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Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe
... Early codification of racial difference in the U.S. shaped White identity as a "declaration of racial purity" (Gotanda 1991:26). Discourses of White purity/cleanliness and dirty/contaminated racialized Others were employed throughout Europe's colonial empire (Burke 1996;Freidberg 2003;McClintock 1995;Newell 2020). ...
... Historically racialized logics of purity and contamination provide an important context to the ways that Burkinabès interpret organic's regulatory emphasis on purity and their own role in organic production. Racial ideologies that constructed Whiteness 8 as purity and Blackness as dirt and contagion (part of trans-Atlantic efforts to justify slavery and colonialism) were propagated throughout Africa (and the world) during the 20th century (Burke 1996, Freidberg 2003, Newell 2020, Thomas 2020, Zimring 2016, as illustrated by overtly racist soap advertisements and "civilizing" campaigns that framed Africans as dirty, but capable of being "cleansed" and even physically whitened by soap and Western civilization (Burke 1996). These racist framings had powerful consequences on urban space and residential segregation, and also impacted subjective 8 We capitalize both "Black" and "White" when referring to the racialized identities of people, to remind us that White, just like Black, is a socially constructed identity that should not be left invisible or naturalized; however, this crisp delineation of what constitutes a distinct socially constructed category of identity isn't so neat. ...
... Historically racialized logics of purity and contamination provide an important context to the ways that Burkinabès interpret organic's regulatory emphasis on purity and their own role in organic production. Racial ideologies that constructed Whiteness 8 as purity and Blackness as dirt and contagion (part of trans-Atlantic efforts to justify slavery and colonialism) were propagated throughout Africa (and the world) during the 20th century (Burke 1996, Freidberg 2003, Newell 2020, Thomas 2020, Zimring 2016, as illustrated by overtly racist soap advertisements and "civilizing" campaigns that framed Africans as dirty, but capable of being "cleansed" and even physically whitened by soap and Western civilization (Burke 1996). These racist framings had powerful consequences on urban space and residential segregation, and also impacted subjective 8 We capitalize both "Black" and "White" when referring to the racialized identities of people, to remind us that White, just like Black, is a socially constructed identity that should not be left invisible or naturalized; however, this crisp delineation of what constitutes a distinct socially constructed category of identity isn't so neat. ...
For decades, critical agri-food scholarship has sought to evaluate the outcomes of alternative agri-food systems such as organic. Two key critiques have emerged: the first focuses on the limitations of certification-based systems that rely on a neoliberal model of consumer concern; the second critique highlights the Whiteness of alternative food movements and the persistence of racial exclusions. In this paper, we draw these critiques together and extend them through an ethnographic case study of organic cotton in Burkina Faso, West Africa. We explore contradictions in the win–win–win discourse of organic cotton, which promises ecological sustainability, improved livelihoods for producers, as well as pure products for consumers. We argue there is an implicit prioritization of consumers within several organic cotton regulatory rules that focus on ensuring final products free of contamination from pesticide residues. We contend that these rules create difficulties for producers and obstacles for the expansion of sustainable agriculture. Further, the focus on “purity for the consumer” may actually reproduce and transmit (historically fraught and colonial) racialized imaginaries of purity. Some Burkinabè producers see organic as prioritizing purity for an imagined White consumer. Organic’s call to “get back to the dirt” also clashes with a cultural context where aspiration for development is often expressed as “getting out of the dirt.” This paper thus raises new questions about the implications of organic agriculture’s intense focus on purity for a) the full realization of the promise of organics and b) residual racial imaginaries embedded within the idiom of “purity” itself.
... A focus on commodities also links our analysis of the micropolitical economy of masculinity with the macropolitical economy of postwar Angola. As Timothy Burke (1996) argues, the meanings of goods, their social power to shape relations between people, and perceptions of need for particular commodities are part of historically constituted discourses of power that are related to the domination of capitalism. Large-scale legacies of colonialism, mission Christianity, historical dynamics of capitalism in the region, and recent dynamics of extractive capitalism shaped men's perception and use of goods in Huambo. ...
... These careers represented stability, education, and successful, modern urban living-and the men saw cars as part of that picture. As Burke (1996) argues, the style of an affluent class may be attractive even to people who are not a part of it. ...
In this article we use men’s changing investments in desired material objects as a window into the changing moralities underpinning masculinities in the wake of Angola’s civil war. Drawing on participant observation and life history interviews with middle-aged men working in informal commerce in the city of Huambo, we examine the roles of land, houses, and cars in the construction of different styles of masculinity. We argue that analyzing differences among men’s investments in these objects provides useful insights into how men construct multireferential masculinities in a contested postcolonial, postwar context in which questions of gendered cultural hegemony are contentious and complex. These masculinities map onto competing, yet overlapping, sets of moral values that rework preexisting gendered cultural forms and practices to cope with the social and economic consequences of the war and to express aspirations for disparate modernities.
... En rekke publikasjoner har påpekt at det var en sterk kobling mellom kolonialisme og ideer om renhet og såpe (Burke, 1996a;Hendrickson, 1996;McClintock, 1995). Jean og John Comaroff viser klart hvordan misjon var en aktiv pådriver i denne prosessen hvor afrikanere ble begrepsfestet som tilgrisede, møkkete individer. ...
... I denne konteksten er det signifikant at hygieniske produkter markedsført for afrikanere var aromatisk distinkt fra dem beregnet på den europeiske befolkningen. Produkter markedsført for afrikanske menn var preget av en sterk karbolsk lukt som var sansbar over en ganske stor avstand (Burke, 1996a). Såpeduften var slik et kompass som gjorde at settlere kunne ha en følelse av å orientere seg trygt i sosiale rom delt med afrikanere. ...
Sammendrag
I denne artikkelen argumenterer jeg for at luft og atmosfære
har stort analytisk potensial for studier av den koloniale arven
i dagens Sør-Afrika. Med utgangspunkt i bruken av såpe i helbredelsesritualer
blant zulusionister i Durban, Sør-Afrika, trekker jeg linjene tilbake
til viktoriatiden. Dette gjør jeg gjennom et arkivmateriale hvor
fokuset på helse og sykdom forankres i viktorianske ideer om luft
og atmosfære. Settlerbefolkningens opplevelse av et fremmed landskap
og fremmed folk blir koplet til ideer om forurenset luft og sykdom.
