Feminist political ecologies of extraction: Spirits,bodies,and embodied small-scale mining practices in Ghana

Abstract

This article examines the mutual spiritualization of biophysical entities (e.g., ores and rivers) and biological materials (e.g., menstrual blood and semen) and implications for gendered extractive practices. Drawing from ethnographic narratives from Ghana's small-scale miners, I explore the spiritual meanings attached to orebodies and human biological materials, as they create differences in mining spaces and subjectivities. By engaging with insights from feminist political ecologists, I demonstrate that gendered extractive spaces are intertwined with how people view and understand extractive materials. The article calls for deeper engagement with complex views of entities to better account for how spiritual ontologies are constituted in the production of gendered mining spaces and divisions of labor. Such an approach will help illuminate other processes that lead to inequalities between men and women and dispel notions around the naturalness of gendered extractive practices through an illustration that such practices are products of social construction, but in articulation with how people understand the workings of invisible entities.