The expansion of artisanal gold mining has contributed to agrarian change in most of the global South—including West Africa: the sector offers interesting examples of technological and socio-economic change, reflecting broader dynamics in the political economy of mining. In this article, we rely on our multisited ethnography to show how innovations in gold processing—particularly, the shift from mercury-based to cyanide-based techniques—reconfigured power relations and organizational patterns in the artisanal mining sector in Burkina Faso. We show that, in the context of structural transformations and pressure from powerful actors, the mechanisms of value creation, the definition of property rights and the relations of production remained open for negotiation and redefinition. Bringing attention to new scenarios opened by the shift to cyanide for processing gold—a transformative factor in many gold mining areas across the world—our analysis contributes to a broader reflection on the nexus between the trajectories of sociotechnical innovation and the ongoing power struggles in the informal economies of resource extraction.

中文翻译：

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谁拥有泥？手工金矿开采中宝贵的剩余物、社会技术创新和不断变化的生产关系（布基纳法索）

手工金矿开采的扩张促进了全球大部分南部地区（包括西非）的农业变革：该部门提供了技术和社会经济变革的有趣例子，反映了采矿政治经济中更广泛的动态。在本文中，我们依靠我们的多地点人种学来展示黄金加工的创新——特别是从基于汞的技术到基于氰化物的技术的转变——如何重新配置​​布基纳法索手工采矿部门的权力关系和组织模式。我们表明，在结构转型和来自强大行动者的压力的背景下，价值创造机制、产权定义和生产关系仍然可以协商和重新定义。