Å puste under enkelte atmosfæriske forhold var å inhalere problematiske
aspekter ved Afrika og afrikanere. Derfor ble bearbeiding av luftrommet
et betydningsfullt forebyggende helsetiltak som hadde andre effekter
enn de helsemessige. Såpe framstår i dette perspektivet som en atmosfærisk
teknologi som viser at forståelser av luft var med på å legge grunnlaget
for segregasjonspolitikken. Jeg konkluderer med at et fokus på luft
og atmosfære synliggjør at zulusionistenes helbredelsesritualer kan
tolkes som et uttrykk for en kreativ måte å manipulere settlerbefolkningens
rasisme.
... Se parece ser uma novidade que o cheiro das pessoas é um possibilitador -e limitador -da mobilidade social, não podemos esquecer de como o colonialismo construiu o cheiro como um dos marcadores sociais que delimitavam a raça e, por sua vez, era utilizado como um meio de desumanizar as pessoas. Em seu livro seminal para o campo, Timothy Burke (1996) nos mostra como o regime colonial no Zimbábue proibiu práticas tradicionais e introduziu itens considerados de higiene básica europeus de uma forma altamente racializada, indicando sabonetes com creolina para homens africanos, pois este seria o único produto capaz de realmente limpar aqueles corpos. De forma semelhante, Anne ...
A partir da experiência sensorial que Auerbach nos propõe ao decorrer da sua obra, intento, aqui, interpretar as realidades enfrentadas pelos seus interlocutores como fenômenos herdeiros da violência colonial portuguesa que teve lugar em território angolano. Desta forma, divido o presente ensaio em três seções. Na primeira parte, viso compreender como o tornar-se classe média em Angola é algo que reproduz em algum limiar as continuações do processo civilizador no mundo pós-colonial, especialmente ao pensar as técnicas de docilização dos corpos. Na sequência, o viver nas ruínas do colonialismo e no capitalismo selvagem, este último um termo caro para a autora, será o meu mote analítico. Por fim, exploro a necessidade de uma reflexão profunda e autocentrada dos nossos corpos em campo.
... On the other, Kerala is unique in terms of the impact of emigrant remittances from outside the country (which was beginning to be felt before liberalization) and transnational connections. Remittances were estimated to be 36 per cent of the Net State Domestic Product in 2016 (Luke 2018, 5). 4 Consumption has become an important focus of studies, especially in sociology and anthropology (see Appadurai 1988Appadurai , 1990Miller 1995Miller , 1998Burke 1996;Ong 1999;Osella and Osella 1999;Comaroff and Comaroff 1999;Lukose 2009;Trentmann 2016;Warde 2016). In the Indian, or the Global Southern, context, it is important to understand the role that consumption plays in rapidly modernizing societies. ...
Kerala is a well-recognized ‘model’ of human development in the world. In this article, I look at a crucial aspect of this development, which is often approached in a positivist fashion of statistical aggregation alone: consumption. Instead, there is a need to study the meanings that surround it. I delineate the many forces, particularly the new material infrastructure, that have driven consumption in the last three decades, especially the last one. With increasing integration into global market forces through migration and investment, and cultural imaginations, I show that there is a tectonic change in consciousness about consumption, marked by fantasies, desires, and, contrarily, feelings of excess and ambivalence. I argue that the non-market sector has also played an important role in consumption. There is an increasing generalization of certain ideas about consumption as well as disenchantments across classes. But critically, I contend, there are caste, class, and gender disparities in consumption as well as differences in the meanings attributed to it. Thus, consumption is a socially meaningful, but discrepant, space. This article is based on fieldwork conducted in a town in central Kerala, supplemented with quantitative data.
... They implied that human sociality is a discipline of drawing boundaries with nonhuman elements. The agents may have fallen back on reflexes hardened in the space of public health, contoured in colonial and postcolonial Africa by hygienist norms(Burke 1996; Le Cour Grandmaison 2014). Calls to discipline behaviours and observe sanitary rules have historically policed the border between civilisation and savagery and been taken up by a development industry of sensibilisation and conscientisation in sub-Saharan Africa. ...
This dissertation examines the ways in which the ‘truth’ about an outbreak of zoonotic disease stabilises through the labour of sampling animals. While scarcely any case of Ebola had ever been reported in West Africa, the deadliest epidemic to date started in 2013 in the southeastern region of Guinea called ‘Forest Guinea’. Since then, ecologists and virologists from Africa, America and Europe have been conducting the largest investigation into what some frame as the origins of Ebola: they are trying to establish a fuller picture of the processes by which the disease is maintained and infects humans in a place that has become known as one of its ‘hotspots’. During 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I closely tracked the Guinean staff of one of those foreign projects – local vets who professionally defined their role as préleveurs (‘samplers’ in English) – while they captured animals, took, and dispatched fluid samples, communicated about the risks of contact with bats, and disclosed the finding of a new species of Ebola virus in bat species. The social sciences have dismantled the idea of singular, hegemonic epidemic origins, and indicated that complex sociospatial conditions allow for epidemics to emerge. This dissertation adopts a different analytical angle and outlines the technological, epistemological, and affective consequences of framing microbiological research as a search for the origin of epidemics. It focuses on the economy of knowledge, epistemological labour, and ethical aspirations of animal préleveurs, whose work is to make a hotspot exist in Forest Guinea. By combining attention to history, the scientific literature and ethnographic fieldwork, I resituate animal sampling within a West African genealogy of asymmetrical extraction and conservation, which crosscuts the colonial sciences, interwar disease ecology, global health, outbreak preparedness, and the newer One Health agenda. At the core of this multifaceted sampling enterprise is an interdependence between anticipatory practices and forms of insecurity – political, economic, environmental. The thesis suggests that insecurity is normalised by hotspot investigations, and that associated social hierarchies, causalities and moralities inflect the local notion of responsibility for the epidemic. Ultimately, insecurity configures the production of evidence about the so-called reservoir of Ebola and leads the hypothesis of a bat origin to gain strength in Guinea. The dissertation chapters foreground the controversies, dissimulation practices, fear, and cynicism that the quest for epidemic origins elicits locally, even as it contributes to imposing a single narrative for disease causality. In so doing, I challenge a social science view that scientific claims become authoritative when the institutions and practices that manufacture them are socially recognised as trustworthy and legitimate, i.e., secure. Instead, insecurity is entangled in the material performances and ethos of préleveurs. Far from only producing scientific evidence for experts, their activity generates clues about Ebola’s origins for many people in Guinea and Africa more generally – with significant consequences for research priorities and prevention policies.
