Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how artisanal gold miners in South Africa are rendered foreign, criminal, and out of place and time. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork among South Africa’s ‘pirate’ gold mining syndicates, this paper gives a new account of the relation between autochthony and economy.

Paper long abstract:

What makes some South African gold ore illicit? In a country where an estimated 90% of industrial mines do not have legal permits for the entirety of their operations, and certain small-scale miners who claim the right to legally operate based on customary land and practice claims, similarly lack permits from the department of mineral resources to mine, it is necessary to look beyond written legal code to explain why the post-apartheid South African state and society render certain artisanal miners uniquely 'criminal' subjects and the gold ore they possess illicit. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork among artisanal miners working in abandoned and active industrial gold mines in Gauteng and surrounding South African provinces, this paper documents a heterogeneous landscape of temporal practices and processes that criminalize miners who find themselves 'out of time' in the post-apartheid nation-state. In particular, this paper attends to how the materiality of gold mining and the gold trade's material capacities to obfuscate the histories of gold's production, the temporal economy of illicit gold production and trade, and the changing meanings of memory, speculative property, nation and belonging in South Africa produce migrant artisanal gold miners as criminal subjects. The paper builds upon recent scholarship in the anthropology of time, migration, the state, criminalization and mining to give a new account of the relation between autochthony and economy.