Underground and Underwater Mining: State Extractivism and the Socio-ecological Transformations of Socialist Bulgaria

This paper examines two types of extractive activities: an underground gypsum exploitation and the extraction of sand and gravel from the Danube riverbed. Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork, access to local archives, and the use of geographic tools, we narrate the story of gypsum extraction in socialist Bulgaria. Following the collapse of a gypsum gallery, the socialist Bulgarian state decided to fill the empty galleries with sand sourced from a nearby location on the Danube's riverbed adjacent to a local island. We demonstrate how the national mining policies of the Bulgarian socialist state disregarded local communities’ interests and their environmental concerns, which adversely affected both human and nonhuman entities, including fish, sand, and sediments. By reflecting on the underground and underwater extractive activities of the socialist state and the technological interventions implemented, we shed light on an extractive regime beyond the colonial context. This paper advocates for a unified approach to extractivism, recognizing its various local expressions and highlighting how it promotes an engineering and technological perspective that often overlooks local ecological knowledge. We aim to contribute to the discourse on extractivism from an STS perspective, as well as to the fields of materiality in anthropology and environmental anthropology in Southeast Europe.