Conversation with Lauren Coyle Rosen

by J. Brent Crosson

Through a sequence of serendipitous encounters, I got to know multiple people at the heart of the organizing efforts in Obuasi, Ghana, the historic mining town at the center of Fires of Gold. It is arguably the site of the most vociferous current contests over access to the gold and a central governance crucible in Ghana’s vibrant constitutional democracy. The nation is now also Africa’s largest gold producer, as of this year. It had been the second largest for some time. In living there, I came to experience the manifold ways in which the spiritual forces and the numinous, more broadly, were absolutely central to the ways in which people navigated these contests, as well as their relationships to histories, memories, ancestors, justice, belonging, property, and much else. This town and its gold had long been important economically, politically, spiritually, and cosmologically – long before British colonialism violently descended upon the land and the people. It was a key object of desire for colonial violence and conquest. In the postcolonial sovereign nation-state of Ghana, contests over the rights of small-scale Ghanaian miners, the sovereign accrual of wealth for the nation’s people, and transnational corporate extraction of the plentiful gold remains central. So, too, with the key contests over spiritual and social ownership and belonging. In the end, this place and project appeared to me to be a prime site for the study of the rich confluences of contemporary worlds of sovereignty, spirits, law, and political rebirth that are so often obscured by abstract theoretical narratives. 

Let me take the significant example of the reconstitution of labor, which is a global phenomenon that is powerfully incarnate in this place, a neoliberal setting that is also a key constitutional democracy in the postcolonial world. Here, we find something quite different than diffuse masses of precarious laborers, which is a portrayal we often find in the literature. We also see something other than youth who jettison or sacrifice their ties to ancestors and other forms of social life. Here, the casual laborers – the informal or small-scale miners, locally called galamseys, who feature in this book – draw upon both so-called traditional forms (so-called because the traditional-modern distinction is always artifice, of course) of social and spiritual power, and they also operate in ways that mimic the scaffolding of the so-called modernist liberal state form in uncanny ways. This distinctive feature, among many others, drew me into the setting to learn much more about the place as a revelatory prism for studying the critical shifting forms of power in contemporary society – and, crucially, what these shifts might mean for people who live within them and who participate in fashioning their contours. 

JBC: What did you learn about religion during your research? Also, what do you hope readers learn from your book?

LCR: There are so many things to say here, and many things that the book encompasses. The book sets forth two key arguments. The first concerns the reconstitution of sovereign power and the central roles of shadow sovereigns, or sovereign-like authorities that operate alongside the legal system and provision, police, adjudicate, or otherwise govern. At times, the deeply liberalized legal system appears absent or waning, but it is very much present at all turns – even when seemingly invisible – and actually helps to give birth to key forms of shadow authority. The key shadow sovereigns at play are the mining company, the informal miners’ association, a casual labor union, grassroots advocacy organizations, and various religious and spiritual forces – Christian, Islamic, and other traditional African ones, particularly Akan authorities.

Second, the book argues that religious figures and spiritual forces are absolutely central to anchoring and animating the powers of all sovereigns and shadow sovereigns – and this, in ways that are multifaceted and multivalent. Spiritual vitalities suffuse forms of freedom and constraint, resistance and its suppression. The point is not that, say, the spirits serve one political end or another, or one group versus another. Rather, there is a vast, complex, and varied field of spiritual forces that animate, co-create, and otherwise participate in mining, politics, law, and the rest of life. Fires argues that these mining dynamics, as well as their deep repertoires of meaning and symbolic power, cannot be fully understood without careful attention to the spiritual dimensions.   

There is a powerful spiritual and earthly amalgam that these miners, activists, and others have innovated, on the ground, which disclose much about contemporary law, moral economy, and sovereign power. Sovereign power here has become at once disaggregated and, within these novel separated forms, consolidated, often hierarchically This is true not only in Ghana but throughout much of the contemporary world. The gold fields at the heart of the study here are merely one particularly illuminating site of these constellations of forces. 

