Book Review: A Ritual Geology

A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa, by Robyn d’Avignon (2022). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Robyn d’Avignon’s A Ritual Geology (2022) makes a remarkable contribution to mining studies by weaving together geological knowledge and accounts of ritual practices through interdisciplinary inquiry. Drawing from history, anthropology, and science and technology studies, the book explores how rituals and the occult are entangled with mining geology. At the same time, it situates these themes within broader discussions of political economy, resource governance, and capitalist extraction. Scholars investigating small-scale and corporate mining in sub-Saharan Africa – particularly historians and anthropologists – will find this book a worthwhile read.

This review provides a critical reading of d’Avignon’s ethnography, which is notable for its careful integration of archival research and long-term fieldwork. It considers how the text engages with epistemological and theoretical frameworks to produce what Fosket (2002, in Clarke 2017) calls “thick analyses.” In this regard, the book considers the longue durée of artisanal mining in West Africa and challenges dominant narratives of Western scientific geology. The author’s work positions these African miners at the center of global networks and innovation, while revealing how colonialism has undermined them.

Over millennia, orpailleurs – roughly, small-scale miners in West Africa – have produced knowledge that is both deeply rooted in local cosmologies and intertwined with global processes. In producing this historical ethnography, d’Avignon spent two years situated in the Kédougou region of southwestern Senegal, researching its history and culture. Having analyzed the historiography of the French colonial state and its postcolonial successors, as well as the ethnography of orpaillage (labor-intensive gold mining) as a praxis, d’Avignon proceeds to decolonize the historical and ethnographic dynamics that have shaped prior cultural analyses of orpailleurs (gendered male gold miners or panners) and West African artisanal miners more generally.

According to d’Avignon, being an orpailleur is a lived experience, and “histories of orpaillage are made in family genealogies, village settlement narratives, and state and corporate archives” (28). I argue that orpaillage should be understood not just as a cultural practice but as a form of material knowledge that emerges through embodied labor, interactions with the land, and the intergenerational transmission of historical memory. In Chapter 1, d’Avignon describes how she perceived both human and non-human actors, whose traces span hundreds of interviews, oral histories, and archival research that she conducted. During two years of living closely with orpailleurs in the gold-rich village of Tinkoto, she became embedded in local social structures, shaped by mining knowledge passed down through generations of gold prospectors. She drew on her prior experience in the U.S. Peace Corps, local language skills, and ties with community members, local officials, and researchers to facilitate access to geologists and historical archives.

While d’Avignon’s singular and authoritative role in conducting ethnography informs the robustness and ambition of her work, her knowledge of the field remains partial, as she herself emphasizes. Her position as a foreign-language speaker duly limits access to certain forms of knowledge. To navigate this, she collaborates with her “intellectual partner,” a research assistant who translated her study participants’ lived experiences into textual form.

The book also presents a reflexive account in which the author navigates the complexities of data collection during fieldwork. As an educated white female researcher, she is frequently suspected of secretly searching for gold. These accusations, which frame her as a “foreign miner or investor,” highlight how globalized bodies are embedded within local hierarchies, where knowledge of the underground is contested by local actors. In Chapters 6 and 7, she undertakes an excursion to juura (a goldfield, in the Maninka language) in search of the precious metal, aiming to observe the miners’ “underlying reality” characterized by underground spirits. This moment exemplifies the book’s broader postmodern view that resists linear narratives and colonial binaries and instead foregrounds ambiguity, reflexivity, and the instability of knowledge. For instance, on page 7, she reflects upon the dualism via which the world’s miners are often classified, between those seen as “modern” and “traditional” – as is portrayed in the following categorization:

artisanal miner = Third World, illegal, primitive, local, customary, Black/Brown

industrial miner = First World, legal, technologically advanced, global, modern, white

Rather than accepting this dualism, d’Avignon uses it as an opportunity to critically examine and unsettle typical portrayals. Her critique, as I interpret it, contributes to rethinking how artisanal miners are constituted as subjects. By positioning artisanal miners as active actors rather than as passive recipients of geological or subterranean exploration, this ethnographic work becomes a methodological platform for decolonizing knowledge production. As John Law argues, “we [researchers] need to understand that our methods are always more or less unruly assemblages” (cited in Fletcher and Clarke 2018: 233). d’Avignon’s book, thus, embraces methodological unruliness by ethnographically approaching geology not as a rigid science, but as a layered field of interpretation. Indeed, this book is a volume of interpretation, seeking to rationalize rituals and rumors, such as “human sacrifices in the juuras generate wealth from the earth’s subsurface” (177) – those ambiguous realities that shape human and non-human relations within this West African mining praxis.

