Unstable Ground was awarded the Columbia University Press 2025 Distinguished Book Prize and praised by several luminaries. Yet, it was challenging to write this review, primarily because the book itself is difficult to read, and one that does not take any prisoners, let alone suffer fools lightly. Any reader of Unstable Ground will need to have their Foucauldian, Derridean, Althusserian and other recently fashionable post-structuralist ducks neatly aligned.
The book is less a single coherent whole than a collection of extended essays linked by the unifying theme of gold, its production and its legacy in South Africa. It consists of three substantive blocks (‘Groundwork’, ‘The deep’ and ‘Surfacing’), plus an Introduction and Afterword, but no conclusion.
Unstable Ground seeks to discover and describe the lasting legacy of gold mining in South Africa. It does so with vivid images of gold mining, and all associated with it, while asking two simple questions: ‘What has gold done to people? What has it made them do?’ (p. 14). In contrast to the clarity of these questions, the book is often closer to literary performance than to ethnography. Morris suggests that her work ‘offers general lessons for conceiving of and doing historical and philosophical anthropology’ (p. 174). As such, Unstable Ground exemplifies a theoretical style that came to muddy academic waters. The prose is dense – not necessarily to obscure, but because it resists simplifying complex structures into common-sense language. It is acutely aware of the power inherent in discourse. For example:
My discourse is not independent of that produced by those whose words I sometimes quote. Their speech is not the mesh, nor mine the embroidered text(ile). When referring to narrative through the figure of text and textile in this sense, as a woven artifact of historical forces, I mean to imply a world in which language – beyond the opposition of speech and writing – functions as a force, one that possesses us more than we possess it. (p. 21)
Each sentence becomes a site of linguistic and ideological tension. Unstable Ground is a hard read, written in a language that attempts to avoid the very assumptions it critiques.
Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Morris likens the underground mines of South Africa to the Paris arcades, where the mines are ‘precisely theaters of display value and spectacles of conveyance … [which] are illuminated by the fetish of gold’ (p. 27). A central theoretical claim is that gold, as a fetish in a Marxian sense, shapes and affects lives across time.
Born the child of a geologist, and deeply influenced by South Africa’s mining world, Morris is well placed to write this history and ethnography (p. 22). Unstable Ground is the product of more than two decades of research among the mines of the Witwatersrand. The book is encyclopaedic in scope, ranging from sinkholes and mine floods in 1963 to sex work in 2023, via political violence in the 1980s, the Marikana massacre of 2012, present-day Zama Zama miners, Chinese indentured labour in the early 1900s, and the ravages of tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. Reading Unstable Ground is like browsing a richly stocked antiquarian bookstore: one encounters long-sought treasures while also being jolted by the force of injustice embedded in South Africa’s gold industry.
Each chapter dilates on one or more themes, often yielding striking observations. For example:
in the era of Black Economic Empowerment, national capital formation, and the rise of an uber-rich black elite for whom equality means equal access to inequality. (p. 148)
Morris’s unquestionable ethnographic skill is best demonstrated in her all too infrequent descriptions of daily life. In the opening scene of the death of an informal miner:
The dead man’s wife, modestly dressed in black with a dull-gray scarf wrapped around her head, waited with their infant wrapped in a canary yellow blanket. (p. 7)
Or, describing a visit to a school in 1998:
As I left, the faint but acrid smell of Jay’s [Jeyes] fluid swirled in the well-mopped hall, which was lit by the cool light of winter passing through the barred windows. (p. 389)
The sources range widely, from personal ethnography to newspapers and both academic and literary texts. Yet there are notable omissions. Morris draws extensively on Jean and John Comaroff but does not reference Jock McCulloch’s South Africa’s Gold Mines and the Politics of Silicosis (2012) or Donald Donham’s Violence in a Time of Liberation (2011), both directly relevant. Likewise, the work of Belinda Bozzoli and Charles van Onselen receives only brief mention, despite their foundational contributions to the socio-history of the Witwatersrand.
Morris does not follow a linear chronology. She moves back and forth across decades, which may challenge historians. Morris delights in puns, such as ‘Chamber-made’ and ‘Chamber-maid’. But passages such as ‘Or. Or, ore, d’or. Or I could put it another way’ (p. 23) or describing tailings dumps as ‘the crypt of value, and the figure of encryption’ (p. 175) can feel more performative than explanatory.
Early on, Morris references Proust’s attempt to reconstruct memory through the taste of a ‘madeleine’ (p. 34). She, too, seeks to capture experiences that resist language. She states that the book has no conclusion because ‘I have been writing this book for too many years to believe that there is a history that can be grasped, thematized, and concluded upon’ (p. 30). Most certainly, we, as academics, can never grasp the world and its past in its entirety, but we can work our way towards glimpses of the world that are real and meaningful. In effect, what Morris does with Unstable Ground is that, instead of attempting to explain the past, she capitulates and states that history and ethnography are simply too large to be grasped, understood or described.
Morris is capable of beautiful, evocative prose, but too often the text veers into what may seem self-indulgent. The book has been praised by distinguished scholars, yet it leaves this reviewer wondering when one might be justified in suggesting that the emperor is not appropriately dressed.
