COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: The Anthropology of Coltan Mining in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo

University Of California-Davis, Davis CA

Investigators

Abstract

Dr. Jeffrey W. Mantz (George Mason University) and Dr. James H. Smith (University of California, Davis) will collaborate in research on the economic, political, and social consequences of columbite-tantalite mining in the Kivu provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. From 1998 until 2003, this region was ground zero for what is widely referred to as Africa's first "world war," a conflict that pitted eight African nations against one another, and which has thus far cost the lives of over four million people. At the center of this conflict was a unique ore,columbite-tantalite or, as it is known in Africa, coltan. Coltan is an electrical current conductor used in the making of digital capacitors. Tantalum, which is processed from coltan, is crucial to all digital technologies, including cell phones, pagers, video game players, and digital music players. Over the past ten years, foreign armies and local militias have used the money they earned from the sale of coltan, and other minerals such as gold, to finance and extend their military operations throughout the region. Mantz and Smith will conduct both extensive survey and intensive ethnographic research on coltan. They will survey a sample of mining towns and cities where coltan is traded to elucidate how coltan mining and exchange operate in the Congo, and the effects that the mining of this commodity have had on local communities and their surrounding environs. Using both extensive survey and intensive ethnographic interviewing, the researchers will investigate the relationship between coltan, conflict, and nation building; how coltan mining has affected the transformation and decentralization of political authority; and, more generally, the effects of coltan on local culture and social organization. In addition, they will map the structure of the process through which coltan is moved from rural mining enclaves, through urban Congolese sites of processing, and out into the world system. The research is important because coltan is an example of a growing phenomenon: locally grounded commodity chains that are central to the global digital age. The production and sale of these commodities have transformative effects upon not only local economies but also local politics and social organization. The research will contribute to social science theory of the intricate relations between local and global, as well as to better policies for economic development and conflict prevention and resolution.