I also wish to emphasize that the state as sovereign remains central, as do the customary legal and political authorities who have jurisdiction that runs parallel to state authorities and who bear much consequence for the everyday lives of many. I trace sovereign configurations that have been lateralized or made more horizontal, in keeping with much recent research, yet I also show the retaining or the resurgence of vertical forms of organization and rule within contemporary political and everyday life. This includes the constitutionally inscribed state and customary authorities. Also, again, it is not merely a horizontal patchwork notion of sovereignty at play here. It is one that also evinces strong forms of vertical scaffolding, many of which mirror those in ancestral, customary, and state-based orders. It is an intricate dance of power and signification, one in which the spirits prominently feature. In the text, I strive to portray these complex movements of the contemporary lifeblood of sovereign power. 

JBC: In teaching classes about sovereignty and spirits, I often assign readings about the history of fetishism, tracing it from the intercultural mercantile spaces of early modern West Africa, to European theories of religion, and finally to Marx and commodity fetishism.  I say this, because in this history, gold plays an interesting role.  Supposed miscalculations of the exchange value of gold served as a supporting narrative for European ideas of the fetish, which became a trope for their stereotypes about African religion (and fetishism remains a living category in West Africa today).  Though early modern West African peoples obviously valued gold highly, they traded gold with Europeans for trinkets and trash in these accounts, revealing (what these Europeans thought was) Africans’ misestimation of materiality.  The fetish became the idea of worthless material objects improperly invested with force, both spiritual and contractual.  It strikes me though, that from a perspective in which material exchange implies social responsibilities there was no misunderstanding.  The point of such exchange was to initiate a relationship of obligation rather than to simply maximize one’s profit.  From this perspective, it was not West Africans who misunderstood the value of material objects, but Western Europeans who misunderstood the social value of material exchange.  I say this, because I found that in the contests over gold mining that your book so wonderfully describes, part of the conflict between the large transnational company and artisanal miners seemed to revolve around the responsibilities that material exchange carries.  Does the extraction of wealth involve reciprocal sacrifice with spiritual and social consequences?  I was wondering if you could say more about how the spiritual dimensions of a material substance (gold) had economic, as well as religious, implications.

LCR: Thank you so much for this beautiful question, which resonates with the heart of so much of my thinking in researching and writing the Fires book. There is far too much to say in response than would be appropriate here. I do not want to inundate you! However, please let me say, first, that you are absolutely correct, in my view, in your suggestions of the misapprehensions in the whole history and discourse of fetishism regarding materiality, spirituality, and West Africa (or anywhere else, for that matter, though so much of the commentary has drawn upon matters from West Africa). Fetishism, as it has operated in the minds of, say, (largely white) Europeans, vis-à-vis West Africa, has served as a concept for a fundamental misunderstanding of economic, sacred, and other realities. Please let me also say that, from this standpoint and to reverse directionality (a directionality which itself is always illusion or fantasy, at least in large part), Europeans or others in the so-called West are no less “fetishistic” than people anywhere else. The relationships to gold, as substance and symbol, are perfect examples of this. I am sure we agree on this matter, but I wanted to be sure to say it.

But yes: you have put your finger on the pulse of a key current in my work. The sacred, spiritual, and religious dimensions of gold cannot be disarticulated or disaggregated from the questions of economic value. This is not merely the case for mining and for the circulation of gold among Ghanaians, of course. It is also the case with others who are part of this world, including those engaged in corporate mining and in negotiating the outflows of the substance, with its myriad values, from the country. The metaphysical significance of gold is not separate from its economic circulation; the spiritual dimensions suffuse the economic life, and they help to fashion the ways in which people interact with and apprehend its location, extraction, and circulation, along with its alienation through sale, its conferral through gift, or its loss through transnational corporate extraction. In this way, the gold is central to the lifeblood of the nation and its peoples in sacred ways that extend beyond the economy – but not because they are separate from economic realities, but because they are part and parcel. The sacred dimensions of gold are not some mirage, some illusory reflection of a “real economic base,” as in, say, a reductive Marxist reckoning or in the offensive classical Eurocentric take on what some call “fetishism” in West Africa. The sacred and the economic are intertwined in very powerful, complex, and revelatory ways. I think we, as scholars, would do well to continue to try to take much more seriously the realities of the sublime and the metaphysical for the domains of economic, legal, and political life, as they take shape in much – or perhaps all – of the world. 

