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American Ethnological Society
Oral Presentation Session
James Smith
University of California, Davis
This paper presents an entry point into the life and work of Eastern Congolese artisanal miners operating in the mining concessions and former mining towns that belong to companies who lease out space to buying houses. While, for some, these spaces represent the memory of an industrial mining past, and the salaried technical labor that some people had, they are also innovative sites that draw in new forms of work, which exist alongside and in tension with the industrial mining past whose ruins people live in and among. Focusing on one mining concession in particular, I draw on a couple poignant case examples to show how multiples temporalities emerge and are accessed through the work of mining, and how people use and draw from the ruins of the past to build very different kinds of futures.