The anthropology of extraction: critical perspectives on the resource curse

Attempts to address the resource curse remain focussed on revenue management, seeking technical solutions to political problems over examinations of relations of power. In this paper, we provide a review of the contribution anthropological research has made over the past decade to understanding the dynamic interplay of social relations, economic interests and struggles over power at stake in the political economy of extraction. In doing so, we show how the constellation of subaltern and elite agency at work within processes of resource extraction is vital in order to confront the complexities, incompatibilities, and inequities in the exploitation of mineral resources

Introduction: Anthropologies of planning-Temporality, imagination, and ethnography

Recent anthropological approaches to temporality and spatiality can offer particularly important insights into established planning theories. In this introductory essay, we consider planning as a manifestation of what people think is possible and desirable, and what the future promises for the better. We outline how plans can operate as a particular form of promissory note, and explore how plans may be seen to perform a particular kind of work, laying out diverse kinds of conceptual orders while containing a notion of the state as an unfulfilled idea. The task of the ethnographer is to chart the practices, discourses, technologies, and artifacts produced by planning, as well as the gaps that emerge between planning theory and practice. We consider the changing horizons of expectation and the shifting grounds of government in different phases and forms of neoliberalization that are characteristic of planning in the contemporary world

90 years on - the 1919 eclipse expedition at Príncipe

The first experiment to observationally confirm Einstein's General Theory of Relativity was carried out in May 1919, on a Royal Astronomical Society expedition to observe a total solar eclipse. Sir Arthur Eddington travelled to Príncipe, a small island off the west coast of Africa, and sent another team to Sobral, Brazil, from where the eclipse would also be visible. This year, in a new RAS-funded expedition organized for the International Year of Astronomy, we returned to Príncipe to celebrate this key experiment that shook the foundations of 20th-century science. Since 1687, Sir Isaac Newton's law of gravity had been the workhorse of celestial mechanics. Newtonian gravity could be used to explain the motions of a host of celestial bodies and the heavens were reliable and predictable. There was one small discrepancy: accurate measurements of Mercury's orbit did not quite fit the Newtonian paradigm. Mercury was observed to precess around the Sun slightly too quickly, by an extra degree for every 8400 years. By the end of the 19th century, attempts to explain the anomaly with classical solutions, such as unseen moons or interplanetary dust, had failed