... When sweat has generated interest, it has, in fact, often done so indirectly, as "matter out of place" (Douglas 1966, 36), generally bundled indiscriminately with other forms of dirt and bodily odors constructed as requiring remediation (Corbin 1986;Willis 2018). From the 19th century onward, as hygiene and moral worth became intimately entwined (Burke 1996;Hunt 1999;Masquelier 2005), repressive hygienic regimes were established to discipline the poor in Victorian England (Porter 1998), colonial subjects across sub-Saharan Africa (Comaroff 1993), and Indigenous people in settler states (Povinelli 2006). These regimes were designed not only to clean the colonized body but also to craft moral subjects. ...
In Mozambique, class and gender have long produced sweating bodies entangled in hierarchies of care and labor. Today, the growing popularity of fitness is complicating the cultural politics of bodily substances, especially sweat. Challenging ideals of feminine propriety, new ways of sweating are fostering health‐conscious subjectivities and encouraging alternative ways of becoming and relating. As a bodily “thing,” sweat sits somewhat uncomfortably within posthumanist and neomaterialist efforts at decentering the human. But our understanding of matter's potentiality can be refined by an ethnography that apprehends sweat as a material‐semiotic thing, one that operates simultaneously as matter and as an index of transformation. [anthropology of sweat, fitness, workout ethic, bodily substances, materiality, semiotics, health‐conscious subjectivities, excretion, Mozambique]
... O e-mail de Victoria sobre Aníbal, parcialmente reproduzido anteriormente, incluía outros detalhes e sugestões interessantes que eu não posso compartilhar aqui em razão do contexto: a relação de confiança entre leitor e escritor é relativamente frágil, e a oportunidade para explicações posteriores é quase nula (mas 56 Cf. Burke (1996), McClintock (1995. sinta-se à vontade para entrar em contato por e-mail, ou me procure no Twitter: @jess_auerbach). ...
Da água ao vinho” explora como Angola mudou desde o fim da guerra civil em 2002. Seu foco está na classe média – definida como aqueles com uma casa, um carro e uma educação – e seu consumo, aspirações e esperanças para suas famílias. Parte-se da pergunta “o que está funcionando em Angola?” em vez de “o que está errado?” e faz uma escolha deliberada e política de dar atenção à beleza e à felicidade na vida cotidiana em um país que teve uma história incomumente conturbada. Cada capítulo enfoca um dos cinco sentidos, com a introdução e a conclusão provocando uma reflexão sobre propriocepção (ou cinestesia) e curiosidade. Várias mídias são empregadas – poesia, receitas, fotos, quadrinhos e outros experimentos textuais – para envolver os leitores e seus sentidos. Escrito para um público amplo, este texto é um excelente complemento para o estudo da África, do mundo lusófono, do desenvolvimento internacional, da etnografia sensorial e da escrita etnográfica.
... These MHM approaches risk building on a colonial legacy of the use of hygiene policies and discourses to disciplining those who present as not complying with colonial cleanliness and hygiene standards across African countries (Burke, 1993;Tamale, 2005). These approaches delegitimise and erase local experiences, disabling the opportunity to build upon women's experiential knowledge (Dombroski, 2015;Joshi et al., 2011;Kotsila & Saravanan, 2017) and practices that 'may be equally effective or even better suited to specific social, cultural or environmental contexts' (Lahiri-Dutt, 2014, p. 1164. ...
In contexts of limited access to urban infrastructures and restrictive cultural norms, managing menstrual waste has important sustainability implications and complicates the menstrual experiences of women. However menstrual waste management has remained largely under-researched. To address this research and policy-practice gap we combine postcolonial and African feminist scholarship with social practice theory to explore the socio-materialities of menstrual waste management in a global South context. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Lilongwe we provide a practice-based account of the different strategies followed by women to handle menstrual waste in a changing socio-material context (including changing absorbents, infrastructures, meanings, and interventions). We demonstrate that interventions normalising new types of disposable and reusable absorbents have not incorporated considerations for the implications related to reuse-disposal of new products. Such approaches pass on the responsibility for managing menstrual waste to women and leave them with no ‘right’ solution as they deal with the unequal infrastructural legacies in the city. We conclude by setting an agenda for research and policy: one that posits that the socio-environmental challenges presented by menstrual waste can be better accounted for by making the needs and desires of women central to the planning of water, sanitation and solid waste services.
... The ethical consumer's ability to find out where products come from, how they have been created and what they contain, charges these goods with the capacity to collapse the spatial and temporal separation between acts of production and consumption, so that consumers can imagine themselves in the world of producers. Products such as Lux soap in India or green products in Hungary allow momentary immersion into worlds that are framed either as Modern and advanced (Burke 1996;Cross and Street 2009) or as nostalgic spaces free of intrusive Western tastes and lifestyles (Pratt 2008). ...
In response to the failure of capitalism to serve all people’s needs, we witness a rise of talk of ethics in the corporate world and a growing movement for alternative economic practices. This chapter is concerned with anthropological responses to emerging trends in economic “ethicizing” by which actors codify, advocate or implement particular sets of ethics to create positive change. Ethicists develop agendas for improvement and realize new principles of production, work, trade and consumption. Anthropologists study the motivations and ideologies of ethicists, their embodied practices, and the social, material and political effects they produce. This strand of research complements anthropology’s concern with moral economies by engaging with fields of action in which ethics describe a professional category and specialized domain rather than a quotidian morality. The chapter focuses on three fields of inquiry into ethical practices: CSR and fair trade, ethical consumption, and social entrepreneurship.
... In either case, it appears that money and spatial advantages have the capacity to buy happiness. In other post-colonial societies, while the equation of purity with 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 F o r P e e r R e v i e w 11 superiority was a racist colonial invention (e.g., Burke 1996;McClintock 1995), in India, this equation preceded colonization (Lüthi 2010). Lüthi finds that white foreigners in South India are considered dirty. ...
