How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet

Description

We 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. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Copyright Table of Contents Foreword by Thomas G. Andrews Acknowledgments Introduction: The Fragility of Work by Sarah Besky and Alex Blanchette Part 1. The Ends of Work Chapter 1. Exhaustion and Endurance in Sick Landscapes: Cheap Tea and the Work of Monoculture in the Dooars, India by Sarah Besky Chapter 2. The Concentration of Killing: Soy, Labor, and the Long Green Revolution by Kregg Hetherington Chapter 3. Making Monotony: Bedsores and Other Signs of an Overworked Hog by Alex Blanchette Part 2. Labor Struggles Chapter 4. The Job of Finding Food Is a Joke: Orangutan Rehabilitation, Work, Subsistence, and Social Relations by Juno Salazar Parreñas Chapter 5. The Heat of Work: Dissipation, Solidarity, and Kidney Disease in Nicaragua by Alex Nading Chapter 6. Metabolic Relations: Korean Red Ginseng and the Ecologies of Modern Life by Eleana Kim Chapter 7. How Guinea Pigs Work: Figurations and Gastro-Politics in Peru by María Elena García Chapter 8. Industrial Materials: Labor, Landscapes, and the Industrial Honeybee by Jake Kosek Part 3. Futures of Work Chapter 9. Cultural Analysis of Microbial Worlds by John Hartigan Jr. Chapter 10. Rhapsody in the Forest: Wild Mushrooms and the Multispecies Multitude by Shiho Satsuka Chapter 11. Kamadhenu’s Last Stand: On Animal Refusal to Work by Naisargi N. Dave References List of Contributors Index