SHADOW AND IMPRESS: ETHNOGRAPHY, FILM, AND THE TASK OF WRITING HISTORY IN THE SPACE OF SOUTH AFRICA'S DEINDUSTRIALIZATION

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe historiography of natural‐resource extraction, especially in colonial contexts, is often torn between two temptations: to represent these histories in narratives commencing with discovery, and thus rupture; or to render them in tales of continuity and thus an identity that transcends history. In the increasingly common scenarios of deindustrialization, these twin temptations are sutured together via the figure of return. Thus, accounts of postindustrial life often construe it as a return to forms of life that preceded capital‐intensive industrial practice, and are written in the idiom of the “artisanal.” In doing so, they mistake a mere form of appearance, which is to say an image of the past, for its repetition, effacing the degree to which the materialities of industrialization shape, as both shadow and impress, the corporeal gestures and unconscious habits of those who inhabit its ruins. At the same time, and in an era of memory studies, truth commissions, and heritage projects, people who inhabit the spaces of deindustrialization often believe that they can survive the destruction of their life‐worlds only by giving themselves to be seen in the form of an image that resembles the past, and in a museological register. In this essay, based on two decades of field research in the areas of deep‐level mining in South Africa, and an ongoing documentary film project with informal migrant miners called zama‐zamas, I attempt to find another form and method for producing a historical and dialectical anthropological understanding of postindustrial life. The essay is an experiment in narrative that attempts to redeem a photographic and cinematographic tradition that is often culpable of reproducing the above‐named temptations. The essay thus weaves together forms of the close‐up—a gesture that seeks to get hold of history by means of an image—with contemplative reflections based in the temporally extended accounts of those who inhabit the ruins of deep‐level gold mines. In so doing, I propose a means of rethinking historiographical practice in the context of an always already vanishing present.