Married to Gold – Dreams, Gender and Value among New Guinean Artisanal Miners

AUTHOR(S)
Daniele Moretti
Development

Up to 200,000 Melanesian men, women, and children work as artisanal miners, yet their life worlds 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 oneiric 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.

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Research Type(s)
Journal Article
June 5, 2025
Published in
2025
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