An Epistemology of Extraction

About

The Philippines is one of the most volatile places for land defenders worldwide. This includes farmers, activists, artists, Indigenous People, and the marginalized. In Cebu, mining contention involves an intersection of political and corporate interests, governance, and law. 

As a transdisciplinary project, I examine how mining contention is rooted, produced, and reproduced by a clash of worldviews, dominated by a historically rooted episteme. Beyond a geographic orientation of mining, an epistemological one frames the economy of mining as the a loss of knowledge and “cognitive injustice” (Santos 2014). The rule of law as a site of mining reveals asymmetrical power dynamics between the state, corporations, and mining-affected residents. Through the analysis of various primary materials obtained during ethnographic work, I demonstrate how places of intergenerational connection are turned into sites of extraction. Bringing together epistemological, political theological, historical, and legal dimensions, forefronts extractivism as a project of world-making beyond its material implications. 

An epistemological framing does not render lived realities to the margins. Rather, the aim is to center Bisayan knowledges. Since 2019, I have been sharing this work with mining-affected residents to make sense of the particularities of mining in Cebu and writing alongside these mostly informal conversations. I have also started working with organizers to make this work available to advance strategies against mining and the politics of mining. 

This project originated in 2019 as an independent interdisciplinary research project, which I turned into my M.A. Thesis in the Sociology Department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Since then, I have continued with this research as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Geography Department of the University of Philippines Diliman through 2023 and 2024. In the fall of 2024, I joined the PhD program in the Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine to further this work.

Pointing to naming practices and the re-interpretation of places as sites of extraction rather than sites of life, my research argues that the starting point of mining violence starts before the first rock or mineral is extracted. Through this lens, an epistemology of extractions makes visible the ways that mining falls under the radar thereby perpetuating dispossession and the eradication of culture(s) and life/lives. Despite various deadly incidents such as landslides, mining on the island province of Cebu in the Philippines lends itself as an apt starting point for research to examine the particularities of archipelagic extractivism.

Drawing on primary resources, such as interviews and contemporary and historical legal texts, my current work expands on three dimensions of an epistemology of extraction conceived in my M.A. thesis, namely; Erasing Lived Experiences, Legal Categories as Fixed Boundaries of Knowledge, and Manipulating Courts. Moving away from quarries as sites of violence, an epistemological lens situates the rule of law as a socio-political and historical site of mining violence reproducing and reimagining a worldview and world order originating from, but lasting beyond the Philippines' historical period. Meanwhile, further fieldwork will deepen my collection of primary sources including legal texts and documents, interviews, mining-affected residents of Cebu, and strengthen a network of local organizations.  

It Runs in the Blood: Towards an Epistemology of Extraction

"They were armed with huge weapons'' exclaims a resident of Naga City in Cebu, an island province in the Visayas region of central Philippines. For decades, Apo Cement and Apo Land and Quarry Corporation, subsidiaries of Mexican mining conglomerate Cemex, have carried out extractive practices in this mountainous area along the south-eastern coast of Cebu. By the time a deadly landslide struck on September 20, 2018, residents were already entangled in fraught contention with mining corporations and the local political elite.

When the residents took to the court, their grievances of mining-related violence were dismissed due to a lack of substantiated causes of action.

The Philippine rule of law rests on the separation of humans and nature from which the mining sector, the historically-rooted extraction of natural resources. In this thesis, the rule of law is framed as an institution that reinforces a binary logic separating people from place and thus actively transforming land into a commodity.

Within this framework, this thesis asks three main questions; 

1. What drives the omission of lived experiences of mining-related violence from the rule of law? 

2. In what ways do legal texts perpetuate closed boundaries of knowledge? 

3. How does the case study of a lawsuit in Naga City demonstrate that the rule of law, characterized by themes of epistemological violence, is a site of violence?

While there is comprehensive scholarly attention on mining the Philippines, there is a lack of research on mining and mining-related violence in Cebu. Scholarship on mining in the Philippines primarily centers three areas of focus; mining as an Indigenous struggle, a leftist struggle centered around land reform, and mining as an issue of resource governance. However, Cebu falls out of the first two streams, instead, research on the particularities of mining in Cebu tends to  be limited to historical accounts of mining o the geospatial aspects of the 2018 landslide in Naga City.

Originally conceived as audiovisual documentation of mining as artistic practice, this material has been read through the theoretical framing of Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ epistemicide problematizing cognitive injustice as a central feature of a historical struggle that renders epistemological complexity impossible. Pivoting from a geographic orientation of mining to an epistemological one centers the deadly business of mining as the "murder of knowledges".

Supported and funded by:

Geography Department, University of the Philippines-Diliman (2023-2024)

Corky Trinidad Fellowship, Center for Philippine Studies, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (2022)

Grants and Awards Program, Graduate Student Organization (GSO), University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (2022)

Cebuano Studies Center, San Carlos University-Talamban (2022)

Research Program, East-West Center Honolulu (2020)

Tropical Futures Institute (2019)

'Atenisi Institute (2018-2019)