Paper short abstract:

Diamond mining is a complex combination of material production, imaginaries, and life experiences oriented by a specific ethic. My particular focus here is on the ways in which diamond miners’ ethic of “hard work” differentiates from other workers’ ethics and produces specific subjectivities.

Paper long abstract:

In Sierra Leone the artisanal diamond miners often compare diamond mining to gambling. In this way they express the uncertainty that characterizes the search for precious gems, and consequently the perception of insecurity permeating their own lives.

By drawing upon my ethnographic experience in artisanal mines of Sierra Leone (2007-2011), I argue that taking this comparison too literally - as some development experts interested in artisanal diamond mining often do when they equate diamond mining to a "casino economy" - may be misleading. Miners are not risky or pathological subjects. Every day, they come to terms with the difficult compromises of a profession in which the imaginary of a quick and unexpected wealth collides, in practice, with the daily realities of a hard and risky job. For these reasons, my paper considers their work as a complex combination of material production, imaginaries, and life experiences oriented by a specific ethic.

Central to the understanding of this ethic is a repertoire of religious metaphors that informs miners' working and ritual practices. My particular focus here is on the ways in which diamond miners' ethic of "hard work" differentiates from other workers' ethic (i.e. stone miners). In noting that miners are not passive subjects, but rather agents who resist, collude or reproduce the dynamics of capitalism in different creative ways, this paper claims that the "miner-gambler" is the result and, at the same time, the representation of the capitalistic contradictions inside the commodity chain of diamonds.