Mining Rituals in Vital Spaces: The Cosmopolitics of Gold and the Precarity of Mine Closure in Ghana

Abstract

ABSTRACTRecent spiritual contests swirling around a five-year shutdown of the Obuasi gold mine in Ghana, one of the world’s largest, have thrown into high relief key features of improvisational labour and cosmopolitical assemblages in de-industrialising settings. People are turning more intensely toward novel mining rituals in pursuits of gold, which spirits animate. These phenomena urge a reconsideration of the theoretical and conceptual terms of analysis for moral economies of labour and neoliberal mining politics. Building upon recent work on cosmopolitics, copresences, and cultures of casual labour, this piece argues for a concept of vital spaces – interior and exterior zones of life and death, of enlivening and deadening – with assemblages of spiritual reciprocity. These multivalent spiritual contests over the vitalities of gold provide a prime context for a retheorization of moral economies and mining politics as cosmopolitics, with implications for understanding labour, politics, and value across the neoliberal world.