| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 52

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Peter Carstens, In the Company of Diamonds: De Beers, Kelinzee, and the Control of a Town (Athens: Ohio University Press 2001)

THIS IS A BOOK about company towns, those social and economic products of industrial capitalism that exist in most remote parts of the world that offer natural resources of significant value. Peter Carstens situates his story of a company town par excellence within the theoretical and functional debates of what defines a company town, and how the social anthropology of these towns differs in important ways from other forms of social and economic organization with which we are familiar.

The Introduction provides a succinct overview of the literature on company towns, and helps to set the scene for the focus of the book, which is the diamond mining town of Kleinzee situated in the remote semi-desert reaches of Namaqualand to the South of the Orange River in South Africa. Although diamonds had been discovered and mined since the 1860s in South Africa's interior at Kimberly, Kleinzee was part of the rich alluvial belt of coastal diamonds that were discovered in 1925 and 1926 along the cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean, stretching from the southern desert of Namibia (where diamonds were discovered twenty years earlier) into the Northern Cape Province. Control of these diamond fields was quickly wrested from the private prospectors and smaller companies by the most powerful diamond company in the world, De Beers.

Carstens argues that De Beers' control and influence (together with Anglo-American) over the lives and socio-economic structure of Kleinzee was formidable, linking the mine and its functions into global capitalism, while simultaneously structuring its employees' lives and destinies in profound ways typical of isolated company towns. Carstens' historical analysis of the interaction between people's lives in Kleinzee and the major actors in the diamond industry in relation to world events over the past 75 years provides the evidence needed to tease out the more theoretical conclusions of the case study. Based on this analysis, the last two chapters of the book abstract the findings by linking them to the broader literature on socio-economic structure and function. Carstens concludes that company towns like Kleinzee, together with other "closed communities" such as the military, are not total institutions in their own right, but rather subject their participants to social conditions associated with "incomplete communities" that induce a range of pathologies including high suicide rates, domestic violence, mental disorders, and substance abuse.

The style with which the detail in this book is presented makes it read like a work of fiction: characters are carefully and skillfully constructed, with their strengths, weaknesses, and other human elements so well portrayed that turning the next page is mandatory. The fascinating analysis of this mining town's operation is as much about industry and management as it is about sociology. The book's strength lies in its application to broader industrial and political processes that were at play globally and within South Africa. The analysis successfully marries the broader industrial and organizational processes of capital and production that were international in character with the specificities of South African politics. Fordist-style mining operations made an easy partner with the racial segregation and discrimination on which not only the diamond mines, but also the gold mines of South Africa prospered.

Carstens also shows how the macro-political events of the past decade in South Africa have changed the racial criteria that were central to the labour architecture of the mine. In the early 1990s De Beers quickly reconfigured its racial policy to one of inclusion to mirror the rise of the African National Congress to power in 1994 which, in turn, marked the formation of the country's first democratically elected government and the abolition of racial discrimination. If anything, De Beers was proactive in its integration of Blacks into the professional and management ranks of the company, illustrating Carstens' assertion that hegemonic control of its workforce by companies like De Beers is accompanied by various propagandist strategies to maintain a positive image both within the company town and the international political arena.

As a case study, the rich insight that the book provides makes an important contribution to our understanding of the South African mining complex and complements similar material that deals with the history of mining, labour, and industry in South Africa. Although parallels are made with other institutions such as mental hospitals and the military, with a short epilogue on the resource town of Tumbler Ridge in British Columbia, a weakness of the book is its near-exclusive focus on Kleinzee and the diamond industry. By situating the story of Kleinzee within a narrow theoretical and analytical framework, Carstens limits the appeal of the book to an audience of specialists. Nonetheless, the author has provided so comprehensive an analysis of Kleinzee and the diamond industry that this focus is indeed also the book's strength. Its appeal crosses disciplinary boundaries and it will be of equal interest to sociologists, anthropologists, and historians as it will to geographers and economists.

There can be no doubt that the author's personal experience of growing up in Kleinzee is central to his sophisticated appreciation of life in this company town. It would have been easy for Carstens to rely on impressions and views obtained from his childhood experiences, but his analysis is based squarely on his detailed research and documentation. The text is rich with footnotes, figures, and photographs that augment rather than complicate the text. Although his own biases are not overt in the book, Carstens does employ a delightful mix of ironic humour and tone that at times amuses and can leave little doubt in the reader's mind of his personal views. This is particularly well done when describing the diversity of characters that constituted the white management hierarchy and its relationship to company policy and the coloured and black workers.

This book comes at an important time when issues of corporate control of resource extraction and processing are on the global political and socio-economic agendas. The role of multinational and transnational companies in wealth generation is increasingly under the spotlight as environmental pressure, climate change, and persistent poverty dominate the international development debate. Peter Carstens' book provides a window into the complex interplay between the welfare of ordinary people under the control of formidably powerful companies, with the ways that changes in the political and economic arenas can determine the social and material outcomes of those ordinary people's lives.


Bruce Frayne Queen's University

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