Miners on the move: Expellable labor, flexible intimacies, and institutional recast in West African artisanal gold mines

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.