Allain, Rosalie; (2021) ‘The Gold is Gone’: Techniques of Resource-Making and Generativity among Gbaya Artisanal Miners in Cameroon. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text Rosalie Allain Final Thesis UCL .pdf Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 September 2032. Download (62MB)

Abstract

This thesis explores practices and conceptions of generativity in a situation of scarcity through an examination of artisanal mining amongst Gbaya-speaking people in the East Region of Cameroon. First introduced through French colonial labour, the role of small-scale artisanal gold mining as the community's primary productive activity and source of income and identity has been destabilised by the recent arrival of Chinese mining companies. Their radical depletion of gold stocks has transformed a remote and impoverished border region into a space of rapid social change. Drawing on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a village-based mining community, this thesis studies the creation of resources in a marginalised community and how, through experimenting and improvising mining practices, they survive and create value on the Cameroonian borderlands. It examines the changing material practices people use and innovate to elicit increasingly smaller amounts of gold and carve out a livelihood as they attempt to maintain their social world and cope with the transition from abundance to scarcity. By drawing on the Francophone inspired Anthropology of Techniques, this thesis offers a close study of the material process of gold extraction, in its artisanal, semi-mechanised and leftover forms. It traces connections between mining and other productive activities (hunting, cultivation) and domains of social life (ritual, ancestor worship) in order to consider how an externally imposed productive process has been transplanted into a pre-existing sociotechnical repertoire and continues to transform it. It foregrounds the cosmological, moral and economic conditions and effects under which technical practices and devices are enacted, thought about, and transformed in relation to an increasingly uncertain future and at the interface with capitalist extractive logics. In doing so, my thesis brings to light vernacular theories of generativity, how these are enacted in artisanal mining and destabilized by the situation of scarcity.

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