Robyn D'Avignon, "A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa" (Duke UP, 2022)
New Books in Anthropology
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The Transformation of the West African Gold Mining Tradition
I wasn't trained as a geologist and this wasn't the way things were spoken about even in the archives to realize well like you know these aren't just isolated gold fields right. So, I was very familiar with some of these gold fields one is found straddling the border of Senegal and Mali it was historically known as bamboo. And there's certain ways that that tracks with what the landscape looks like as well which would have been very self evident to people historically who are migrating and moving across the landscape. The geology has a way of shaping the entire landscape in ways that have been fundamentally important to human settlement and exploitation of the environment far beyond the concerns of just gold.
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