A Ritual Geology

Robyn d’Avignon tells the history of West Africa’s centuries-old indigenous gold mining industries and its shared practices, prohibitions, and cosmological engagements

A Ritual Geology

Robyn d’Avignon tells the history of West Africa’s centuries-old indigenous gold mining industries and its shared practices, prohibitions, and cosmological engagements

Subterranean Histories: Making `Artisanal' Miners on the West African Sahel.

Since the late 1990s, in the context of rising gold prices and pro-market legal reforms, dozens of multi-national corporations have opened gold mines across the West African Sahel. Increasingly, corporate security forces enter into violent conflicts with so-called “artisanal” miners who extract gold with handpicks and dynamite. Social scientists and journalists have slotted conflicts between these two categories of miners into narratives of Africa’s neoliberal resource “curse” and problems of governance. By focusing on longer histories of extraction and empire, I reframe this “clash” as one node in a far-reaching debate over the rights of agrarian residents, the state, and private capital to the Sahel’s mineral resources. Since French conquest of this region in the 1890s, private prospectors and geologists have systematically appropriated the gold discoveries of West African miners while simultaneously degrading their extractive practices as primitive, criminal, and wasteful. While the criminalization of “informal” economic practices is a central feature of the power dynamics that constitute “development” in much of Africa, scholars have largely overlooked these dynamics in the extractive sector. Scholarship on mining focuses almost exclusively on the exploitation of land, labor, and ecologies. By contrast, I argue that the co-option of African mineral knowledge, and not only nature, is central to the reproduction of mining capitalism in West Africa, and likely elsewhere. This project also details how the racial geographies of imperialism became incorporated into post-colonial regulations of technological practice. Rooted in a deep historical account of gold mining in eastern Senegal, this dissertation is based on two years of field research in Senegal, Guinea, and France.PhDAnthropology and HistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133516/1/robdavig_1.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133516/4/ROBDAVIG.pdfDescription of ROBDAVIG.pdf : Revised (Images removed due to copyright restrictions

Shelf Projects: The Political Life of Exploration Geology in Senegal

Since the early 2000s, southeastern Senegal has emerged as a premier gold exploration and mining frontier. At present, the Sabodala gold mine, owned by the Canadian company Teranga Gold, is the only operational gold mine and mill in Senegal. But two more open-pit gold operations are scheduled to open this year, and several other companies have announced discoveries of industrial-scale deposits. By documenting the shifting ownership and exploration of the Sabodala deposit, this article draws attention to how the protracted phase of mineral research shapes the political life of mining operations in Africa and elsewhere in the global South. Geological exploration in colonial and post-colonial Senegal, as in much of Africa, has relied heavily on the expertise of indigenous miners and smelters. Mining Sabodala has thus unearthed multi-vocal and contested histories of gold discovery. Historians of science have established that field assistants and experts in Africa have produced agronomic and medical knowledge typically credited to “the West.” By extending this argument to gold exploration, the article brings African history into dialogue with an emergent anthropology of subterranean knowledge production

Introduction

AbstractThis special themed section examines the multilayered engagements between Africa and the Soviet Union as a central, if overlooked, global encounter of the mid-twentieth century. We call this worldview and the entanglements it generated the “African-Soviet Modern,” an asymmetrical combination of aspiration, materiality, and practice that was rooted in diverse African states and in the Soviet Union. As an analytical category, the African-Soviet Modern speaks to the gap between the grand rhetorical and ideological scope of the Cold War moment and the relatively discrete channels in which it materialized, which gave this mode of thinking a particular vitality and instability. African-Soviet entanglements unfolded in an expansive and uneven geography that incorporated diverse regions of Africa, the USSR, and beyond. Avoiding the temporal and spatial silos of either Soviet or African history, the four essays in this section focus on the spaces where African and Soviet students, politicians, and scientists interacted with one another, creating “connected chronologies” and complementary archives of evidence. Weaving together documentary and oral sources, these articles recover a global entanglement that was energized by unbounded political, economic, and technological aspiration, but that produced an uneven material footprint in newly independent African states.</jats:p