Rainforest Capitalism

Congolese logging camps are places where mud rain fuel smugglers and village roadblocks slow down multinational timber firms; where workers wage wars against trees while evading company surveillance deep in the forest; where labor compounds trigger disturbing colonial memories; and where blunt racism logger machismo and homoerotic desires reproduce violence. In <i>Rainforest Capitalism</i> Thomas Hendriks examines the rowdy world of industrial timber production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to theorize racialized and gendered power dynamics in capitalist extraction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Congolese workers and European company managers as well as traders farmers smugglers and barkeepers Hendriks shows how logging is deeply tied to feelings of existential vulnerability in the face of larger forces structures and histories. These feelings Hendriks contends reveal a precarious side of power in an environment where companies workers and local residents frequently find themselves out of control. An ethnography of complicity ecstasis and paranoia <i>Rainforest Capitalism</i> queers assumptions of corporate strength and opens up new ways to understand the complexities and contradictions of capitalist extraction.