Summer School 2013 "Situating Media" - Participants
Sandra Calkins (Leipzig/Halle)
Managing Uncertainties ─ Metal Detectors and Organizational Forms in Sudan's Artisanal Gold Mining Sector
Artisanal (illegal) gold mining is burgeoning in northern Sudan since mid-2008. It has turned into a main source of livelihood for the rural poor. This paper focuses on how artisanal gold miners process various uncertainties – here understood as lived experiences with semantic, deontic and epistemological dimensions – by clinging to 'fixed' organizational forms. I concentrate on the introduction of a novel extractive technology to Sudan: metal detectors which electromagnetically prospect the terrain. They can detect nuggets, grains or flakes of gold in the surface layers of the soil. Metal detectors are inscribed with different significations, which affect the perceptions of its properties. In the Sudanese artisanal gold mining sector, a preordaining Islamic God is enlisted to explain and mystify the uncertainty of finding anything. The technology is reinterpreted as an instrument to pursue “what God has written down” for a miner, to realize and claim one's divinely allotted share. This has reshuffled organizational forms and calibrated a specific distribution of wealth. Miners engage uncertainties by focusing on technical instead of moral dimensions, on getting the work done rather than on how it is done. This enables them to blend out elements that would lead to reflexive inquiry and doubts about distributive patterns. An insistence on following procedures and organizational forms connects to the need for cooperation in extracting the precious metal and the multiple and grand uncertainties that gold miners live through.
Sandra Calkins is a Ph.D. Candidate of Social Anthropology at the University of Leipzig and a member of the LOST group at the University of Halle. She is currently writing her Ph.D. thesis “Survival at the margins: Processing uncertainties in Sudan”. She studied Oriental Studies, Journalism and Indology at the University of Leipzig, Damascus and Jaipur. Her Magister thesis dealt with social security and mobility in Sudan.
Her main research interests are uncertainty and organization, technologies, translations, classifications, standards, statistics; Africa & MENA-region
Recent Publications
2014: “Territories of Gold Mining: International Investments and Artisanal Extraction in Sudan” (with Enrico Ille), in: Jörg Gertel, Richard Rottenburg, Sandra Calkins (ed.), Disrupting Territories. Land, Commodification and Conflict in Sudan, Woodbridge/Rochester: James Currey (forthcoming).
2013: “Gemeinschaft neu gedacht: Nomaden als Vorreiter der Globalisierung?,” in: Revue. Magazine for the Next Society 12, 122–127.
2012: “Agricultural Encroachment in Wadi Mukabrab Area: Policies of Recompense, Differentiation and ‘Tribal’ Belonging,” in: Cornelia Kleinitz, Claudia Näser (ed.): “Nihna nâs al-bahar – We are the people of the river.” Ethnographic Research in the Fourth Nile Cataract Region, Sudan. Meroitica 26, Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 229–251.