Lauren Coyle Rosen : The Spiritual Laws of Gold: Time, Space, and Mining Rituals in Ghana

Lauren Coyle Rosen (Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University): The Spiritual Laws of Gold: Time, Space, and Mining Rituals in Ghana

What are the spiritual dimensions that govern gold in Ghana and elsewhere? How do miners and others making claims to the sacred ore harness, supplicate, neutralize, or otherwise try to navigate the numinous realms that suffuse the gold fields? How do the divine laws that pertain to gold rituals unsettle and expand conventional notions of time and space? This talk draws from extensive ethnographic research on gold mining and spiritual jurisdictions in Ghana, focusing on contemporary struggles among corporate and artisanal miners in the penumbra of the industry.

The talk engages classic and contemporary debates anthropology and philosophy in order to illuminate temporality, spatiality, and spiritual principles in two distinct ritual contexts. The first is those considered illicit or unethical – namely, those of so-called blood money or quick money rituals, for hastening the production of gold and other forms of wealth through improper sacrifices. The second is the class of ritual practices that people consider ethical or proper, including dutiful prayer, moral supplication, or unselfish sacrifice, all of which can accelerate the growth, appearance, or movement of gold at any particular time and in a specific space.

Both categories of ritual activities are performed in Christian, Islamic, and African indigenous spiritual systems. I argue that, though the language codes and conceptual glosses vary, the implicit moral economies and symbolic valences resonate across the spiritual traditions. Rather than evincing the putative triumph of one religion over another, these resonant phenomena bespeak underlying horizons of understanding that, in fact, lead to mutual reinforcements of the powers of each of the religious systems – here, vis-à-vis governing vital matters such as gold, spirits, lives, and livelihoods. This has important implications for theoretical notions of consciousness, dialectics, temporality, and co-presence, as the spirits of all of these systems perpetually intermingle and interact – at times co-creatively, and at times co-destructively.

BIO

Lauren Coyle Rosen is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. She works in the fields of legal and political anthropology, comparative religion and spirituality, the anthropology of knowledge, and critical theory.

Coyle Rosen holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago (2014) and a J.D. from Harvard Law School (2008). At Princeton, she is a faculty affiliate at the Program in Law and Public Affairs, and she sits on the executive committee of the Program in African Studies.

She is the author of the forthcoming book, Fires of Gold: Law, Spirit, and Sacrificial Labor in Ghana (University of California Press, spring 2020). She is now writing a second book, Law in Light: Truth, Vision, and Transnational African Spirituality, an ethnography of the recent revitalization of Akan sacred culture in Ghana and the US.