This article explores the spatial marketing system in India. It highlights a case where market failure is institutionalized through the normalization of heterotopia in the consumption of gated communities (GCs). We build on the earlier work by Bargends and by Sandberg on spatial marketing systems to discuss the consumption of exclusive space. We find that the gated community leads to heterotopic relations, fantasized living and, the pursuit of identity through spatial purification. This research contributes to macromarketing research by offering three theoretical interpretations of our qualitative study of residents of a gated community in India. First, spatial inequality is found to be a defining process in this spatial marketing system. The creation of such disparities is a deliberate strategy by dominant consumers to 'other' the outsiders. This spatial segregation is seen as a market failure. Secondly, branded space emerges as a trope for decoupling with local lower class surroundings through a process of postcolonial mimesis. In the process of imitating the West, residents engage in self-captivity and voluntary seclusion to achieve spatial purification. Thirdly, we extend marketing systems theory by locating spatial purification-related processes and mechanisms at the heart of marketing systems formation and adaptive change.
... In Africa, the myth of femininity was constructed through specific colonial discourses that emphasised a Victorian moral logic through religion, education, and specific consumption practices (Stoler 1989;McClintock 1995;Burke 1996;Ochwada 2002;Mutongi 2007;Musila 2015;Berger 2016). In her article "Making empire respectable: the politics of race and sexual morality in 20th-century colonial cultures", Ann Stoler argues that the need to assert 'European dominance in the colonies' required a reinvention of European cultures locally (1989,634). ...
... Yet, I have been wary of this object, aware of the imperial legacies this brightly wrapped commodity carries. As I show elsewhere, soap smooths extractive research logics; its centrality to present-day global health projects recalls the 'gift' of soap brought to Africa via imperial projects that envisioned modern, hygienic, consumerist subjects (McClintock 1995;Burke 1996;Hunt 1999). Sunlight soap is one of the personal care products listed on Unilever East and West Africa's website, from which the epigraph to this essay is taken. ...
... 'From the outset', McClintock tells us, 'soap took shape as a technology of social purification, inextricably entwined with the semiotics of imperial racism and class denigration ' (2013, p. 212). In line with Burke (1996), McClintock shows how colonised subjects were framed as Other by their relationship to 'dirt' and their cleaning practices, and how efforts to bring 'civilisation' to colonised peoples were bound up in efforts to improve these practices, and thus their relationship to 'dirt'. Looking at contemporary soap adverts in South Africa, Ally (2013) shows how even now South African whites extol black South Africans to adopt their standards (i.e. ...
What is dirt, and how is it used in processes of Othering? This is the central theme of this opening, introductory chapter. The chapter brings together a number of theoretical approaches to dirt. In exploring the central role of dirt and dirt management to the civilising process, we (re)produce a particular sort of history of European relations with dirt – a history characterised as much by dirt as a site of distinction as by an apparent increasing aversion to the dirt of bodily exuviae. By bringing this into dialogue with a second sort of history of European relations with dirt, characterised by shifting ideas about illness and contagion, we explore the kinds of work that discourses about dirt do. Viewed together, it becomes clear that central to both histories are processes of Othering – of the dirty by those who define the dirty. This links to the third theme of the introduction which explores specifically symbolic dimensions of dirt, drawing Douglas’s idea of dirt as ‘matter out of place’ into dialogue with Kristeva’s idea of the abject. In layering a discussion of dirt as abjection upon dirt as distinction we come back to contagion, and the power of (re)producing self/other boundaries through dirt. Together, these tell a story of dirt as a site of power, and a tool used by those who define the dirty to oppress those they consider unclean.
... Signaling time spent on the self rather than in the service of others, beauty products pose a challenge to the "domestic virtue model" and its family-oriented ethic, emblematic instead of the "Modern Girl" and her "pursuit of consumption, romance and fashion" (Modern Girl Research Group 2009:9). Indeed, as Burke (1996) argues of Zimbabwe, the use of beauty products evokes a deep tension between allure and transgression, ambivalent moralities evoked in the accounts of the women interviewed. Some younger women told us they feared being conceived of as "manhunters" or prostitutes when using common beauty products such as skin whiteners, 4 hair extensions and lipstick, concerns which alternated with praise for those who did use them: "I admire her and I don't have any ill feeling about her. ...
This article explores logics of affordability and worth within rural Ugandan households. Through an analysis of how worth is ascribed to certain goods, from the morally ambiguous personal consumption of alcohol and beauty products to the “responsible” category of educational spending and sanitary pads, the article demonstrates how gender norms and anxieties are marked and sustained in the consumption practices of the household, constituting what is deemed necessary, affordable, and responsible. Moral obligation is differentially distributed between genders: women are deemed responsible for household expenditure, their personal consumption preferences constrained, whereas men are able to delimit a sphere of personal consumption separate from the household, with limited accountability to its moral requirements. The gendered nature of power relations is thus revealed both in the apportioning of moral duty and in the construction of affordability through which consumption is enabled.
... As Timothy Burke (1996) argues, bodily goods like toiletries, lotions, and shampoos "work on or through the body [to] function in one of the most intensely contentious aspects of modern identity" (4). Hygiene products are used to build personal identities, social bodies, and the bounds of femininity. ...
In the world of Nigerian beauty pageants, the bikini remains a fraught embodied symbol and aesthetic practice. Pageant affiliates, critics, and fans alike strongly debate the question of whether to include bikinis in these events. This article draws primarily from nearly a year of ethnographic observations of two Nigerian national beauty contests in 2009-2010 to show how various stakeholders used personal, domestic, and international frames about women’s bodies, and the bikini in particular, to bolster respectability. Through embodied respectability, women’s figurative and literal bodies were used to strategically situate propriety, social acceptance, and reputability for the self and the nation.
... 27). The concurrent rise of mass advertising and marketing both reflected and shaped demand and established a strict sex-role division that is still with us today (for a similar discussion in an African context, see Burke 1995). ...
... Anne McClintock (1995) has argued that through instilling routines of personal hygiene, and the marketing of British-manufactured soap, the management of cleanliness in newly colonised areas was a means of imposing social order and control. In colonial Africa advertising campaigns associated cleanliness with whiteness and 'civilization' and darker skins with dirt and 'backwardness' (Burke 1996). For example, an advertisement for Pears' ...
