This short essay is part of an Interrogations book forum on Claire Blencowe's Spirits of Extraction: Christianity, Settler Colonialism and the Geology of Race (Manchester University Press, 2025)
When I first heard about Claire Blenclowe’s Spirits of Extraction (2025), I was intrigued to see how it might relate to a strand of my own work on the intersection of religion and the environment. My early book Nature, Technology and the Sacred (2005) had explored the enduring, profound but often unrecognised influence of the West’s distinctive monotheistic history on modern ideas of nature and technology. In more recent work on how social thought might respond to earth system science and the Anthropocene, Nigel Clark and I have engaged with Indigenous thought, arguing that the language of spirits and ‘earth beings’ is appropriate and helpful at thresholds between different ‘operating states’ of Earth systems (Clark and Szerszynski 2021: 147-9; Clark and Szerszynski 2023: 59-62). And one of the things we focused on was mining, race and spirit.
In Planetary Social Thought (2021), we quoted Barbara Freese on how ‘[m]iners and their families, commonly referred to as a separate race of humans, were increasingly ostracized by society’ (Freese 2016). We were interested in how such cultural attitudes not only justified exposing other bodies to inhospitable working conditions, but also how they were an example of a much wider dynamic in modernity that justified the growing transformation of the Earth at the expense of not just nonhuman living things but also racialised others. As we put it, miners were ‘literally positioned in a profoundly unstable interzone between the mobile, fluid envelope of the Earth’s surface and the slower-moving subsurface of rocky strata, and ‘continuously exposed to the volatile events that occur as these layers are brought into contact’ (Clark and Szerszynski 2021: 111).
As I started reading Spirits, I greatly appreciated the detailed historical work that Claire has done on this topic. But what was completely new to me was her analysis of the cultural role that Methodism played in the project of colonialism. Claire’s opening of the book dramatizes this discovery. She describes how the 2020 protests in Bristol that ended up with the statue of local slave-trader Edward Colston being toppled into the harbour were followed by the celebration of a more positive story about Bristol’s contribution to the history of slavery: the significant role that John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, played in the anti-slavery abolitionist movement.
But Claire insightfully draws out the dark side of the Christian civilising mission of evangelists like Wesley: how such ideas helped shape and promote the idea of a ‘good colonialism’ that involved the paternalistic civilising of heathens and the destruction of their attachments to culture, land and kin. She situates this within the wider, more familiar story of how the end of the slave trade was merely the beginning of an era of indentured labour for people of colour, and a strengthening of the rationale of Empire for powers like Britain. Claire illuminates this further by relating it to the analyses of Achille Mbembe and Sylvia Wynter on the role of religion in nineteenth-century biopolitics and racism. Pointing out that religious racism was more typical of the colonial context, she analyses Methodism as a source of biopolitical subjectification both for whites and people of colour. Wesley’s version of Christianity – its rejection of predestination, his idea of the ‘transcendence of savagery’ and his model of a stripped-back self, fitted for spiritual progress – corresponds with the shift from what Wynter called ‘Man 1’, with a fixed racial hierarchy, to her ‘Man 2’, less fixed but no less hierarchical.
Her telling of this story centres on the Methodist civilising mission to mining communities, around Bristol but then especially on Cornish miners, seen as barbaric, racialised, even blackened. In the third chapter she focuses on Anishinabewaki territory of the Great Lakes region and Upper Canada, where schools for Indigenous children are the key, monstrous example of Ojibwe dispossession – but as she makes clear, the introduction of forestry, mining and other extractive industries are a central driving force. She uses this to make the general point that the science of geology and the extractive industries emerged at the same time as ideas of humanitarian colonial government and biological evolution. Drawing on ideas of the geology of race (Yusoff 2018) she argues that there is more than an economic connection between evangelism and mining – and more than a metaphorical one. Evangelism needed heathens to convert and mining needed minerals to extract and transform. Bringing crude matter from depth and darkness up into the light is seen as an act of redemption and salvation – whether of souls or of brute matter.
It would be interesting to extend Claire’s analysis beyond mining to other extractive practices– but also to speculate how the cultural subordination of peoples working with matter can coexist with a deep fear of their spiritual power. The transformation of nature into raw materials for the human world has often been seen as fraught with spiritual significance and danger (Clark and Szerszynski 2023: 56-9). In a number of publications in the 1980s and 90s, the anthropologist Mary Helms argued that in non-industrial societies a cosmologically significant contrast is often made between the home society, seen as ‘safe, civilized, ordered, moral, domesticated’, and an outside seen as either ‘dangerous, chaotic, immoral or amoral’ or ‘a mystically powerful place of sacred superiority’ (Helms 1993: 25). As Helms put it:
As one proceeds outward from the political-ideological centre or heartland in any direction - vertically and/or horizontally - one enters domains of cosmological and, therefore, political-ideological significance (Helms 1992: 318).
