Albuquerque, Sara. Book Review, “Robyn d'Avignon. A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in West Africa

Abstract

Robyn d’Avignon, a scholar with broad interests in the history of natural resource governance and scientific research, has written a pathbreaking book that will be of interest not only to an academic audience but also to a broader public one. A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in West Africa is an impressive piece of scholarship that provides readers with a refreshing approach to African histories of science and technology. The book centers on African epistemologies and ontologies as they relate to the underground, mining, and geology. In doing so, the book provides an innovative decolonial framework that decenters traditional narratives about, for instance, twentieth and “twenty-first-century scramble[s] for Africa’s resources.” Focusing on Senegal, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, and Mali, d’Avignon uses historical, archaeological, and ethnographic data to reconstruct the history of ritual geology, “a set of practices, prohibitions, and cosmological engagements with the earth that are widely shared and cultivated across a regional geological formation” (5).