Book synopsis: Tens of thousands of families rely on au pairs to do everything from childcare and housework to elder care, pet feeding, and waiting at dinner parties. Perhaps because society largely sees them as privileged and well-educated young women, au pairs have been excluded from many of the recent discussions of migrant domestic labor. Both the United States and the United Kingdom put few regulations on au pairing: in the US, the government considers them “cultural exchange participants” and in the UK au pairs aren’t considered employees if they even so much as “learn about British culture from the host family.” The result is that au pairs now constitute one of the poorest-paid and least protected groups of workers. Through an examination of lived experiences, As an Equal? draws on detailed research to examine au pairs and the families who host them in contemporary Britain. The authors show families lean on au pairs under pressure to provide better childcare in a work environment that demands longer hours and offers little family support. This in turn increases a reliance of families on an exploited workforce, and so contributes to the wider political climate of economic austerity. As an Equal? will raise profound questions about the real value we place on childcare and domestic labor as well as the complicated position of women within the neoliberal economy.
... Medical anthropologists have long been interested in intersections and co-constitutions of healing traditions, especially how biomedical concepts and practices have been incorporated and debated in different societies, and how these have led to the modernization of 'traditional' therapies, medicalization, and reconfigured perceptions of illness, the body, and the self (see for example Burke 1996;Langford 2002;Scheid 2002). Similar processes, like the mobilization of psy concepts in the formation of wahm, are also part of the story I tell here, but only one part. ...
This article examines the emergence and constitution of a new affliction category in contemporary Egypt: wahm, meaning (self-)illusion, locally defined as the condition of being falsely convinced one is possessed by spirits called ‘jinn’, all the while exhibiting real possession symptoms. As I show, wahm transcends the domain of revivalist Islamic healing from where it originates by mobilizing and entangling Islamic and psy concepts and practices. It both exploits the local dichotomy of jinn afflictions/mental disorders and grows from the cracking of this binary. In this manner, wahm provides a new idiom for critiquing current therapeutic practices, for understanding suffering, and for analyzing modern life in today’s Egypt. Through the analysis of wahm, this article contributes to scholarly investigations of ontology and the emergence of diseases by moving the lens from biomedical categories to the terrain where biomedicine meets religious healing, highlighting not only intersections but also the new formations they engender.
... Methodologically, this has already been pioneered in the consumer studies literature through Arjun Appadurai's (1986) and Igor Kopytoff's (1986) seminal discussions of 'commodity biographies', with Sidney Mintz's (1986) Sweetness and Power and Timothy Burke's (2005) Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women providing more practical examples of what ethnographically rich studies of consumption can achieve. Although they focus only on commodities and make many contestable claims, and while it is never entirely clear how best to generalize from them, such studies demonstrate how market consumption plays out in concrete human lifeworlds in complex ways that most political-economic generalizations about aggregate consumption entirely fail to register. ...
A fundamental concern of all critical social theory has been relating economic action to socio-political action when explaining social change. Along with critical theories of socio-political praxis and critical theories of production and reproduction, critical consumer studies has at times sought to demonstrate how narrowly productivistic solutions to this problem can be updated or supplemented to fit better with observable historical events. However, consumer studies itself lacks conceptual coherency and is split between extending and rejecting major productivistic assumptions, making the wider significance of this literature difficult to identify. I argue that consumption and production are best understood conceptually as related moments in the material and symbolic circulation of value in circuits of market exchange, redistribution and reciprocity. Whether consumer action functions to reproduce anterior productive arrangements is a matter of historical contingency. The real benefit of consumer studies is the capacity to question and modify existing historical narratives, while serving also to generate its own insights. Consumer studies can help to systematically reveal the extent to which collective social action is patterned by class divisions, but it can also identify forms of collective association that do not reveal a basically class logic. Likewise, consumer action may reinforce the ‘distinction’ that Pierre Bourdieu has helped to theorize, but it can equally create the ‘mutuality of being’ of which Marshall Sahlins speaks. Moreover, consumer demand may indeed reproduce certain productive arrangements, as consumer critiques have always pointed out, but production is often a response to prior consumer demand, and rises or falls in relation to this. Instead of a priori assumptions about the manipulability of consumer demand, which make it easy to evade this enormous problem, situated analyses of specific fields of consumption are required that show how, when and where consumer action leads to reproduction or to real historical novelty.
... We now identify at least five distinct definitions of commodification described in the academic literature. These include: (D1) exchanges through which capitalism redefines something in terms of its extrinsic, measurable characteristics [14] [15] [16] [17]; (D2) exchanges that create or enlarge a commodity or consumer culture [18] [19] [20] [21] [22]; (D3) exchanges through which something "human" or "inalienable" becomes valued for its commodity exchange value in a market [23] [28]; (D4) exchanges through which a product becomes undifferentiated in a market setting [29]; and (D5) neoliberal and globalism exchanges motivated by the economic advantages of international trade [27] [30]. The most pronounced definitional inconsistencies exist between D2 (commodification as an increase in consumer culture) and D4 (commodification as exchanges in which products become undifferentiated). ...
Dans les années 1980, les syndicats sud-africains en plein essor ont été comparés à la génération montante de mouvements démocratiques qui s’attaquaient aux gouvernements autocratiques. L’industrialisation par substitution aux importations (ISI) a transformé les villes du Sud global en sociétés de consommation. Cet article se concentre sur la main-d’œuvre de l’industrie manufacturière de Durban et du KwaZulu-Natal. Il est frappant de constater qu’alors que les intellectuels radicaux espéraient que ces usines deviendraient des sites de mobilisation socialiste, les archives (pamphlets, essais photographiques et mémoires) révèlent à quel point les militants syndicaux étaient profondément imprégnés des évolutions de la société de consommation de l’apartheid. Les analystes déplorent aujourd’hui une nouvelle culture de l’individualisme et de l’enrichissement patriarcal au sein des syndicats contemporains, en contradiction avec leurs traditions radicales. En analysant la littérature grise et les archives produites par les syndicats, j’affirme que ces questions de mobilité sociale, de consommation et d’enrichissement patriarcal ont semé le trouble au sein des syndicats depuis leur création. Traduit de l’anglais par Françoise Blum, Camille Mathy, Ophélie Rillon et Elena Vezzadini.
