Published by University of New Mexico Press
Winner of the 2021 Society for the Anthropology of Work (SAW) Book PrizeWe now live on a planet that is troubled—even overworked—in ways that compel us to reckon with inherited common sense about the relationship between human labor and nonhuman nature. In Paraguay, fast-growing soy plants are displacing both prior crops and people. In Malaysia, dispossessed farmers are training captive orangutans to earn their own meals. In India, a prized dairy cow suddenly refuses to give more milk. Built from these sorts of scenes and sites, where the ultimate subjects and agents of work are ambiguous, How Nature Works develops an anthropology of labor that is sharply attuned to the irreversible effects of climate change, extinction, and deforestation. The authors of this volume push ethnographic inquiry beyond the anthropocentric documentation of human work on nature in order to develop a language for thinking about how all labor is a collective ecological act.
Subjects: Anthropology
ContentsForeword Thomas G. AndrewsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Fragility of Work Sarah Besky and Alex BlanchettePart One. The Ends of WorkChapter One. Exhaustion and Endurance in Sick Landscapes: Cheap Tea and the Work of Monoculture in the Dooars, India Sarah BeskyChapter Two. The Concentration of Killing: Soy, Labor, and the Long Green Revolution Kregg HetheringtonChapter Three. Making Monotony: Bedsores and Other Signs of an Overworked Hog Alex BlanchettePart Two. Labor StrugglesChapter Four. The Job of Finding Food Is a Joke: Orangutan Rehabilitation, Work, Subsistence, and Social Relations Juno Salazar ParreñasChapter Five. The Heat of Work: Dissipation, Solidarity, and Kidney Disease in Nicaragua Alex NadingChapter Six. Metabolic Relations: Korean Red Ginseng and the Ecologies of Modern Life Eleana KimChapter Seven. How Guinea Pigs Work: Figurations and Gastro-Politics in Peru María Elena GarcíaChapter Eight. Industrial Materials: Labor, Landscapes, and the Industrial Honeybee Jake KosekPart Three. Futures of WorkChapter Nine. Cultural Analysis of Microbial Worlds John Hartigan Jr.Chapter Ten. Rhapsody in the Forest: Wild Mushrooms and the Multispecies Multitude Shiho SatsukaChapter Eleven. Kamadhenu’s Last Stand: On Animal Refusal to Work Naisargi N. DaveReferencesContributorsIndex