Rainforest Capitalism
Power and Masculinity in a Congolese Timber Concession
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About This Book
Congolese logging camps are places where mud, rain, fuel smugglers, and village roadblocks slow down multinational timber firms; where workers wage wars against trees while evading company surveillance deep in the forest; where labor compounds trigger disturbing colonial memories; and where blunt racism, logger machismo, and homoerotic desires reproduce violence. In Rainforest Capitalism Thomas Hendriks examines the rowdy world of industrial timber production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to theorize racialized and gendered power dynamics in capitalist extraction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Congolese workers and European company managers as well as traders, farmers, smugglers, and barkeepers, Hendriks shows how logging is deeply tied to feelings of existential vulnerability in the face of larger forces, structures, and histories. These feelings, Hendriks contends, reveal a precarious side of power in an environment where companies, workers, and local residents frequently find themselves out of control. An ethnography of complicity, ecstasis, and paranoia, Rainforest Capitalism queers assumptions of corporate strength and opens up new ways to understand the complexities and contradictions of capitalist extraction.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Contents
- Note on Anonymity
- Note on Photography
- Prologue
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction. Thinking with Loggers
- Chapter One. Awkward Beginnings
- Chapter Two. Forest Work
- Chapter Three. Remembering Labor
- Chapter Four. Sharing the Company
- Chapter Five. Out of Here
- Chapter Six. A Darker Shade of White
- Chapter Seven. Cannibals and Corned Beef
- Chapter Eight. Men and Trees
- Chapter Nine. Women and Chainsaws
- Conclusion. Capitalism and Ecstasis
- Epilogue
- Notes
- References
- Index