Putting Kinship to Work: Gender and Relatedness in a Wyoming Coal Mining Community.

Abstract

The strict division of social worlds into public and private spheres is widely recognized as a historically specific mode of social organization and analysis that corresponds more closely with ideological abstractions than with the practice of everyday life. In this dissertation, I argue that despite calls to move beyond this binary, it continues to reverberate in anthropological theories of kinship and work, ethnographies of mining communities and the field of feminist technology studies. In contrast, this dissertation examines the contexts and social configurations within which this series of binary analytic divisions – public and private spheres, work and home places, masculine and feminine persons, and rational and affective actors – is invoked and reworked in northeastern Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. In particular, I examine the history of the region; family life at home; workplace relatedness; gendered places and divisions of labor; mine radio talk about technical expertise; and corporate social responsibility. The ethnographic basis of this research includes 20 months of fieldwork in Wyoming, including participant-observation at four mines. This region is a key hub of the coal industry and a major employer of women miners. I make two main arguments concerning the anthropological study of kinship. First, I argue that studying relatedness at work potentially unsettles the private/public binary that animates the existing literature. I show that miners and managers create workplace families to make claims on one another and create the type of workplaces they value. Yet I also trace the contradictory motivations that underline these practices, particularly concerning production and safety. Second, I argue that theories of the co-construction of gender and kinship must consider not just the ways in which men and women appear different from one another, but also the sociocultural processes that challenge binary understandings of gender. I show that studying workplace relatedness in the Wyoming mines highlights the deceptively mundane ways in which men and women sometimes reinforce and other times challenge strictly gendered kinship practices and persons. I conclude by arguing that contemporary debates about national energy policies must include attention to the social implications of work in the coal industry.