Up to 200,000 Melanesian men, women, and children work as artisanal miners, yet their lifeworlds are seriously under-researched. This ethnography of a multigenerational community of migrant miners in Papua New Guinea shows that dreaming mediates how they experience and manage gold mining. Men argue that they alone can mine successfully by forming dream marriage bonds with the spirits of the land. Women draw on their own dream experience to challenge this, asserting their equal capacity to marry spirits and their right to mine. For women and men alike, dreams provide legitimations of agency and commentaries on mutual dependencies and moral obligations in the domestic domain and between humans and nonhumans.

Autorentext

Dan Moretti was British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge (2007-2010). Since 2007, he has consulted on projects related to artisanal and small-scale mining in Laos and Papua New Guinea.