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Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) has been growing steadily in the past two decades, particularly in the African continent, in connection to the dynamics of global prices and the perception of a new “mining boom” (that has started to slow down since around 2013). The artisanal mining sector is often depicted as chaotic: narratives, both in the media and in the political discourse, emphasize the exploitative conditions of production, its environmental impact and its links with conflict. Nonetheless, in-depth research has shown that artisanal mining areas organize around informal modes of governance that often prove effective in securing the production process and in negotiating with the surrounding socio-political context. Social anthropologists have described the emergence of legitimate leadership in the camps; the friendship ties and the risk-sharing arrangements that contribute to the cohesion of the working teams; the ritual practices and symbolic imaginaries associated to mining activities; to sum up, the construction of mechanisms of reciprocity and of “socially embedded economies” that shape the local articulation of mineral production across the world. On the other side, artisanal mining is not a marginal or “traditional” economic sector: it is deeply enmeshed with the global logic of capitalism. In West African gold mining camps, for example, workforce is made up by a huge mass of mobile miners who work mostly on an individual basis and aggregate temporarily in teams. Qualitative research at the micro level can show the high competition on natural resources, the precarious conditions of living, the accelerated processes of socio-technical change, and the shift from open access to more restricted or “privatized” forms of access to the resource. Drawing from my ethnographic work on artisanal gold mining in Western Burkina Faso and Eastern Guinée, I will reflect on these combinations of embeddedness and individualized economic behavior, and I will propose to use an approach based on the concept of "moral economies" (in the plural, to account for their multiplicity).

Artisanal Mining; West Africa; Embeddedness; Moral Economy