Certain culinary practices are often interpreted as evidence of ‘economizing’ (a frugal use of available resources) or of ‘excess’ (a celebratory expenditure of resources for symbolic purposes). This article uses these categories as a way to interrogate analytical assumptions about materialism more generally. Drawing on ethnographic research from both rural Tanzania, and the contemporary suburban United States, it argues that various qualities of discernment, taste, and preference are not determined by the material affordances of foods, but rather that these judgements can be materialized in social and cultural practice. Cuisiner à l’économie, cuisiner à l'excès : matérialisation de la valeur dans la pratique culinaire Résumé Les pratiques culinaires sont souvent interprétées comme manifestant une recherche « d’économie » (par l'utilisation frugale des ressources disponibles) ou « d'excès » (par la dépense festive de ressources à des fins symboliques). Le présent article utilise ces catégories pour interroger plus généralement les hypothèses analytiques relatives au matérialisme. À partir d'une recherche ethnographique menée en Tanzanie rurale et dans une banlieue contemporaine des États‐Unis, il avance que divers aspects du discernement, du goût et des préférences ne sont pas déterminés par les disponibilités (affordances) matérielles des aliments, mais que ce sont plutôt ces jugements qui peuvent être matérialisés dans la pratique sociale et culturelle.
In 1995 Uganda adopted a new Constitution mandating parliament and local councils to include disabled members, elected by registered disabled people in each community. Consequently, Uganda has an unusually institutionalised disability movement, with over 45,000 disabled councillors and, theoretically, disabled people’s organisations in every village. The political position of ‘disabled person’ is closely tied to Uganda’s governing party, the NRM, as a structural client, encouraging a form of ‘quiet politics’ aimed at fostering relationships to bring about future opportunities rather than approaching government or NGOs as citizens demanding rights. This thesis uses an ethnographic study (based on eighteen months of fieldwork) of a disabled women’s organisation called DWG to investigate the effects in disabled people’s lives. With a focus on the social determinants of obligation, it expands critically on anthropological literature treating dependence as a mode of political action. DWG is based in a peri-urban market in Bunyoro, where the core members run small retail businesses. Members receive grants from government and NGO small business programmes, which form the overwhelming majority of support available to disabled people in Uganda. Through analysing the distribution of one grant, I detail the disciplinary effects produced: the programmes establish an idealised model of newly empowered (post-1995) disabled people as independent and self-sufficient. This advantages an elite group who present the desired financial behaviour, including some members of DWG. Disabled people who do not fit the behavioural expectations (particularly people living with mental health problems or intellectual disability) do not benefit. However, DWG's operations are not fully determined by powerful infrastructure or actors. While entitlement to business funding is judged on economic performance, obligations accruing to relationships within the group are based on long-term togetherness, especially co-residence, giving the group a gendered historico-spatial specificity. Chapters 4-6 look at elements of DWG sociality that exceed the model of self-sufficient businesspeople. Even the most financially successful members rely on long-term relationships providing care and (for deaf members) communication assistance based on linguistic community, repurposing disability movement-derived resources to foster them. In this space, obligations turn on what I call ‘claims in relationship,’ a concept that blends theoretical work on dependence, clientelism, and obligation. My interlocutors use two diverging discourses. One, characterised by the word ‘obulema’ [disability] is closely associated with legal structures; its usage is largely restricted to the political disability community. The other, using the term ‘abaceke’ [weak people], is more widely used, forming part of a moral system of provisioning in which people who live together accrue mutual obligations in misfortune. In chapters 6 and 7 I look at the differential distribution of these discourses. The second can be more inclusive, allowing partial identification with those excluded from mainstream disability sociality (especially ‘mad’ people). However, because it relies on non-systematic personal connection, this group's challenges are not thereby fed into the infrastructure or funded activities of the disability movement. Chapter 7 looks at problematic interactions between the discourses, which impact on the most excluded during land disputes, in the context of industrial sugar farming.
In January 2021, the ETHOS Research Center at Bayes Business School, along with the CRIS Research Center at Royal Holloway University of London, hosted an event entitled Decolonizing the Business School. Over 500 attendees participated, from all business disciplines, testifying to the strong levels of interest in this topic. Marketing was particularly active, with over 100 participants. In this article, I (Giana Eckhardt, one of the organizers of the event) speak with the marketing break out room facilitators–Russ Belk, Tonya Bradford, Susan Dobscha, Güliz Ger and Rohit Varman–in a wide-ranging conversation about what decolonization means to the field of marketing, and what marketing academics can do if they would like to explore these ideas further. First, we offer a brief introduction to decolonization. Also, a list of resources for the interested reader is presented as well as ideas for further exploration in this nascent domain at the end.
Fondée en 1840, la ville de Bulawayo témoigne du développement urbain et de l’évolution des cultures alimentaires en Afrique australe et en Rhodésie du Sud (actuel Zimbabwe). Au temps du Gouvernement Responsable de 1923, la ville compte une population très diverse et s’impose non seulement comme le centre économique de la colonie britannique naissante, mais aussi comme le lieu emblématique des relations complexes entre Noirs et Blancs qui caractérisent la période coloniale. En s’appuyant sur l’histoire de la cuisine et des habitudes alimentaires liées aux petites céréales africaines – sorgho, millet et rapoko –, cet article retrace le développement de pratiques alimentaires nouvelles à Bulawayo. Basé sur les Archives nationales du Zimbabwe et l’historiographie existante, il a recours à l’histoire de ces petites céréales dans l’alimentation des citadins pour repenser certains aspects des relations socio-politiques entre Noirs et Blancs dans les cultures urbaines africaines, du début des années 1920 à l’aube de la Fédération des Rhodésies et du Nyassaland en 1953. Contribuant à une historiographie des villes africaines en plein essor, cet article démontre aussi comment, à l’époque coloniale, l’histoire des relations sociales et des changements de consommation à Bulawayo peut être analysée au prisme de l’estomac.
The human body is a central entity and analytic within African life and Africanist scholarship. The source of perception and the seat of animation, of life, it grounds experience of the world while also providing a rich set of symbols from which humans draw in political, social, and religious life to create and communicate meaning. Livingston reviews approaches to the body as a key concept in Africanist scholarship, tracing regimes of bodily representation ranging from the deployment of bodily symbolism in ancient smelting furnaces to the hypervisibility of the black female body in the European colonial imagination. She discusses a welter of bodily experience, from the pain of childbirth and the vulnerabilities of illness and accident to the sensorium or the kinesthetic power of movement and dance. In the process, Livingston considers developments within the field of African Studies via the body.
Review of the book Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners, by Lynn M. Thomas.
