This week, Guillaume Vadot, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Norbert Elias Centre (EHESS, France) is answering our questions.
Subject of my thesis :
My thesis offers a comparative ethnography of three industrial plantation companies in Cameroon. In this central Africa country, these cover huge surfaces dedicated to the production of Palm oil, sugar, rubber, tea or bananas. They are also the biggest employers after the state, a situation which tended to strengthen during the 2010s through the signing of new land occupation contracts. The survey, carried out between June 2013 and January 2018, combined direct observation of work and places of life with numerous interviews (n = 252), as well as the examination of vast corpus of documentaries and a photographic work. The manuscript is organized in two parts. The first, “Living and working on an industrial plantation”, is devoted to the study of the workforce (all statuses and all categories), by crossing the sociology of the popular classes, work and employment. The second part, “The Large Plantation as a Singular Land of Politics”, looks at the conflicts and bureaucratization processes that form the local roots of the state.
Why this subject is interesting to me and to the community:
In this month of October 2020, I had the joy of receiving the “Africa and Diasporas” thesis prize, which is awarded every two years to two young doctors in social sciences specializing in African studies. The price includes a grant to enable the thesis to be published in book form.
When I started my PhD, I was keen to bring to life a questioning that I had forged during a thesis on small cotton producers in northern Cameroon. It seemed to me that the study of politics in Africa, profoundly renewed and enriched over the past twenty years, had somewhat abandoned the observation of interactions and spaces linked to work and production, when the latter in fact constitute key sites for the genesis of politics and the formation of the State. I return to this in the introduction of the thesis, by making an history of the object “work” as it has been successively approached by specialized social sciences on the African continent since the beginning of the twentieth century. Then, I come back more concretely to the way in which identification registers are forged on plantations, in close connections with work experience, as well as how authority is formed over people and things within these spatialized productive spaces. All in all, it seems to me that my research so far has helped to shed light on the anchoring of the Cameroonian State in these particular places that are the plantations, and more generally, the part taken by companies in the sociogenesis of States in contemporary neoliberal Africa.
What the network brought you as a researcher:
It was for a postdoctoral fellowship that I had the chance to join the MinErAL network. With Christine Demmer and Séverine Bouard, I worked on the biographical trajectories of Kanak women working in nickel mines and factories in New Caledonia. For me, this was a fascinating discovery, through existing literature, own research, and a survey conducted through interviews in 2018 by Mathilde Baritaud, also a member of the network. These few months have been an enriching experience for me, and one which I believe has strengthened my ability to analyze work contexts in postcolonial spaces and in particular gender and race relations within them.
I am grateful to the network for the way it integrates newcomers, especially young researchers, by giving visibility to their research. During this postdoctoral fellowship, I was able to interact with colleagues such as Suzanne Mills and Katie Mazer about their ongoing work on nickel mining in Canada, another exciting discovery for me.
What is your most recent publication or communication:
It is a chapter of a book in English devoted to the study of contemporary capitalism, entitled Accumulating Capital (Théo Bourgeron and Marlène Benquet eds, to be published at the end of 2020 by Routledge). My paper is entitled "Dispossessive Wage Labor. Understanding Accumulation and Its Crisis through Labor Ethnography in Contemporary Cameroon Large-Scale Plantations". It describes the situation of agricultural workers on Cameroonian plantations, who generally have only one foot in the wage bill, and analyzes the work and pay regime constructed by these companies to compensate for and take advantage of the disadvantages of this incomplete wage bill.
I am also in the evaluation process for an article entitled "Under the threat of the body. Work, Organizations and Self Appreciation on Industrial Plantations in Cameroon". The text focuses on the engagement of bodies through work on the plantations, as well as the subjective repositioning and forms of negotiation with management to which this testing gives rise.
Favorite book/article related to my thesis topic:
Tough choice! In the course of my research, I have been greatly influenced by the work of anthropologists such as Ann Stoler, Philippe Bourgois or Tania Murray Li, by the politician Jean-François Bayart, but also by more recent works that have shown how statehood was negotiated rather than denied in contemporary Africa, or by the geographer David Harvey, from whom I have drawn many tools to think about the material dynamics of plantations. But, since it is a matter of choosing a particular work, I would like to highlight the work of sociologist Nicolas Renahy, who studied the evolution of sociabilities among young people in a rural working-class region in Burgundy, France. The finesse with which he analyzes the constraints that weigh on his respondents, their tastes and dislikes, the fabric of their positioning in the world, has greatly influenced me, particularly in grasping the evolution of the "worker" identity frame of reference. It is a long way from Burgundy to the center and south of Cameroon, but it seems to me that the same sensitivity must be used to do justice to the subjectivities I have been confronted with without reifying them. Here is the reference: Nicolas Renahy, Les gars du coin. Enquête sur une jeunesse rurale, Paris, La Découvert, 2010, 294 p.