Paper short abstract:

Focusing on how expectations in artisanal gold and diamond mining in Eastern Sierra Leone were managed, this paper ethnographically explores how mining continues to seed hopes despite its inability to fulfill its promises of social mobility.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I engage artisanal mining in Eastern Sierra Leone as an aspirational striving for that which cannot be realized. Artisanal gold and diamond mining is at the core of the regional identity. While accessible deposits have shrunken, hopes for sudden wealth have not. For many, mining is perceived as the only means of social mobility. Paradoxically, while many turn to mining for social mobility, mining itself is marked by constant waits for sponsors of mining operations acquiring the resources to continue mining.

Amidst constant waiting, how are expectations managed? I engage this question from two angles. Firstly, I follow young men’s waiting for mining operations to continue. Their waiting is marked by finding alternative livelihood sources and ways of getting by. When speaking of waiting, literature on youthhood acknowledges that youth’s waiting is not empty, but full of movement. I look at these movements and how they engage mining as a milieu through which one has to “navigate” (Vigh 2009), establishing new networks and managing expectations. Secondly, I look how sponsors manage expectations as well by seeding hopes to accumulate economic and social capital through an “economic of appearances” (Tsing 2005). Through spectacular performances and magic tricks, expactations are manipulated and exploited. On the one hand, instead of social mobility, social hierarchies perpatuate in mining milieus. Despite this, though, mining never lost its attraction. By investigating how this contradiction is practically endured, I shed light on how moments of stagnation are hopefully navigated through.