Ethnographic Notes on ‘Camp’: Centrifugality and Liminality on the Rainforest Frontier

Abstract

As a set of ethnographic ‘notes on camp’ — a pun on Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay — the following paragraphs provide an ethnographically informed theoretical reflection on the nature of camps as specific spatial manifestations surfing on multiple mobile borders and, in their turn, producing characteristic border mobility from a contemporary African perspective. As a direct spatial consequence of current neo-liberal investment in African extractive industries, camps indeed seem to be, once more, on the rise. The following exercise in critical theorization therefore starts from a fine-grained ethnography of power and affect in an extra-territorial logging concession operated by a multinational timber company in the Congolese rainforest. Long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the labor camps of this company — which, for reasons of anonymity, I will refer to as CTI (Congolese Timber Industries) — sheds new light on the dynamics of foreign investment in seemingly ‘out-of-the-way’ places (Tsing, 1993) and on the affective ambiguities and dynamics of everyday camp life.¹ As a place situated on a constantly shifting profitability frontier, the uncertainties and fluctuations of a global timber market directly affected people’s lives in the camp and produced particularly mobile borders that set it apart from its immediate environment while also entangling it in broader spatial constellations.