Abstract
Attention to resources – “objects and substances extracted from ‘nature’ for human enrichment and use” (Ferry and Limbert 2008: 4) – and extraction – the process of separating objects and substances from their surroundings and rendering them as resources – has risen strongly in anthropology in the past 20 years. Along with this surge in attention to resource extraction has come an intensified focus on these processes as fundamentally material ones, and an attention to activities and formations of resource extraction as occurring within historically embedded material-social composites. In this chapter, I review how substances and materiality have been approached in earlier ethnographies of extraction and in more recent works in which these appear more centrally and actively.
