A Review of Thomas Hendriks, Rainforest Capitalism: Power and Masculinity in a Congolese Timber Concession. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022, XXIV+294 pp.

Abstract

This review is an attempt to describe a rich monograph by the Belgian-British anthropologist Thomas Hendriks whose main characters are employees of the African branch of a European logging company: local black workers and white expat managers. Hendriks’s research is a case in which, to analyse an emotionally complex field dominated by inequality, racism, and misogyny, it took the author many years to achieve sufficient detachment and still complete the work, albeit at the cost of giving up regular scientific activity. The review focuses on three aspects of the book: first, on the author’s approach to presenting ethnographic material, when close attention to the emotions of informants and their own experiences creates a sense of presence in the field for the reader. Secondly, the author uses non-trivial methods to analyse such popular subjects for Siberian anthropology as labour, everyday life, and moral and informal economics, as well as the use of historical excursions in anthropological research. Thirdly, Hendriks’s monograph is interesting for its multifaceted theoretical reflections, including the author’s reflections on the place of theory in anthropology, as well as his own attempt to combine theory and ethnography, constantly balancing between the critical approach characteristic of “dark anthropology”, on the one hand, and the anthropology of the good, on the other, while not completely leaning towards either to one side.