The Work of Repair

"Cousins's focus on repair points to the regenerative capacity of hope amid consuming violence, vulnerabilities, and despair. Thoughtfully argued and meticulous in detail, this book highlights why cultures of interconnection, inclusivity, impurities, and repair in South Africa and elsewhere are key to convivial theorization in Anthropology and kindred disciplines."--Francis B. Nyamnjoh, University of Cape Town In the timber plantations in northeastern South Africa, laborers work long hours among tall, swaying lines of eucalypts, on land once theirs. In 2008, timber corporations distributed hot meals as a nutrition intervention to bolster falling productivity and profits. But life and sustenance are about more than calories. At stake is the nurturing of capacity across all domains of life 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, strengthen one's body, and 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. The ordinary actions coordinated by and directed at amandla do not obscure the wounding effects of plantation labor or the long history of racial oppression, but rather form the basis of repair. In this captivating ethnography, Cousins examines how amandla, as the primary material of the work of repair, anchors ordinary scenes of living and working in and around the plantations. The Work of Repair is a fine-grained exploration of relationships between laborers in South Africa's timber plantations. Offering a fresh approach to the existential, ethical and political stakes of ethnography in late liberal South Africa, the book attends to urgent questions of postapartheid life: the fate of employment; the role of the state in providing welfare and access to treatment; the regulation of popular curatives; the queering of kinship; and the future of custom and its territories. Cousins explicates the fragile techniques that constitute the work of repair: the effort to augment one's capacity in a way that draws on, acknowledges, and reimagines the wounds of history, keeping open the possibility of a future through and with others. Thomas Cousins is Clarendon-Lienhardt Associate Professor in the Social Anthropology of Africa at the University of Oxford.