In the light of the previous chapter, this chapter provides a further analysis of the second chimurenga by identifying and discussing a number of themes. It does so primarily in order to set a comparative basis for analysing the third chimurenga. Crucial in this regard is the relationship between guerrillas and villagers during the second chimurenga, as this speaks to the significance of the relationship between war veterans and occupiers during the fast track occupations (third chimurenga). One the key themes covered in the recent literature is spirituality, with an increasing move away from examining spiritual mediums and other traditional forms of spirituality, to an examination of the relationship between Christian missions, guerrillas and villagers. As well, in the Rhodesian countryside, a number of local patriarchal systems existed, which included chiefs in Native reserves and white farmers on commercial farmers. Whether intentionally or not, the very presence of male guerrillas challenged the authority of these patriarchs. Finally, in the context of patriarchy, the chapter considers the multi-faceted experiences of different groupings of women during the war of liberation.
This article analyzes how state power and authority were established and critiqued through the performative, material, and sensory characteristics of Harare's Criminal Magistrates’ Courts in Zimbabwe. Drawing on courtroom observations and interviews conducted with human rights lawyers and their clients between 2010 and 2018, this article shows how Zimbabwe's deteriorating political and economic situation after 2000 caused a decline of the material conditions in court. Lawyers and their clients played on this decline to emphasize how the state failed to display its authority. Simultaneously, these material conditions highlighted the ruling party's (ZANU‐PF) preoccupation with law's coercive rather than legitimating utility. A focus on material attributes, however, does not suffice in examining the ways in which court proceedings impose and challenge the authority of the law and of the state. The sensory dimensions of courtrooms also require attention. Within the courtroom, it was vital for actors to engage the visual, auditory, and—importantly—the olfactory reminders of the horrific conditions in police detention and prison. By doing so, lawyers and their clients reasserted and questioned not only the authority of law but also the control certain state actors exerted on and over the bodies and emotions of Zimbabwean citizens within legal spaces.
In this article, I examine how white supremacy is reproduced and circulated through advertising. I explore the shift from the racial and ethnic specificities of “multiculturalism” to the more open‐ended concept of “diversity,” which indexes difference in unspecific and nonthreatening ways. How diversity is represented in general‐market advertising and how it differs from multicultural advertising offers a window into white supremacy and the role of advertising in furthering its agenda. Advertising has long acted as a vehicle for white supremacy, and by analyzing diversity, there is something to be learned about the current work done by this medium. [race/ethnicity, advertising, media, diversity, white supremacy] En este artículo, examino cómo la supremacía blanca es reproducida y circulada a través de la publicidad. Exploro el cambio de las especificidades raciales y étnicas del “multiculturalismo” al concepto más abierto de “diversidad”, el cual cataloga la diferencia en formas no específicas y no amenazantes. Cómo la diversidad es representada en la publicidad de mercado general y cómo difiere de la publicidad multicultural ofrece una ventana a la supremacía blanca y al rol de la publicidad en avanzar su agenda. La publicidad ha actuado largamente como un vehículo para la supremacía blanca, y al analizar la diversidad, hay algo para ser aprendido sobre el trabajo actual realizado por este medio. [raza/etnicidad, publicidad, medios de comunicación, diversidad, supremacía blanca]
This study examines how Anglophone urban elites in 1960s metropolitan Cameroon negotiated local and global ideas about culturally constructed forms of “natural” black beauty. Formally-educated Christian urbanites, such as freelance female journalists, who often worked as civil servants, sought to discipline women’s bodily practices and emotional expressivity in order to regulate the boundaries of perceived feminine respectability and to define a woman’s “natural” beauty, a descriptor with both internal and external implications. The language they used included both local terms such as nyanga , a Cameroonian Pidgin English word for varied ideas about beauty and stylishness, and standard English terms. This specific use of language illustrates the hybridity of understandings of natural beauty and bodily comportment, painting a distinct African imagery denoting the social progression of black Cameroonian elite subcultures.
This article offers a multimodal discourse analysis of the representation of masculinity and its relation to femininity in Destiny Man, a popular South African magazine for men. The approach taken looked at the content in the magazine and identified themes that were present in most of the issues. Through the lens of hegemonic masculinity and feminism, discursive practices that Destiny Man employs when discussing issues of gender relations are explored. Furthermore, these discursive practices are also considered in the context of race in post-apartheid South Africa. To understand how women are spoken about and represented in the man-targeted magazine, three articles and five images published in the eight 2014 issues were analysed using a multimodal text analysis (Lindy). We conclude that the discourses presented in the magazine tend to portray women as needy, emotionally dependent and possessing limited agency in relationships. We argue that these portrayals have implications for man/woman relations in contemporary South Africa and require a rethinking in order to advance both feminist and masculinity studies.
Across the Global South, the realities of urban informality are changing, with implications for how we understand this phenomenon across economic, spatial, and political domains. Recent accounts have attempted to recognise the diversity of informality across contexts and dimensions, as well as its everyday lived realities. Reviewing key debates in the sector, and drawing upon the new empirical studies in the papers presented here, we argue for a shift away from seeing urban informality narrowly as a setting, sector, or outcome. We suggest that reconsidering informality as a site of critical analysis offers a new perspective that draws on and extends political economy approaches, and helps us to understand processes of stratification and disadvantage. We seek to highlight the significance of the informal-formal continuum at the same time as challenging this dichotomy, and to explore emerging theoretical and empirical developments, including changing attitudes to informality; the increasing salience of agency; and informality as strategy both for elite and subaltern groups. © 2019, © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Engaging the ‘method of connective comparison’, this article examines linkages between consumer culture and political debates in apartheid South Africa and early postcolonial Kenya. It does so by considering the history of skin lighteners, commodities that were both common and controversial. Largely unnoticed by commentators at the time, the growth of a black consumer market for skin lighteners in Kenya was tied to the earlier emergence of such a market in South Africa. This history also reveals how, in both countries, matters of consumer culture and anti-racist politics were often refracted through the prism of the United States.
With this chapter, I shift to examine how solutions are framed in MHM. Many MHM proponents draw on discourses of human rights to conceptualize a menstrual-friendly world as one where every girl is enabled to care for her menstruating body with “dignity.” In this chapter, I explore this frame by analyzing the materials of MHM organizations as well as the gray and scholarly literature to reveal how the MHM-human rights link relies on a fundamental social construction of (female) bodies as dirty and, thus, shameful. My complaint is not with this general deployment of the human rights frame, but with how MHM’s human rights discourse rests upon a unidimensional notion of dignity that subscribes to a standard of cleanliness rife with gendered, racialized, and classed meanings. And so, the quest for the means of menstrual care becomes a quest for “protection”—against the body that, if not contained, invites ridicule, a frame that fails to challenge institutions (both material and cultural) to imagine a view of the body that is truly agentic and profoundly liberatory.
