Work in the rainforest Labour, race and desire in a Congolese logging camp

Diss. doct. Sociale Wetenschappen

The present dissertation is the product of an ethnography of everyday life in and around the labour camps of a multinational logging company operating in the Congolese rainforest. It offers a first detailed account of the actual workings of a logging company and, thus, contributes to an ethnographic understanding of the realities of globalised capitalism and its particular manifestation as investments and activities in out-of-the-way places. The case of the CTI logging concession illustrates how multinational companies, as agents of globalisation, are not always the strong and powerful actors moulding their own contexts of intervention, largely disconnected from their immediate surroundings. On the contrary, the successive chapters reveal that the company?s strategies were often failing and its activities marked by doubts and uncertainties. These more vulnerable, insecure and fragile aspects of multinational corporations in action often get side-lined in a globalisation discourse built upon their supposed control. This is not to deny the real power and influence

Proefschrift tot het verkrijgen van de graad van Doctor in de Sociale en Culturele Antropologie