Diamonds and Plural Temporalities

Along the Sewa, Sierra Leone’s main river, the underwater search for diamonds coexists with the artisanal extraction of building materials and precious metals such as sand, stone, and gold. There are numerous and substantial differences between these various mining activities, but one aspect is shared by all miners: the need to earn money – more specifically, “fast money” - with which to escape poverty, or improve their own status. This paper shows how miners’ ideas about “fast money” are key to understanding temporal perceptions of resources, highlighting a temporal economy based on the articulation of different modes of production. Various kinds of temporalities as well as different rhythms and cycles are at stake in this mining context. This paper explores this multiplicity and endeavours to explain the emergence of accelerated temporalities. By examining and comparing different kinds of extractive activities, this paper argues that artisanal diamond mining can be seen as a transformative practice that seeks to accelerate the encounter between a variety of rhythms and temporalities. To this end, this paper highlights the layers of processes occurring on different time scales: from the long-term geological processes of diamonds to the mid- and long-term historical and cultural processes that characterise the specific mining sites where I carried out my fieldwork between 2008 and 2016.