The Underground, In-Depth Geopolitics And Gold Mining In Ghana

In anthropology, geography, STS, and urban studies, scholars have started to pay attention to the underground in their analysis of political forms of domination, economic developments, the effects of technological innovations, the building of infrastructure, and the future of the world at large. The anthropology of resource extraction takes centre stage in this development, first of all in its scrutiny of the relation between the social and the subterranean. By taking gold extraction in Ghana as starting point, this lecture looks at the social - subterranean nexus.  The presentation is based on collaborative work with Robert J. Pijpers. Together, we developed the concept of ‘in-depth geopolitics’ for analysing the dynamic, oftentimes tense, socio-spatial arrangements that emerge across different mining landscapes in Ghana (Luning and Pijpers 2017 and 2018). Our approach to ‘in-depth geopolitics’ foregrounds three interconnected domains: knowledge systems of the underground, technologies of extraction and their social characteristics and governance dimensions of mining practices.  The lecture analyses various cases to show how the interplay of these domains affects the strategies of large-scale and different artisanal and small-scale miners for working out arrangements of cohabitation. The Ghanaian cases serve as 3-dimensional terrains for discussing how the concept of in-depth geopolitics may be relevant for the anthropological study of mining scapes in the world at large.