The Making of an African Working Class: Politics, Law, and Cultural Protest in the Manual Workers' Union of Botswana (Anthropology, Culture and Society) - Softcover

Werbner, Pnina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745334954 ISBN 13: 9780745334950

Publisher: Pluto Press, 2014

Synopsis

It is now 50 years since E.P. Thompson published his classic, The Making of the English Working Class.The Making of an African Working Class follows Thompson in exploring the formation of working class identity among low-paid African workers. In arguing for a radical public anthropology of worker identity, the book seeks to analyse the cultural, legal, ideological and experiential dimensions of labour activism often neglected in other labour studies.

Pnina Werbner shows that by fusing cosmopolitan and local popular cultural forms of protest, unionists have created a distinctive, vernacular way of being a worker in Botswana: one that does not deny workers’ roots at home or in the countryside, while being cognisant of a wider world of cosmopolitan labour rights. The assertion of working class dignity, honour and respect, Pnina argues, is a powerful motivating force for manual workers.

Against legal-sceptical approaches, The Making of an African Working Class argues that in challenging the government - their employer - in court, manual workers’ protests and mobilisation are deeply embedded in ethics, social justice and the law.

About this title

About the Author:

Pnina Werbner is Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology, Keele University, author of The Manchester Migration Trilogy - The Migration Process (1990/2002), Imagined Diasporas (2002), Pilgrims of Love (2003) - and editor of several theoretical collections on hybridity, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, migration and citizenship, including Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism and The Political Aesthetics of Global Revolt.

Review:

"Werbner makes good use of ethnographic vignettes, life histories, and biographies of individual unionists, giving the text an intimate feel despite its broad scope. [This book] represents a major contribution to political and legal anthropology." (American Anthropologist)

About this edition

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0745334954
• ISBN 13: 9780745334950
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320