Justin Lee Haruyama

JUSTIN L. HARUYAMA, then a graduate student at University of California, Davis, California, received funding in April 2018 to aid research on ‘Intimate Labors: The Production of “South-South” Capitalist Labor Relations at Chinese-Operated Mines in Zambia,’ supervised by Dr. James H. Smith. This project involved fourteen months from June 2017 to August 2018 of ethnographic investigation into two Chinese-operated coal mines in southern Zambia: one operated by a Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE), and the other privately owned by five brothers from China’s Jiangxi Province. The research examined how actors from various racial, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds at the mines struggle to understand and regulate each other’s presence, thereby illuminating the broader capitalist transformations at work in everyday encounters around the extraction of coal. Existing global accounts of shifts in capitalism to a more South-dominated world lack an ethnographically nuanced account of how these processes are experienced and understood by local actors on the ground, an account that this project will provide. To do so, this project will has paid close attention to historical experience, as preliminary research showed that the sometimestraumatic encounters with colonialism, socialism, and neoliberalism experienced by participants from both Zambia and China continue to have profound reverberations in their actions and discourses at the mines today.