How is wealth communicated visually and how might a post-feminist sensibility intersect with wealth? This article examines the Instagram profile of Irene Major, a self-styled social celebrity and an apparently super-rich woman living in England. Born in Cameroon, Major migrated to the U.K. where she worked as a fashion model before marrying Sam Malin, a Canadian oil tycoon. Major’s online profile presents us with a fascinating figure who celebrates extreme wealth via a spectrum of social media communications. This performance of wealth is relevant to broader debates about the links between race, gender, class and wealth not only in the U.K., but also to those regarding these links in a globalised and mediated world. The article traces three key narrative themes in the @irenemajor Instagram profile with particular reference to critical thought on the intersection of race, gender and class in the self-representation of super-wealth. It concludes by considering how a post-feminist sensibility intersects with the visual mediation of wealth.
The chapter provides an overview of historical studies on African masculinities published mainly in English since the 1990s by looking at the following themes: conceptual issues like multiple masculinities and hierarchies within them; Africa's flexible gender systems; the legacy of the African big man; the colonial remaking of African men through missionary societies, education, and wage labor; urban gangs; intersections of gender, age, and state; gendered development; postcolonial interventions and anxieties; and sexualities. Useful methodologies are discussed and suggestions offered for further research.
This paper assesses research from cultural anthropology, archaeology, geography, and sociology to define social science concepts relevant to climate change drivers and the factors that influence the effectiveness of mitigation and adaptation strategies. The paper presents significant ways in which these four social science disciplines—often underrepresented in governmental and inter-governmental assessments of climate change—address demography, economy, politics, social stratification and inequality, technology, infrastructure, and land use as key factors driving climate change. The paper details how these factors interact dynamically over space and time. Governance structures, social and institutional contexts, past decisions, existing infrastructure, consumption, and production are key elements in mitigation and adaptation processes; and social, political, technological, and economic factors often produce unintended, unanticipated consequences. Overall, these four social science disciplines highlight multi-tiered, multi-centric approaches and governance structures that encourage trust, agency, and cultural and historical relevance.
Branded as “Africa's first luxury perfume”, the Scent of Africa perfume is a “scented declaration of progress”. Particularly fascinating is the commercial advertisement for the perfume, which I argue to be an “Afropolitan Imagineering” project that is intended to signal Africa's rise and its new association with global cosmopolitanism. At first glance, the Scent of Africa perfume advertisement seems to point to the ways in which Imagineering projects can reproduce colonial discourses about Africanness. However, in this article, I suggest that we complicate the advertisement and examine its subversive potential to decentre whiteness and celebrate Africanness while writing Africa into the world. Despite this subversion, I conclude that African worlding practices should disinherit the familiarity of Eurocentric geographic determinism that is embedded in Afropolitan Imagineering and instead become informed by afro‐futuristic imaginings and disidentification politics.
From the inception of colonial film-making in British West Africa in the early 1930s, dirt and the cinema were closely connected. Numerous educational movies were produced to show Africans the economically, physically and morally degrading consequences of “dirty habits.” By the early 1940s, the Colonial Office had come to realise that, within the cinema spaces created by mobile health units across Africa, intended audiences processed images and messages through their own aesthetic, spiritual, moral, economic and political value systems. These systems exceeded colonial projections and defied assimilation into colonial categories of dirt. This article focuses on the complexity of intended audiences’ responses to the simple ideological formula of colonial health and hygiene films. It argues that the presence of local aesthetic tastes and values in media archives on public health and hygiene in colonial Africa represents a vital space of mediation that must be considered alongside film content and film-makers’ intentions.
This article examines the state of middle-class black South African masculinity in the postapartheid era as presented in Destiny Man, a popular lifestyle magazine targeted at accomplished, stylish, and affluent black men in South Africa. The magazine offers a blend of compelling and relevant business and lifestyle content, including articles on fashion, grooming, sport, technology, and motoring. This article’s focus on consumerism, fashion, and masculinity as represented and featured in the magazine offers a vital contribution to fashion studies in general and to the African diaspora’s dress sense in particular, as well as to the contemporary intersections of wealth associated with masculine identification Articles published in the 2014 issues of the magazine were selected for an in-depth multimodal discourse analysis of how factors such as fashion, access to economic resources, status, and wealth play a significant role in masculine black identity formation. Visuals were also analysed to understand the representation of black middle-class men in the magazine. The findings indicate that Destiny Man’s characterization of middle-class black South African masculinity is based on the acquisition of material goods, on perceptions of power and on the ability to transition into formerly white-only spheres.
Waste sullies, physically and morally, polluting people and places, and defining or altering their position within social and spatial hierarchies. Given this polluting quality and the moral charge of the idiom of pollution, waste and its distribution are indicative of how places are imbued with moral judgment and at the same time waste illustrates how places themselves can become morally polluting. In the context of a waste crisis that followed the Tunisian Revolution of 2011, it is argued here that an attention to waste as material and symbolic category demonstrates the recursive relationship between materials, people, their thoughts and actions, in the moralisation of place. Examining this waste crisis in terms of a Tunisian moral geography of waste, which was established under colonialism and labels certain people and places as clean and dirty, reveals the dynamic and historically contingent nature of moral spaces and depicts them as sites for socio-spatial struggles that in themselves illuminate the revolution in novel ways. Finally, it is concluded that the polluting quality of waste spilled over the boundaries of Tunisia’s moral geography to morally sully the whole time period and political process of Tunisia’s transition.
Inspired by de Laet and Mol’s classic article on the Zimbabwean Bush Pump and Peter Redfield’s revival of fluidity as a central characteristic of humanitarian design, this paper argues that many humanitarian technologies are characterized not so much by fluidity as by stickiness. Sticky technologies lie somewhere between fluid technologies and Latourian immutable mobiles: They work precisely because they are mobile and not overly adaptable, yet they retain some flexibility by reaching out to shape and be shaped by their users. The concept is introduced through a detailed study of Plumpy’nut®, a peanut paste for therapeutic feeding that is materially sticky – much firmer than a fluid, yet still mutable – as well as conceptually sticky. ‘Stickiness’ can have wide utility for thinking through technology and humanitarianism.
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