abstract:

How did African societies prior to colonialism give political form to geology? In nineteenth-century Bambuk—an ancient gold-producing province that straddles the border of modern Senegal and Mali—Maninka gold miners produced claims to tracts of mineralized land by cultivating relationships with the spirit owners of underlying geological formations. Claims to these “spirited geobodies” were materialized at shrines, erected at the base of trees and on boulders, that signaled a sacrificial exchange relationship between Maninka lineages and spirits. Combining insights from the history and archeology of West Africa with the “global” turn in science and technology studies, this article engages with the occult as a concrete historical reality that made claims on people, land, and minerals. Such an approach is not merely an epistemological intervention into the historiography of technology. Rather, it is necessary for understanding how subterranean property was produced and defended in Africa’s deeper past.

摘要：

殖民主义之前的非洲社会如何给地质学赋予政治形式？在19世纪的班布克省（Bambuk），这是一个古老的黄金生产省，横跨现代塞内加尔和马里的边界，马尼卡（Maninka）的金矿工通过与底层地质构造的精神所有者建立联系，来宣称拥有成矿土地。这些“精神地球人”的主张在树下和石头上竖立的神社中得以实现，这标志着马尼卡血统和烈酒之间的牺牲性交换关系。结合西非历史和考古学的见识与科学技术研究的“全球”转变，本文将神秘学作为具体的历史现实，涉及对人，土地和矿产的主张。这种方法不仅是对技术史学的认识论干预。相反，有必要了解非洲更深的过去如何生产和捍卫地下财产。