3. Gold mining

Anthropologists study the multiple meanings attributed to gold, as well as the multiple forms of knowledge of underground substances – be it geological knowledge, ideas about ‘gold as real anchor’ in the world of finance, or artisanal miners’ care in approaching gold as a capricious, living substance. In the ethnography of gold mining, attention is given to articulations of artisanal and large-scale mining, both in time and in subterranean space. This is illustrated by studies carried out in Ghana, where religion, politics, and the spiritual aspects of gold are key in gold mining entanglements. In work the author carried out with Robert Pijpers, we show how access to gold resources is entangled with the socio-political landscape and foreground how geological characteristics influence the organization of access to gold. In an approach we call ‘in-depth geopolitics’, we propose attentiveness to political and subterranean aspects of the mining landscape.