‘With gold, it’s never over’. Remainders and the moral economy of artisanal mining in Burkina Faso

This article focuses on the work and sharing practices of gold miners in Burkina Faso as a case to highlight the importance of remainders in the artisanal mining economy. Through a continuous process of identifying valuable ores and discarding leftovers, miners create opportunities for the future reprocessing of remainders from past mining activities. This act of (re)processing remainders can become central, especially when specific techniques – in the case described here, the use of cyanide – enable the extraction of profits from matter that would otherwise be considered marginal. In small-scale mining, informal patterns in the organization of work and production, of profit sharing, and of economic transactions, tend to coalesce into moral economies that legitimize the participation of different actors, and that shape their interactions and mutual obligations. However, these moral economies are unstable and subject to change and contestation. The article describes how the introduction of cyanide-based processing transformed pre-existing practices and hierarchies of value, and how these transformations were closely associated with controversies over the ownership and use of gold ‘remainders’.