The Gender of the Gold: An Ethnographic and Historical Account of Women's Involvement in Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining in Mount Kaindi, Papua New Guinea‪.‬

INTRODUCTION The mineral price boom of the late 1970s and early '80s led to the opening of new mining ventures in many previously isolated and marginal areas of the Asia-Pacific. As these locales had been traditional foci of ethnographic research, regional anthropologists became increasingly preoccupied with the dynamics of resource extraction and its implications for indigenous lifeworlds (Ballard & Banks 2003). In Papua New Guinea, where law requires environmental and social assessment studies to be conducted for all proposed large-scale mining developments, this type of research was given additional momentum by consultancy opportunities both within the industry and for donors and advocacy groups with a stake in the sector. As a result, the past two decades have witnessed the development of a very rich 'anthropology of PNG mining' (for a few examples see Banks 2000; Filer 1990, 1997; Hyndman 1994; Haley 1996; Hirsch 2001; Howard 1991; Kirsch 2002; Macintyre & Foale 2004; Rumsey & Weiner 2004; Toft 1997).