Book discussion by Rosalind C. Morris
WiSER invites you to a book discussion by
Rosalind C. Morris
Unstable Ground
The Lives, Deaths, and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa
What has gold done to people? What has it made them do? The Witwatersrand in South Africa, once home to the world’s richest goldfields, is today scattered with abandoned mines into which informal miners known as zama zamas venture in an illicit—often deadly—search for ore. Based on field research conducted across more than twenty-five years around these mines, Unstable Ground reveals the worlds that gold made possible—and gold’s profound costs for those who have lived in its shadow and dreamt of its transformative power. From the vantage point of the closure of South Africa’s gold mines, Rosalind C. Morris reconsiders their histories, beginning in the present and descending into the pasts that shaped them. Anchored in evocative descriptions of mining in the ruins, this book explores the social worlds built on gold and the lives that were remade and sometimes undone by the industry over a century and a half.
Rosalind Morris is an award-winning anthropologist, cultural critic and media theorist, who has taught at Columbia University, where she is Professor of Anthropology, for 31 years. She has worked for more than two and a half decades to document the transforming life-worlds around the gold mines of the Witwatersrand. She is the author of 7 books and more than 100 essays, and has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Berlin Prize and the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon fellowship of the American Academy in Berlin, the Lenfest Prize, the Lichstein Lectures of the University of Chicago and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In addition to her scholarly writings, Morris has collaborated extensively with visual artists, including William Kentridge, Clive van den Berg, Ebrahim Hajee, Songezile Madikida and Shahzia Sikander, and is an award-winning documentarist (We are Zama Zama, The Zama Zama Project).
Monday, 25th August 2025
1pm
WiSER Seminar room
6th Floor, Richard Ward Building
East Campus, Wits University