Digging for Rezeki, Sidestepping Bala: Health Risks, Perceptions, Amelioration in Bombana Gold Mining, Eastern Indonesia

Abstract

Bombana in Southeast Sulawesi has been experiencing a 'gold rush' since 2008, and thousands of miners, including migrants and local people, engage in risky small-scale mining practices daily despite messaging from local media and government health and environment agencies emphasizing the risks of gold mining to humans and the environment. This thesis analyses people's reasons for mining, their (risky) mining practices, local risk perception and people's strategies for ameliorating risks. It is an ethnographic study of the work and life of mining settlements in Bombana, based on medical anthropology and cultural epidemiology. The thesis investigates mining work and its economic and environmental impacts from the point of view of miners (locals and migrants; men and women; and the children of mining families). In Bombana gold mining, people deploy their traditional cultures, identities, social relations, gender relations, morality, norms and values in their mining and family lives. They justify their engagement in mining, the choice of small-scale mining methods, and interpret what is risky and non-risky, to conduct their livelihoods. They draw on customary beliefs and practices to identify and ameliorate those risks. The concept of rezeki (livelihood, luck, fortune understood as a gift from God)) is a powerful motive for miners. Rezeki encompasses economic motivation (culturally defined) and religious rationale. It expresses morality based on religious ideas, particularly Islamic values regarding the conduct of worship (ibadah) and struggling for life (jihad). These religiously inflected motives keep people going to mine even though they risk their lives in the deep 50-metre shafts and often get no returns in a day. Their religious calculation that God (Allah) will intervene in their rezeki underpins their economic calculation of mining. People express religious values by working hard (berusaha) along with supplication (berdoa) to optimise their rezeki. Yet, they also always expect to encounter bala (disaster/risks), which can also carry the sense of being given by God). I explain this customary and religious concept of risk, which reveals what they perceive as 'health risks'. Their perception of risks encompasses a comprehensive set of adverse health impacts, and negative impacts on the broader concept of human health, including physical, psychological, mental, social, and environmental. Everyday lives are entangled in rezeki and bala. To attain and retain rezeki and avoid bala, the Bombana miners and their community believe they should maintain good morality and perform ameliorative rituals based on traditional culture and Islamic religion, and, notably, migrants tend to adopt the Moronene rituals to ameliorate mining risks. We can understand these traditional concepts as strategies for understanding risk management. These traditional and religious concepts are examined alongside the government approaches to risk management in small-scale gold mining. I found the understanding of the issues and the advice that officials gave to communities was often based on ignorance and also often contradictory between different agencies. A further complication is that perceptions of health risks and strategies for risk management remain fluid in the community, and I show they can be understood through, for example, gender and sociocultural lenses. The contribution and implications of my study relate to how we can achieve successful public health and social interventions and outcomes for mining communities. I argue that to communicate successfully to the community, policymakers and staff of health and environment agencies consider laypeople's perceptions and language of risks rather than deploying a uniform fixed format of risk management to address the pressing health, social and environmental issues. Show more