JBC: Your book forcefully shows the backdrop of the neoliberal fragmentation of state sovereignty against which these conflicts over gold mining unfold.  As state sovereignty fragments through structural adjustment policies that privatize resources and public services, you draw on a definition of sovereignty as a “tentative, and always emergent form of authority, grounded in violence” rather than the property that emanates from a state.  This reminded me of recent discussions around performative sovereignty that have permeated my own work and field of inquiry.  In Caribbean Studies, the work of Deb Thomas or Rivke Jaffe have all probed “hybrid” or “performative” conceptions of sovereignty.  One interesting aspect of this research, in the work of Chelsea Kivland on Haiti, is that neoliberal governance carries with it not simply the fragmentation of centralized sovereignty but also the desire for sovereignty, which in a wonderful Haitian Kreyol turn of phrase is expressed as “making the state.”  Making the state is not simply about violence, killing, and fear (i.e. necropolitics), but responsibility and redistributive obligation—what one might call the requirement that convincing sovereigns must perform a noblesse oblige that demonstrates a clientelistic bond.  This is precisely what liberal ideologies of rule of law and transparency, on the one hand, and private capital, on the other, come to deconstruct—as either as “corrupt” or “backwards” kinds of relations or as something that is the responsibility of individuals rather than institutions.  It sems to me that the self-reliant, entrepreneurial individual and the rule of law are moral and economic virtues in this system, which tend to erode hierarchical forms of responsibility in the name of an abstract egalitarianism.   Interestingly, this is precisely why, as Yarimar Bonilla highlights in Nonsovereign Futures, that some anticolonial movements in the Caribbean opposed postcolonial independence.  This was because they knew that if the colonial power remained sovereign over their territory, it also had to shoulder (at least to a relatively greater degree) the redistributive responsibilities of the sovereign.  Postcolonial independence in this reckoning allowed the colonial sovereign to wash their hands of their colonies by ceasing to be sovereigns.  Ghana, of course, is the very exemplar of postcolonial sovereignty in Africa and the diaspora, and so represents the promises (and failures) of postcolonial sovereignty since Nkrumah.  For me the desire in neoliberal Haiti for someone besides the state “to make the state” helped explain why the miners in Ghana can simultaneously decry the destruction mining company activities have wrought and demand that the company give them jobs and be responsible to them.  I wondered how emphasizing this dimension of sovereignty might expand the notion of sovereign power beyond violence, domination, and the right to kill in a way that is less biopolitical/necropolitical than clientelistic.  In some cases, might clientelistic relations of sovereignty be less shadowy and more substantive than liberal ideals of abstract equality, rule of law, and transparency?

LCR: Absolutely. This is such a generative set of reflections, and I thank you very much for the gift of these thoughts as well. All of these scholars you mention have produced works of deep revelatory power for me, in their thinking of sovereignty, performativity, postcoloniality, belonging, and much else – Deborah Thomas, Yarimar Bonilla, Rive Jaffe, Chelsea Kivland, and yourself.  I am tempted to respond to the very important interventions that each of you has made, as well as how all of you have helped me to much better understand the worlds I discuss in Fires. However, I will resist that temptation, as such an answer would go on at considerable length. Again, the wish to not inundate you!

