Labouring (in)visibilities: the fear of collapse among workers in a Gobi Desert mine (Mongolia)

This ethnographic study explores the ways in which a non-organic working environment transforms the human condition at multiple levels. To do this, I look at workers’ health, labour dynamics and political economy at the Oyu Tolgoi mine, one of the largest recently opened underground copper and gold mines in the world, located in the southern Gobi Desert in Mongolia. Through the lens of ‘diffuse intrusion’, I examine the processes of knowledge making (including ecological awareness) that have emerged as Oyu Tolgoi miners are confronted with the specific (im)materialities of the mine. The workers experienced a sense of intimate and unsettling proximity arising from their immanent relation with a toxic and harsh environment. In their accounts, the mine was described as an entity, sometimes alive (am’tai lit. with breath), sometimes dead (am’güi without breath), of which they were a part. In a continuum of being, the place transformed the miners, and the miners transformed the place, blurring the boundaries between environment and self. This close and viscous attachment was epistemologically twofold. On the one hand, the relatively high salaries paid to workers evoked a sense of desire associated with financial prosperity and social mobility. On the other hand, the physical, material experience of working conditions generated a sense of repulsion and rejection of something that invaded and disrupted their bio-rhythms (bio khemnel). This was evidenced by a generalised extreme fatigue (yadargaa) resulting from the long shifts in the mine during the pandemic, and as part of a wider societal ‘crisis of psychology’ (setgel züin khyamral). Female workers suffered high levels of stress, insomnia, loss of fertility and miscarriages, according to interlocutors’ accounts, while men frequently developed heart problems. Despite the anxiety and epistemic confusion that resulted from alienating working conditions and a boundless intimacy with this (in)visible violence, the miners did not make pacts with the devil, nor did they create fetishes or new cosmologies, as in Nash and Taussig’s account of Bolivian tin miners. But, they did seek to meaningfully locate these transformative processes within individual and collective instances of life. Women began to keep written records of miscarriages in the mine, while men began to mobilise politically, leading to the historic and unprecedented mass protests in the capital Ulaanbaatar in 2022 echoing the miners’ demonstrations in Kazakhstan and China that same year.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Pakulla, Iris

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Sneath, David

• Underground mining
• copper and gold mining
• post-socialist Mongolia
• industrial labour
• cyberactivism
• labour mobilisations
• Oyu Tolgoi mine
• reproductive extractivism
• human-environment relations
• shift work
• health

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/db7b5764-8532-49d9-a86e-e468314dc61c/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.119140

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/385584