Sous la menace du corps. Travail, organismes et appréciation de soi dans les plantations industrielles au Cameroun

Abstract

Based on a long-term ethnographic survey in three agro-industrial complexes in Cameroon, the article explores how the biological bodies of workers, as well as living plant matter, are protagonists of the work experience in the plantations. To this end, it describes the particular condition of these wage-earners, generally of rural origin and located on the margins but not outside formal employment. It examines the organization of work and the mode of remuneration historically constructed by these companies, and shows they are the origin of a form of control over bodies. Seeking to make sense of this, the workers tend to develop a way of appraising themselves and others that gives a central place to their biological body and its calculation. However, they are faced with the difficulty of anticipating and homogenizing work tasks, which involve plant organisms that are resistant to standardization. The diversity of individual relationships to the experience of working on the plantation also reveals the influence of prior socializations on the ability to deal with the threat represented by the transgression of the limits of the body, a threat which nonetheless affects each and every labourer.

Keywords

• work
• body
• agriculture
• materialisms
• Cameroon