“Gold Is a Spirit”: Diverse Ontologies and a More-than-Human Political Ecology of Extraction in Ghana’s Small-Scale Gold Mining Industry

Abstract

This article examines how indigenous ontologies of gold, land, and rivers shape extractive practices, based on ethnographic field work in Ghana. I draw from political ecology to account for how invisible properties of the subsoil become entangled with social realities. In Ghana, understandings of the subsoil as more-than-material worlds inform rituals, taboos, and other protocols. Through such protocols, chiefs, spiritualists, and others emerge to govern subterranean access. This research shows that subterranean sovereignty extends beyond the state to include invisible forces of extractive landscapes, presenting ontological challenges to neoliberal land acquisition and gold privatization processes. The study also shows that mineral matters have resisting and intentional capacities that are constituted through resource making. Such resisting capacities contradict dominant views of resources, generating new understandings of resources as things that do not always become. The study suggests the need to attend to complicated forces of extraction and mining regulations. Such an approach is not merely epistemological intervention for addressing the subsoil’s invisible properties but provides important insights to reimagine contemporary extractive practices as ontological struggles over the subsoil wherein indigenous persons produce and challenge claims to land through more-than-material relationships with the environment.