Article ID: CBB860117991

The Company Oracle: Corporate Security and Diviner-Detectives in Angola's Diamond Mines (2017)

unapi

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.

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Authors & Contributors
Cleveland, Todd
Varanda, Jorge
Pereira, Hugo Silveira
Amaral, Isabel
Andrews, James T.
Ashby, Jack
Journals
História, Ciências, Saúde---Manguinhos
Agricultural History
Archives of Natural History
British Journal for the History of Science
Centaurus: International Magazine of the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology
HOST: Journal of History of Science and Technology
Publishers
Yale University
Universidade de Lisboa
Duke University Press
Reaktion Books
Iowa State University
Springer International Publishing
Concepts
Colonialism
Science and society
Indigenous peoples; indigeneity
Portugal, colonies
Agriculture
Public health
People
Zilsel, Edgar
Allport, Morton
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
20th century, early
20th century, late
21st century
18th century
Places
Angola
Mozambique
Portugal
Africa
Kazakhstan
Australia
Institutions
United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
Royal Society of London
United States. Central Intelligence Agency
United States. Department of Defense
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