철(鐵)과 탄(炭)의 장면 - 광업과 자원의 인간학

Abstract

Minerals and the mining industry are the roots of death and impoverishment, as well as that of modern production and development. Death and impoverishment are not limited within the field of nature. As coal miners show, exhaustion is never just the realm of nature. They traverse the underground world where nature's strength, cruel capital, and crafty states converge only with small lanterns. This article explores what kind of representation and cultural-political meaning were given to minerals, the mining industry, and mine workers by constructing a semantics of iron and coal, focusing on the wartime to liberation period (1937~1948). Due to a commodity shortage during war, resource conservation and increased production were more strongly emphasized than before. During this period, Lee Pukmyong problematized the reality of the poor strata in colonial Korea by describing the lumpen proletarian or 'minor on the ground' who illegally picked and sold discarded pieces of metal on the black market. Since the liberation of Korea and expanding imagination of resources, the mining industry and mine workers have changed to the extent that nationalism grew strong. This means that the tendency of minor transnationalism embedded in the modern mining industry has significantly weakened. Ahn Hoe-Nam, Han Seolya, and Hwang Geon's works demonstrate this nationalistic turn. Han Seolya and Hwang Geon wrote a narrative of the ‘splendid’ state, describing miners as perfect technicians emancipated from colonialist slave labor and have at last appropriated knowledge, technology, and patriotism. However, in the process of crafting the story of the ‘pillar of industry’ the irreducible complexities and alterities of miners, the uncontrolled and resistant labor-machine, were erased. To construct an anthropology of the mining industry and resources, the traces of conflict or rupture arising from the clashes between state-capital and miners should be considered.