Gold mining and changing perceptions of risk in West Java.

Artisanal gold mining presents some risks that can be accommodated easily within traditional cosmologies and perceptions of natural causation, and other health costs that are often new for those involved, and which require people to radically modify their evaluation and management of risk. This paper examines changing perceptions of risk for the Kasepuhan, an upland cultural enclave in West Java, who are increasingly drawn into gold mining to subsidize traditional forms of income generation at a time of rising material expectations. We first demonstrate how mining (tunnel collapse) is accommodated within traditional cosmologies and explanations of misfortune. We compare this with the processing of gold using mercury amalgam, which presents different kinds of risk not easily explained using traditional models. These have required miners and their communities to entertain new notions of causality and risk management.