Paper short abstract:

I show how Gbaya ancestor rituals act as an ongoing interface between colonial French and Gbaya, where gold oscillates between its status as gift and commodity, resource and reactive agent and imbricate technical and exchange processes challenging existing anthropological categorisations of action

Paper long abstract:

In the East Region of Cameroon, Gbaya communities have practiced artisanal mining since it was introduced by French colonial mining companies in the 1930s. With their departure, local Gbaya communities appropriated and transformed these mining techniques, by transplanting ancestor rituals – originally specific to hunting - into the extraction of gold.

Ritual ancestor offerings are productive of luck (desonti), a Gbaya generative force that is central to socioeconomic forms of (re)production and success by rendering human action efficacious. In mining, luck is a transformative potential gifted from the ancestors which transforms food offerings into gold, conceived of as an animate, quasi-living entity.

This paper shows how these rituals are modalities of action enabling sociomaterial transformation at two interconnected scales, by 1) underlying the material and value transformations within mining, and 2) articulating the broader scale transformations of historical and technical change, by mediating the period of (post)colonial transition and the appropriation of French mining into a pre-existing Gbaya cosmotechnical repetoire.

I show how these rituals act as an ongoing sociotechnical interface between colonial French and Gbaya, where gold oscillates between its status as gift and commodity, resource and reactive agent. I argue that these rituals imbricate technical and exchange processes and show how the luck they generate follows a logic of obtainment instead of production, challenging existing anthropological categorisations of action.