Gold digging and the politics of time: Changing timescapes of artisanal mining in West Africa

This article analyses the socio-political transformations observed in two artisanal gold mining sites in West Africa (Guinée Conakry and Burkina Faso), linked to economic cycles and technical innovations. The notion of timescape(s) is employed to underline the intertwining of the spatial and temporal dimensions of mining, and to show the contradictory movements of compression and release of space and time to which local modes of production and institutional settings have been exposed. These transformations have generated shifts in the power to “make time” - that is, to define the rhythms and duration of work in the present and to plan mining activities in the future - triggering political reconfigurations in order to (re)appropriate control over the resource.