Gold Walks Like a Snake: Fourth MVDC Research Seminar 25 October

This paper explores the analytical and vernacular use of analogy to think through the similarities, resonances and relations between different technical activities and domains. I present an ethnographic comparison of hunting and mining techniques practiced by Gbaya in Cameroon to draw out the spatial relations of movement and fixity common to both practices. I tease out analogies between animals, gold as well as speech and luck, to show how they all follow the same “path”-like structure enacted in techniques. From this, I argue that hunting and mining are both techniques that operate through analogy, and which have been analogically related to each other through ritual practices.

Dr Rosalie Allain is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford. She holds a BSc in Social Anthropology from the LSE and MA in Material and Visual Culture from UCL. She completed her PhD at UCL in 2021, for which she received the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Radcliffe-Brown Sutasoma Award for research of potentially outstanding merit, and is a co-founder of the new Centre for the Anthropology of Technics and Technodiversity at UCL. Her research engages with the study of technology, resource extraction, cosmology and economic life in Cameroon.