Fires of Gold

"Lauren Coyle Rosen’s compelling ethnography of a Ghanaian gold-mining city centers on the value of gold.  But, as in those early modern mercantile encounters, it is also about the very logics of religion and ritual that place conflicting understandings of the value of exchange at the center of political struggles. Fires of Gold masterfully theorizes the dynamics of “liberalization,” which have occurred not just in Ghana but across the world since the late 1980s, as altered early modern ideas about the free market have reformed postcolonial welfare states."

— Religiology

"Fires of Gold remains a dense, compelling and well-constructed ethnography that enriches the growing literature in the anthropology of resource extraction and uses an entry point on mining-related conflicts to bring together issues of labor struggles and existential precarity, spiritual controversies and religious change, political authority under constant contestation and redefinition, all ultimately shaping the uncertain future of a bustling but crisis-ridden one-company town."

— Cahiers D'études Africaines

"Coyle Rosen convincingly describes the flattening of sovereignty between a diversity of actors in Obuasi that parallels a conflictual verticalisation of spiritual authorities spurred by the growth in monotheist practice. Ghana’s praised success as a liberal democracy should be read in the context of the spiritual and pragmatic violence that reshapes the state in what the author describes as ‘a re-spiritualization, or re-enchantment, of sovereignty and political life.'"

— Journal of Modern African Studies