Description
Product ID: | 9781531503543 |
Product Form: | Paperback / softback |
Country of Manufacture: | GB |
Series: | Thinking from Elsewhere |
Title: | The Work of Repair |
Subtitle: | Capacity after Colonialism in the Timber Plantations of South Africa |
Authors: | Author: Thomas Cousins |
Page Count: | 320 |
Subjects: | African history, African history, Social and cultural anthropology, Industrial relations, occupational health and safety, Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography, Industrial relations, health & safety, Republic of South Africa |
Description: | Select Guide Rating The Work of Repair is an ethnographic examination of the intimate relationships between laborers in the timber plantations of postapartheid South Africa, in the wake of the HIV crisis and the contentious politics of nutrition. It explores how capacity is augmented as the wounds of history are embodied and modulated. In the timber plantations in northeastern South Africa, laborers work long hours among tall, swaying lines of eucalypts, on land once theirs. In 2008, at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, timber corporations distributed hot cooked meals as a nutrition intervention to bolster falling productivity and profits. But life and sustenance are about much more than calories and machinic bodies. What is at stake is the nurturing of capacity across all domains of life—physical, relational, cosmological—in the form of amandla. An Nguni word meaning power, strength or capacity, amandla organizes ordinary concerns with one’s abilities to earn a wage, to strengthen one’s body, and to take care of others; it describes the potency of medicines and sexual vitality; and it captures a history of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggle for freedom. |
Imprint Name: | Fordham University Press |
Publisher Name: | Fordham University Press |
Country of Publication: | GB |
Publishing Date: | 2023-06-06 |