2019. School for Advanced Research (SAR) Press. Co-edited with Alex Blanchette (Tufts University)

Winner of the 2021 Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Prize

In India, a prolific cow suddenly refuses to give milk.  In the U.S. heartland, a factory-farmed sow pounds her head violently against the bars of her pen.  In Malaysia, orangutans are forced to learn how to earn their daily meals. In rural Paraguay, indigenous crops are eradicated to make room for a monoculture of soy. In Nicaragua, sugarcane cutters are dying from exposure to heat every day.

These cases raise questions about the changing participants, values, and types of labor in contemporary life.  They ask us to re-think who (or what) is included within an anthropology of work. Drawing on such examples, “How Nature Works” initiates a new approach to critical labor scholarship, one that is attuned to a moment when the planet is wracked with both environmental damage—from climate change to mass-extinction—and economic turmoil—in the form of austerity, industrial intensification, and generalized job loss.

Anthropologists and our intellectual kin have long studied conditions of work, seeking to bring attention to the exploitation and thwarted aspirations of laborers. However, few scholars systematically question the value and necessity of work, nor do they ask why labor, especially in contemporary capitalist societies, has become central to defining what it means to be human (and non-human). The chapters in this book offer divergent and experimental attempts to both re-think the meaning of human work, to re-define how we can study work in its broadest sense. This collection thus highlights the importance of ethnography for developing an approach to life amidst degradation, in ways that are not so heavily determined by human labor.