Based on my reading, “ritual geology” is broadly defined as a theoretical framework that examines the relationship between miners and the subterranean landscape. Along these lines, d’Avignon defines ritual geology as “a set of practices, prohibitions, and cosmological engagements with the earth that are widely shared and cultivated across a regional geological formation” (5). She takes inspiration from anthropologist Jan Vansina’s work on the history of political customary traditions in Equatorial Africa (1985; 1990). As d’Avignon sees it, rituals based on Vansina’s perspective are a dynamic constellation of practices and beliefs that are inherited and transmitted from one generation to the next through narratives, political institutions, rituals, and bodily praxis (9). Conceptualized as such, orpaillage is, by definition, the bodily praxis of cosmological engagements and practices tied to prospecting, extracting, and processing minerals.

This position further illuminates how orpailleurs are technically proven as miners. Stories of how “men learned from their fathers how to taste and smell soils for the presence of iron, pyrite, and gold” (78) show how geological knowledge is transmitted and embodied across generations. In contrast, smelling techniques were ignored, and even ridiculed, by colonial geologists. Although orpaillage was mostly unrecognized by colonial authorities before World War II and in the early post-independence period, this began to change in subsequent decades; western geologists increasingly came to rely on orpailleurs to map subterranean resources. Chapter 5 recounts stories from Tinkoto, where local miners recall how the equipment used by geologists from the Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières initially failed to detect underground deposits, until orpailleurs were later brought in to identify the sites that led to successful discoveries.

 [..] when the missions came [the western geologists] had a map of the land. But they would also take a native from here. They would recruit an orpailleur to show them the points [juuras]. They [. . .] had maps and photographs. Then there were photographs taken from airplanes. But photographs and the land, they are not the same. You need someone to show you the place. On the map it looks one way, but on the ground everything can be different (144).

The miners’ knowledge of the underground is also shaped by perceptions of risk and luck and the presence of spirits. In some Muslim traditions in the region, mineral-rich mountains are believed to be inhabited by other “earth-beings.” As described in the introduction; Chapters 2, 6, and 7; and the conclusion, some community practices around mining are guided by a moral economy of subsistence. In this view, people in Kédougou refer to the juura (the gold mine and deposits) as kurukuro (granaries) – thus framing the earth’s wealth as essential for family survival, not capitalist exploitation. This reinterpretation serves as an ethical guideline and a warning against actions that might disturb or “empty” the subsurface. In this context, taboos or restrictions on the timing and methods of mining can be understood as attempts to prevent famine or misfortune:

The juura is our granary [kurukuro]. It is how I nourish my family. What will I do if they [the state or mining companies] take it? Wouldn’t you rather risk death than let someone light your granary on fire? (167)

In these chapters, d’Avignon strikes a balance between evaluating and allowing the evidence to speak for itself. By portraying artisanal miners as intellectual actors, the ethnography deconstructs how their often-overlooked skills – such as smelling, digging, and winnowing – challenge dominant narratives that dismiss such traditional praxis as “primitive” and, as a result, reinforce technological determinism. Additionally, d’Avignon’s descriptions of miners’ underground knowledge echo what Clarke describes as the “complex situatedness” of postmodern scholarship (2017: 4). Clarke argues that research variables pertaining to scholarship should not be limited to human subjects but also nonhuman entities such as technologies, animals, discourses, historical documents, and visual representations. Indeed, d’Avignon’s book is grounded by such an assemblage, one that is shaped through the researcher’s interactions with spirits, people, technologies, and texts.

To conclude, orpaillage may be understood as a form of geological practice, in which orpailleurs are positioned as part of geological science itself. In addition to being agentic, they take on an authorial position, akin to that of ethnographers, whereby their mining practices are inscribed in operative modes of geological exploration. Borrowing from Fortun’s analogy of the telephone operator (2010), we could say that it is d’Avignon’s artisanal miners who are connecting their “callers” (that is, anthropologists, historians, and other scholars) to “the line” (technoscience and subterranean knowledge) of gold mining in West Africa.

References

Clarke, Adele E. 2017. Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory after the Interpretive Turn. Sage.

Fletcher, Isabel and Adele E. Clarke. 2018. “Imagining Alternative and Better Worlds: Isabel Fletcher Talks with Adele E. Clarke.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 4: 222–45.

Fortun, Kim. 2010. “Foreword.” in James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. University of California Press.

Fosket, Jenny R. 2002. Breast Cancer Risk and the Politics of Prevention: Analysis of a Clinical Trial. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California-San Francisco.

Vansina, Jan. 1985. Oral Tradition as History. University of Wisconsin Press.

Vansina, Jan M. 1990. Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa. University of Wisconsin Press.