-15
2021-04-15
16
23
10.18174/cf.2021a18080
-
Working the Rural-Urban Divide
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/18079
<p class="p1">Alexander F. Day is not only an avid consumer of Chinese tea, he has taken up this plant, product, and production system as the subject for his forthcoming book. Situated in <em>Meitan</em> county in <em>Guizhou</em> province—the county that currently boasts the largest planted area of tea in China—his research traces the interplay of tea, labor, and political economy and the shift from household production to industrialisation from the 1920s to the present. Day combines archival research and fieldwork, making regular trips to <em>Meitan</em>, where he collaborates with local tea historians. His work connects the past and the present, and provides insights into how studying the contemporary period sheds light on earlier periods and vice versa. The following is a lightly edited version of our interview about Alexander’s current book project.</p>
Historians Take on the Present
Mindi Schneider
Copyright (c) 2021 Commodity Frontiers
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
2021-04-15
2021-04-15
10
15
10.18174/cf.2021a18079
-
The Coffee Frontier in Proto-Colonial and Colonial Angola
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/18078
<p class="p1">Coffee plantations were unquestionably one of the defining features of Angola’s colonial landscape. From the 1870s to independence, coffee was the main export of this former Portuguese colony, barring a couple of intervals during which rubber and diamonds held first place. During this time, Angola ranked consistently among the world’s largest robusta producers, which it might still have been today had the country’s civil war (1975-2002) not made commercial farming all but impossible. In Angolan popular memory, coffee occupies an ambivalent position: for some people it brings up memories of colonial forced labor, while others recollect stories of successful family farms. My research project, “Coffee and Colonialism in Angola, 1820-1960,†aims to reconstruct the multiple, intertwined realities behind these contrasting memories. Focusing on northern Angola, where smallholding and estate farming always coexisted, it investigates how African farmers, colonial settlers, foreign traders, and global consumers shaped one of the oldest commercial coffee frontiers in sub-Saharan Africa. In doing so, it reflects on the question to what extent “colonialism†is the proper lens through which to study the history of coffee cultivation in Angola.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p>
Studying Commodity Frontiers
Jelmer Vos
Copyright (c) 2021 Commodity Frontiers
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
2021-04-15
2021-04-15
1
4
10.18174/cf.2021a18078
-
Teaching the History of Drugs as Commodities
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/18077
<p>Paul Gootenberg is SUNY Distinguished Professor of History and Sociology at Stony Brook University (New York) and Chair of History. He is a global commodity and drug historian trained as a Latin Americanist at the University of Chicago and Oxford. His works include <em>Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug</em> (UNC Press, 2008), <em>Cocaine: Global Histories</em> (Routledge, 1999) and with Liliana M. Dávalos, <em>The Origins of Cocaine: Peasant Colonization and Failed Development in the Amazon Andes</em> (Routledge, 2018). From 2011-14 he chaired the Drugs, Security and Democracy fellowship (DSD) of the Soros Open Society Foundation and Social Science Research Council. Gootenberg is General Editor of the forthcoming <em>Oxford Handbook of Drug History</em> and President-elect 2021of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society (ADHS). He regularly teaches courses at Stony Brook about the history of commodities and drugs. What follows is an edited transcript of an interview he had with Elisabet Rasch one of the editors of the <em>Teaching Commodity Frontiers </em>section, in February 2021.</p>
Teaching Commodity Frontiers
Elisabet Dueholm Rasch
Copyright (c) 2021 Commodity Frontiers
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
2021-04-15
2021-04-15
5
9
10.18174/cf.2021a18077
-
Global Commodities
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/18076
<p class="p1">Focusing on coca, coffee, gold, soy, sugar, and tea, articles in a special issue of the <em>Austrian Journal of Historical Studies</em> 30/3 (2019) on <a href="https://journals.univie.ac.at/index.php/oezg/issue/view/305"><span class="s1">Global Commodities </span></a> aim at tracing the emergence of commodity chains through the expansion and contraction of commodity frontiers. Frontier shifts imply complex – and potentially conflicting – interactions shaped by as well as shaping socio-natural systems. Thus, the contributions reveal commodity chains and their frontiers to be subject to negotiations between multiple actors, both human and non-human. Each of the contributions concentrates on one or more world region(s) of frontier shifts, while taking into account the transregional, transnational, and transcontinental connections via commodity chains. Thereby, these commodity-focused histories reveal the benefit of combining global with regional or even local perspectives (Joseph, 2019).</p>