But please do let me say, in brief, that I resonate with much that you have already outlined in this very rich and insightful question. In the case of Ghana, the early Independence efforts often were to completely nationalize the mining industry. It wasn’t until the foreign financial pressures of the neoliberal reforms starting in the 1980s that the state privatized or largely privatized the industry for the long duration. In 1993, Ghana moved to a constitutional democracy – again, under foreign pressures, but also under grassroots and other organized efforts within the country. This shift, along with privatization, entailed a strong emphasis on rule of law, abstract ideals of equality, and transparency, in keeping with trends throughout much of the postcolonial, neoliberal world. These transformations have generated newly configured domains of freedom and constraint, with respect to opportunities for authentic national self-governance free from foreign economic and other interference. Yet it is so important for me to emphasize here, again, the continued vitality and centrality of the state in Ghana. It has not vanished or truly receded, as some of the literature would have it; it has merely shifted forms. What I call the shadow sovereign forms in the book are generated, in part, by the very design of the legal and political systems of the state, which remain crucial in many, many ways, which I hope come through in the book. The state is of great central importance – not least in efforts toward true economic and political independence from financial and political centers elsewhere. One reason I used the term shadow in shadow sovereigns was to honor and underscore the power and potency of the Ghanaian state. The reason I used sovereigns within the phrase was to emphasize the organized political power of these institutions that are not formally inscribed as state bodies but which nonetheless function as sources of sovereign-like power – and they provide forms of governance both earthly and spiritual. Here, shadow does not mean ersatz or substandard (such as in the phrase, “only a pale shadow of”). I try to drive this point home at the start and at the end of the book. Shadows here are authentic, true, powerful, and often furnish critical sites of sustenance, vitality, and resistance. These shadow sovereigns, operating in this earthly realm, also have vast, complex, and significant backing and interplays with spiritual forces that suffuse and animate them. 

You ask whether there might be other modes of sovereign power that are less rooted in violence, domination, and the right to kill, and more clientelistic, as you put it. It is a great question. In Fires, I try to show the ways in which sovereign power – including shadow sovereign power – functions in ways that are biopolitical, exceptional, and grounded in systems of values and politics that have a very great deal to do with social obligations and connectedness. The sovereigns in this study do provision, care for, and adjudicate, rather than merely punish, police, discipline, or exact violence upon people. In this way, sovereign power here, as in the other settings you mention, provides fertile terrain for powerful reformulations of resistance and political rebirth – through renegotiations of the proverbial city (or the law of the nation-state), the soul (or people’s interior relations to freedom and truth), and the sacred (or people’s senses of inviolable forms or tenets that are most precious to life and afterlife). This is the reason I emphasize the embodied struggles in the gold fields as serving as critical sites for revelatory reformulations of this classical philosophical triad. Even for philosophical insights of this nature, we all would do well, in my view, to closely consider the worlds that ethnographies or related arts strive to document and to render in their various forms. 

JBC: You use Walter Benjamin’s concept of “divine violence” in Fires of Gold, and this concept, drawn from his difficult but generative essay “Critique of Violence,” has been very important for me.  I wondered if you could talk more about the divine violence operative in the mining town Obuasi and how it differs from what Benjamin calls the “mythic violence” of legal and religious regimes. 

LCR: Oh yes, thank you for this. Here, again, could be another essay, but I briefly will say that the main point here, for me, in enlisting Walter Benjamin was to invoke the distinction between mythic and divine violence that you mention here. Mythic violence is found in all societies, and it merely serves to oppress, brutalize, or thwart freedom and liberation. This is so, even though mythic violence often masquerades as something otherwise. A key example of this, for Benjamin, would be legal orders, which for him are all born of mythic violence while bearing the pretenses of, say, abstract equality and rights that truly liberate and equalize. Divine violence is that which breaks through the structures that mythic violence inaugurates, generates, and sustains. These are forms of violence that do not partake of the perpetuation of oppressive or dominating legal orders or sovereign violence. For Benjamin, there is a false pretense of divine violence – as he puts it, “the sign and seal but never the means of sacred execution” – to sovereign violence. In my conjuring of Benjamin, I wished to draw inspiration from his distinction, in discerning what and how different sovereign, spiritual, and legal forms operate in the gold fields and elsewhere, and what meanings these various forms carry for those who inhabit these worlds. For example, in which ways might certain reconstituting processes be considered truly divine or liberatory, in the sense that Benjamin suggests in his distinction? I ask this even for domains that Benjamin’s essay would seem to preclude, such as actually existing or emergent sovereign and legal forms. Thank you for this excellent question. I hope that this is a satisfactory start to an answer.

Read J. Brent Crosson’s review of Fires of Gold here.

J. Brent Crosson is an Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Texas who focuses on secularism and religion in the Carribean.