HUMA African Epistemologies Advanced Seminar Series
Introduction: This talk examines the varied responses of men and women artisanal gold miners to the growing presence of small-scale Chinese mines in Manica, Mozambique, between 2015 and 2018. By examining intersections between “mining temporalities” with the temporalities of the life-course within the current political economic conjuncture, I show how gender, kin and affinal assumptions inform opportunities and barriers for women in artisanal gold mining, including the ability to recruit or be recruited for certain tasks. By attending to these gendered dependencies and interdependencies through which labour mobilization occurs, I examine how differently positioned men and women have economically responded to the altering mining landscapes caused by the expanding Chinese mines. By pointing to how mining environments and their uneven classed and gendered economic possibilities are deeply implicated in intimate power relations involved in labour practices within artisanal mining, I suggest overarching narratives that schematically gender rural landscapes (e.g., women as victimized community members) in Africa are inattentive to the range of livelihood strategies and struggles at work for rural women, even as wider economic landscapes shift.
About the speaker: Blair Rutherford is a professor of anthropology and chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada and founding director of Carleton’s Institute of African Studies. He has carried out ethnographic research on the cultural politics of rural livelihoods for nearly thirty years in different sub-Saharan African countries. He is currently working with colleagues from Canada, Mozambique, Sierra Leone and Kenya on research that looks at gender dynamics in artisanal and small-scale gold mining. Among other publications, he is the author of Working on the Margins: Black Workers, White Farmers in Postcolonial Zimbabwe (Zed Press & Weaver Books, 2001), Farm Labor Struggles in Zimbabwe: The Ground of Politics (Indiana University Press, 2016), and co-editor with Pius Adesanmi of Africa Matters – Cultural politics, political economies and grammars of protest (Daraja Press, 2019).