Publications
Erich Landsteiner
Ernst Langthaler
Copyright (c) 2021 Commodity Frontiers
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
2021-04-15
2021-04-15
48
53
10.18174/cf.2021a18076
-
Commodity Frontiers 1, Fall 2020 Cover Material
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/17976
<p>Cover material, table of contents, mission statement.</p>
Articles
Mindi Schneider
Copyright (c) 2020 Commodity Frontiers
2020-10-02
2020-10-02
10.18174/cf.2020a17976
-
Gold is not for eating
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/17960
<p>This article presents large-scale gold mining and related conflicts in Burkina Faso - a paramount example of the recent commodity boom and its pervasive socio-economic effects. Mobilization around the Houndé gold mine, located 250 km southwest of the capital Ouagadougou, is depicted as an illustration.</p>
Labor Frontiers
extractivism
mining
gold
conflict
Africa
Burkina Faso
Bettina Engels
Copyright (c) 2020 Commodity Frontiers
2020-09-30
2020-09-30
1
6
10.18174/cf.2020a17960
-
Making sense of global gold mining
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/17961
<p>In our own research, we set out to develop an explanatory framework for understanding diversity in global gold mining. This required a move away from the dualist and localist focus that characterized earlier research. The results of this exercise were recently published in the form of an edited volume, which couples an analysis of systemic trends in global gold mining to thirteen country case studies in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. In this contribution, we want to briefly elaborate on the analytical and conceptual challenges that we encountered.</p>
Studying Commodity Frontiers
gold
artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM)
minerals
commodity frontiers
anthropological fieldwork
Boris Verbrugge
Maria Eugenia Robles Mengoa
Copyright (c) 2020 Commodity Frontiers
2020-09-30
2020-09-30
7
11
10.18174/cf.2020a17961
-
“COVID-19 has crippled our struggleâ€
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/17963
<p>An Interview with Pinky Langa, environmental justice and feminist activist, on the experiences of women organising against extractivism in South Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic.</p>
From the Field
women against extractivism
organising
coal mining
resistance
solidarity
Sithandiwe Yeni
Copyright (c) 2020 Commodity Frontiers
2020-09-30
2020-09-30
43
47
10.18174/cf.2020a17963
-
Teaching extraction and its discontents
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/17965
<p>Anna Zalik, Associate Professor at York University’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, teaches a course called Extraction and its Discontents: A Social History and Political Economy. The course builds on and extends her work on the politics of industrial extraction in Nigeria, Mexico and Canada, her more recent research on seabed mining, and her writing and reflections on the politics of fieldwork on natural resource extraction. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of an interview she had with Gayatri Menon, editor of the Teaching Commodity Frontiers section, in August 2020.</p>
Teaching Commodity Frontiers
extraction
minerals
sovereigntist movements
seabed mining
Gayatri A. Menon
Copyright (c) 2020 Commodity Frontiers
2020-09-30
2020-09-30
12
15
10.18174/cf.2020a17965
-
Copper, llamas and a virus
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/17966
<p>This essay reflects on my re-encounter with the llama herders of Turco (Bolivia) and their entanglement with histories of capitalism and indigenous resistance (after many years without visiting). The pandemic sheds a new light on these shifting entanglements.</p>
Historians Take on the Present
Bolivia
copper mining
llamas
Covid
indigenous communities
Hanne Cottyn
Copyright (c) 2020 Commodity Frontiers
2020-09-30
2020-09-30
16
21
10.18174/cf.2020a17966
-
Frontiers of the green energy transition
https://library.wur.nl/ojs/index.php/commodity-frontiers/article/view/17967
<p>Interview with Melisa Argento and Bruno Fornillo from the Research Group on Commons and Geopolitics (Grupo de Estudios Sobre Bienes Comunes y GeopolÃtica) at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. They have investigated the expansion of the lithium frontier for well over a decade, and have published widely on a range of issues, including geopolitical movements, local resistance and technological aspects of battery production.</p>
Commodity Frontier Political Ecology
extraction
renewable energy
Andes
geopolitics
Maria Cariola
Copyright (c) 2020 Commodity Frontiers
2020-09-30
2020-09-30
22
27
10.18174/cf.2020a17967