Boomtown Runaway Globalisation on the Queensland Coast [Hardcover]

Sitting next to the Great Barrier Reef, steeped in coal and gas, the industrial boomtown of Gladstone, Australia embodies many of the contradictions of the “overheated” world: prosperous yet polluted, growing and developing, yet always on the precipice of crisis.
            Capturing Gladstone at the peak of its accelerated growth in 2013–14, Thomas Hylland Eriksen dissects here the boomtown phenomenon in all its profound ambivalence. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the book examines local identity, family life, infrastructure, and local services and explores the tensions and resentments surrounding migrant workers.
            Writ large inBoomtownare the clashes of scale at the heart of the town’s contradictions, where the logic of big industry and the state compete with those of the individual and the local community and ecology, crystallizing the current crisis of political legitimacy that is unfurling all over the world.
 

Thomas Hylland Eriksenis professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo and former president of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. He is the author of numerous classics of anthropology, includingWhat is Anthropology?andSmall Places, Large Issues, both also published by Pluto Press.

“It takes a seasoned anthropologist like Thomas Hylland Eriksen, with his wealth of research and experience, to elevate this ethnographic depiction of a town in Queensland to a study of the many social, economic, and ecological tensions and contradictions that animate many places around the world.”