The Ethics of Excess: Consumption, Destruction, and Their Limits in Artisanal Mines in Katanga Province, Democratic Republic of Congo
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper is an attempt to understand why young men working as artisanal diggers or creseurs engage in displays of waste and excessive consumption in spite of the precarious nature of their material existence. My research based on ethnographic fieldwork among artisanal miners tries to go beyond recent scholarly approaches that view precarity in the lives of workers as merely a symptom or effect of a neoliberal social order. I show how economic uncertainty in the lives of youth working is sublimated in violent acts of indulgence and excess that depict the workings of the moral economic order underpinning artisanal mining in Katanga. Through an inquiry on the moral order of life in the mines I try trace how value is attributed to human life and social relations through exuberant displays of consumption in bars as well as in moments of crisis when the walls of the mines swallow miners. I view moments of ecstatic consumption and destructive loss as tournaments of value that serve to delimit the norms and ethics of social life in the lives marginalized youth.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".