Miners on the move

Abstract

The expansion of gold mining in West Africa transforms miners’ relations to space and time as they move frequently from one mining site to the next. Whereas labor, reproduction, and social integration are expected to be durably organized through the social institutions of marriage, mentorship, and friendship, itinerant miners recast these institutions in a compressed and nonbinding form. As evictions from illegal mines multiply, miners create a life across ephemeral spaces by turning the financial and social resources accruing in intimacy into portable anchorages. They engage in relationships that mimic institutions of village life but whose significance is detached from long‐term local prospects. Thus, young men find themselves constructing adult manhood while on an indefinite journey. Despite the risks and indeterminacy that characterize their labor, they seek to regain a sense of agency and reconcile antagonist temporalities and moralities of exchange that extraction progressively disrupts.

Furious depletion—Conceptualizing artisan mining and extractivism through gender, race, and environment

“…Social reproduction in artisan mining has hardly been researched, perhaps because of its multi-local and highly mobile nature (Werthmann, 2010;Bolay, 2022). Much social reproduction takes place outside the "mining camps" where most research has taken place.…”

“…. Several studies present evidence of female artisan miners taking on the role of the breadwinner themselves and explore femininity beyond male patriarchal control through artisan mining (Werthmann, 2009;Bryceson et al, 2013;Bolay, 2022). Shining a light on the fluidity of gender norms is valuable in and of itself, but it also opens theorizing avenues for thinking about gender as a source of social and normative transformation, as Paulson (2016) has pointed out.…”