Geological sores: minerals, toxicities, and rumors in DR Congo

With a growing scholarship on post-industrialism, an ethnographic view about industrial mining industry in DR Congo remains largely absent. This article takes the immediate surroundings of an industrial mine, with its blast rhythm and chemical reagents that spill over from its boundaries, as an object of ethnographic attention. It investigates how exuding fumes create an everyday shaped by nervousness and shaping rumors. Drawing from the asymmetries of knowing that arise when living in toxic worlds, this article thinks with extractive landscapes through the notion of a sore. From this vantage point, rumors and accusations not only contextualize extraction, but keep geological sores open by refusing them from being sealed. This article tracks colonial attempts to ridden itself from sores to the cumulative deepening of extractive processes into postcolonial times in which hyper-industries and chemical proliferations are met with suspicions.