How Nature Works

“How Nature Works charts a new path by challenging a dominant idea in political economy—that work is a uniquely human endeavor. . . . This volume should be read as much for its insights into more than human labor as for its rich contextual history of the ecologies and sites of production of the global south. . . . How Nature Works constitutes a poignant defense of ethnography as a method to rethink labor politics at the end of (human) work. This volume describes work through experiences of everyday life, skillfully interweaving a tradition of labor analysis on the specificities of work with posthumanist critique. . . . Taken as a whole, How Nature Works combines political economy and ecological critique so as ‘to spark the imagination of other worlds and enable estrangement from existing ones’ (Weeks 2011:209). This volume embodies the shared political project at the heart of an expanded account of labor in both feminist and posthumanist thought: to trouble the distinction between work and life and to imagine how to mobilize new forms of collective agencies in these troubled times.”
—Amy Zhang, New York University, Current Anthropology, December 2020

“This edited volume, published in 2019 by SAR Press and the University of New Mexico Press as a product of the prestigious School for Advanced Research seminar series, is an impressive breakthrough in the anthropology of work. The chapters’ authors explore the boundaries between human and nonhuman labor across multiple sites and disciplines. This intellectually original volume outlines new ways of envisioning labor, those who perform it, and those upon whom it is performed. The authors offer persuasive and logical, yet compassionate renditions of the labor of human and not-human agents who feed humanity, culture microbial communities, and pollinate our fields. These authors paint vivid portraits of those who tend and resist efforts to make nature work.”
—Society for the Anthropology of Work 2021 Book Prize committee