Helms describes this movement as along two axes – a horizontal dimension moving outward from the centre (often seen as the navel of the earth) to the margins (foreign societies), and a vertical cosmological dimension upwards to celestial bodies (sun, moon, stars) and the weather of the heavens or downwards into ‘the flowing waters, minerals (e.g., salt), precious stones and ores, plants, and other products derived from (brought up from) the interior of the earth and sea’ (1992: 319). Crucially, these two axes are in a sense mapped onto each other – so that both trade (travelling out horizontally to gain prestige goods) and craft (reaching ‘vertically’ down into the nonhuman world of forests, rivers, soil and rocks, obtaining ‘materials’, and transforming them into objects for human use) involve consorting and bargaining with other spiritual realms. Mircea Eliade’s (1978) analysis of ‘Divine Smiths and Civilizing Heroes’ similarly brings out the ambivalence of craft, as does Georges Dumezil’s argument from the structure of Indo-European mythology that craftspeople in ancient societies were seen as dangerous, to be controlled and excluded from the public realm (Dumézil 1996; 1959).
In another publication (Blencowe 2016), Claire discusses ‘three theological figurations …that open onto the theological task of questioning the value of values, and the political task of mustering spirit …. : the enchantress, the witch, and the intrusion of Gaia’. In my paper ‘Gods of the Anthropocene’ (2017) I tried to map the Anthropocene as an emergent ‘geo-spiritual formation’ – but one in which singular ‘high gods’ such as the Anthropos (abstract humanity) or Gaia (the living Earth) are less operative than ‘low spirits’, cannibal spirits, vampires and devils that have been detached from place and spread around the Earth along with raw materials. Even place-based ‘earth beings’ such as mountains and rivers that could once be bargained with (de la Cadena 2015) are more often than not turning into malevolent low spirits or reterritorialized into distant, aloof high deities of ‘heaven’. In Spirits, Claire does refer to miners’ widespread interactions with ‘Knockers’ or other spirits encountered underground, that were ‘feared but also to some extent revered and with whom the miner shared a sense of camaraderie’ (Blencowe 2025: 93-4). It would be interesting to know whether her historical cases of Cornwall and the Anishinabewaki territory have similarstories of spirits being transformed and their effect being felt elsewhere, as local subsistence and gift economies are incorporated into global flows of matter and value.
Overall, Claire makes a very significant contribution to ‘material eco/geo-feminism’ (ix) with her detailed historical work on Methodism, race and mining, articulating what she calls its ‘evangelical extractivist-exorcist aesthetic’. She shows how the modern ideology of race came to have a vertical coding, underwritten by geological ideas of the superposed layers of the lithosphere, with lower layers older, darker, more primitive, and newer layers exposed to the light. Here there are echoes also of Johannes Fabian’s (1983) argument that Europeans came to see other peoples and cultures as not only different but also temporally anterior. It would be interesting to look at the obverse of the race-as-geology dynamic – to explore to what extent the culturally complex modern idea of planetary ‘deep time’ (Heringman 2023) also drew on ideas of human difference.
Blencowe, Claire (2016) ‘Ecological attunement in a theological key: adventures in antifascist aesthetics,’ GeoHumanities, 2(1), pp. 24–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2016.1168209
Blencowe, Claire (2025) Spirits of Extraction: Christianity, Settler Colonialism and the Geology of Race, First edition. edition, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Clark, Nigel and Bronislaw Szerszynski (2021) Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences, Cambridge: Polity.
Clark, Nigel and Bronislaw Szerszynski (2023) ‘Planetary technics, earthly spirits,’ in Religion, Materialism and Ecology, ed. Sigurd Bergmann, Kate Rigby, and Peter Scott, London: Routledge, pp. 48–65. http://doi.org/10.4324/9781003320722-4
de la Cadena, Marisol (2015) Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Dumézil, Georges (1959) Les Dieux Des Germains: Essai Sur La Formation De La Religion Scandinave, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Dumézil, Georges (1996) Archaic Roman Religion, with an Appendix on the Religion of the Etruscans, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Eliade, Mircea (1978) The Forge and the Crucible, tr. Stephen Corrin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fabian, Johannes (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, New York: Columbia University Press.
Freese, Barbara (2016) Coal: A Human History, Revised and updated edition, London: Arrow Books.
Helms, Mary W. (1992) ‘Thoughts on public symbols and distant domains relevant to the chiefdoms of Lower Central America,’ in Wealth and Hierarchy in the Intermediate Area: A Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks, 10th and 11th October 1987, ed. Frederick W. Lange, Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, pp. 317–29.
Helms, Mary W. (1993) Craft and the Kingly Ideal: Art, Trade, and Power, Austin: University of Texas Press.
Heringman, Noah (2023) ‘Deep Time: A Literary History,’ Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 1 online resource.
Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2005) Nature, Technology and the Sacred, Oxford: Blackwell.
Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2017) ‘Gods of the Anthropocene: geo-spiritual formations in the Earth’s new epoch,’ Theory, Culture & Society, 34(2–3), pp. 253–75. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0263276417691102
Yusoff, Kathryn (2018) A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
How to cite this article: Szerszynski, Bronsilaw (2026), "Mining Gods and Spirits," Interrogations, doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18714387
