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The Company Oracle: Corporate Security and Diviner-Detectives in Angola's Diamond Mines

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 June 2017

Filipe Calvão
Filipe Calvão*
Affiliation:
Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva (IHEID)
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

In 1957, the security force of Angola's colonial diamond mining company recruited African diviners to help them solve a case of diamond theft in Lunda. This event reveals a peculiar convergence of divinatory practices with techniques of corporate surveillance in Lunda's political economy of security. In their overlapping features of secrecy and control, divination and corporate security can be understood as historically aligned evidentiary practices, or what I call “corporate divination.” By examining divinatory rituals in tandem with the “occult” apparatus of corporate surveillance, and the figure of a colonial sorcerer-detective renowned for his “divinatory” prowess, I ask how such seemingly opposed modes of knowledge production eroded or shored up colonial rule. The cultural significance of divination within the context of a mining company, I suggest, exposes the conditions under which a colonial corporation appropriates the social world in which it intervenes, and conversely, the cultural resources that potentially shape or undermine corporate life in a colonial context.

Keywords

surveillancesecrecydivinationcorporationsecuritycolonialismminingAngolaAfrica
Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 59 , Issue 3 , July 2017 , pp. 574 - 599
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2017 

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