Unstable Ground: The Lives, Deaths, and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa

Morris’s Academy project is based on nearly twenty years of field research in South Africa’s gold-mining regions. Drawing on deep ethnography and collaborative filmmaking with undocumented migrants and itinerant miners, Morris analyzes transformations in the social worlds of mining since 1994, when South Africa held its first democratic elections. Local political and global economic forces have accompanied the rise of contract labor and more militant labor organizations—sometimes violently. Unlike most accounts of mining in South Africa, “Unstable Ground” encompasses the lives of individuals and communities beyond those directly involved in mining by including chains of dependency. As Morris explores the “phantasms of miraculous wealth and terrible destruction that suffuse this world,” she also proposes an experiment in ethical thinking. Working with miners she trained to use cameras underground, Morris has produced an archive of “subterranean domains in which strangers greet each other and forge not common languages but polyglot spaces of both contest and mutual recognition.” She argues that this archive can help us forge responses to a broadly acknowledged “migration crisis” that is also causing increased levels of nationalism. In looking at local histories of South Africa in light of global developments, Morris extends insights elaborated in her earlier essays, during documentary filmmaking, and in collaborations with South African artists William Kentridge, Clive van den Berg, Songizile Madikida, and Ebrahim Hajee.