SOAS Anthropology Department Seminar - Rosalie Allain

The SOAS Anthropology Department welcomes Dr Rosalie Allain for her talk The Vitality of Gold and its Analogic Reproduction on a Cameroonian Resource Frontier.

Among Gbaya artisanal gold miners in the East Region of Cameroon, gold is understood to be a quasi-living being, subject to ‘vital’ processes of growth, reproduction and animation which influence and emerge from the ways miners interact with it in their techniques and practices of extraction.

This paper explores the entanglement between these two types of generativity – the generation of living beings with the productivity of human technical action – through the prism of analogy. Departing from a productivist lens, and drawing from the Francophone Anthropology of Technology, I examine the analogies within and between vital processes and technical processes, to argue that the ‘production’ of gold is instead a process of reproduction and revelation.

I argue that analogic relations (of similarity/difference, continuity/discontinuity) are integral to this process, and in doing so foreground the pragmatic potential of analogy alongside its explanatory uses. By examining a series of analogies that Gbaya miners draw and enact in mining, I show how gold emerges from non-human agencies (mami wataa, ancestors, water and earth) that are engaged in relations of procreation and kinship, and how these are revealed and materialised in extractive techniques.

I argue that techniques are simultaneously intellectual and material processes, showing how gold’s vitality is forged within mining practices, through which miners recursively imagine its origin.

About the Speaker

Dr Rosalie Allain is an Early Career Departmental Lecturer at the School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford, where she previously held an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. She completed her PhD in Anthropology at UCL in 2021, for which she received the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Radcliffe-Brown Sutasoma Award for research of potentially outstanding merit.

She is a founding member of the Centre for the Anthropology of Technics and Technodiversity (CATT) at UCL and is a member of the ‘Anthropologie de la Vie’ (Anthropology of Life) research group at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale (Paris). Her research engages with the study of techniques, natural resources, cosmology and economic life in Cameroon where she studies artisanal gold mining among Gbaya communities, and how these mediate processes of generativity and scarcity in a context of resource depletion.

We would like to invite attendees to join us at the IoE bar for drinks after the event to continue the conversation.

Conact

If you have any questions, please contact Alice Rudge (ar80@soas.ac.uk).