“Looking for life”: sustaining livelihoods and life in artisanal gold mining in Bondo, Western Kenya

In this article we explore how artisanal gold miners in Western Kenya “look for life” in a landscape where precarity is not exceptional but part of everyday life. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with artisanal gold miners and participant observation, we examine how miners sustain both their livelihoods and lives whilst navigating precarity through relational, financial, practical, material and cosmological interventions in an agentive gold-mining landscape. We demonstrate how the phrase “looking for life,” which they use to describe their reasons for being artisanal miners, reflects more than the pursuit of livelihoods. It embodies an ongoing relational pursuit of crafting a viable life beyond mere survival. We argue that such viability is not a fixed economic metric but a fluid and relational state that is constantly recalibrated through the interplay of economic aspirations, social networks, skills, material conditions and cosmological forces that sustain livelihoods and life.