154 Chiara Bralnbilla

main Senegalese Inigrant association in the Province of Bergamo) and wasalso working at the migratlon desk in Zingonia at the time of the research.

6. An approach to the city and its images based on counter-m.aps produced bywandering through the urban space is also related to the psychogeographicalapproach elaborated by the Situationists in the 1950s and by Guy Debord(2006). See also (Sadler, 1998).

7. Local people's map-rnakìng abilities only becarne widely known and facili-tated in the early 1990s. This took place because of both critical theoreticalchanges in map analysis and the development and spread of participatorymethodologies and Geographic Information Systems (Chambers, 2006).

8. Regarding auto-photography as an ethnographic field research method, seeAitken & Wingate (1993), and Dodman (2003).

9. On shadowing as an ethnographic technique, see Czarniawska (2007).10. The map-drawing activity is situated within child-centered and (child-

friendly' research methodologies (Barker & Weller, 2003).

9Ethnographic Notes on 'Camp':Centrifugality and Liminalityon the Rainforest FrontierThornas Hendriks

Asa set of ethnographic 'notes on carnp' - a pun on Susan Sontag's 1964essay - the following paragraphs provide an ethnographically informedtheoretical reflection on the nature of camps as specific spatial manifes-tations surfing on multiple mobile borders and, in their turn, producingcharacteristic border mobility from a conternporary African perspective.As a direct spatial consequence of current neo-liberal Investment inAfrican extractive industries, camps indeed seem to be, once more, onthe rise. The following exercise in critical theorization therefore startsfrom a fine-grained ethrlography of power and affect in an extra-terri-torial logging concession operated by a multinational timber companyin the Congolese rainforest. Long-term ethnographic fieldwork in thelabor camps of this company - which, for reasons of anonymìrç; I willrefer to as CT! (Congolese Timber Industries) - sheds new light on thedynamics of foreign investment in seemingly 'out-of-the-way' places(Tsing, 1993) and on the affective arnbíguttíes and dynamics of everydaycamp llfe.' As a place situated on a constantly shifting profitability fron-tier, the uncertainties and fluctuations of a global timber market directlyaffected people's lives in the camp and produced particularly mobìleborders that set it apart from its i:mmediate environment while alsoentangling it in broader spatial constellations.Theorizing practices of everyday life in the CT! logging camp demon-

strates how camps are enfolded by a set of Inabile borders that areconstantly pushed outwards by theìr inhabitants' 'work of the irnagin-ation' (Appadurai, 1996). This perpetual iInaginary transgression anddisplacement at the heart of everyday camp life - its centrifugal dynalnics-arises from the inherently liminal and ephemeral nature of canlp spaceand camp time, As a specific case of and on the filabile border, campcentrifugality and lìminalìty constantly make and unmake, reconfirm

155

156 Tilo/nas Hendriks

and contest rnultiple overlapping borders and limits. The camp there-fore has to be understood as an interface, a space of affective negotiationin which people manage to (re)make a home and a self through whatI will call an internal dialectic of experienced mobility and ìmmobìlìty.Re-conceptualizing the notion of 'camp' from these empìrlcal groundssheds new Iìght on the metaphors of Inabile borders and border networksin contemporary neo-liberal capítalìsm from the seemingly peripheralperspective of the Congolese rainforest.This chapter starts with an ethnographic insight into the, sometimes

surprising, Iìmìts of corporate power in concessionary politics and therebycounterbalances James Ferguson's (2005, 2006) influential argument onso-called investment 'enclaves' in contemporary Africa. It argues that,on the mobile border of industrial logging - that is, on its inherentlyunstable profitability frontier - camps rather than enclaves materìalìzeits characteristically nervous Inability. Such ethnographic insights thenlead to a reformulatìon of Giorgio Agamben's (1998) theorization of the"camp' as the central nomos of modernity from a specifically postcolonialAfrican perspective. Navigating between the polltìcal-economìc contextof postcolonial camps and the everyday affects and sentiments to whichthey give rise - what Raymond Willìams (1977) would call their particular(structure of feeling' - further exposes camps as spaces of experiencedexception that are, however, firmly entangled in wider mobile networkssimilar to Danny Hoffman's (2007) ethnographic conceptualization of the'barracks'. But rather than revealing bodies being deployed by powerfulor sovereign actors franz above - whether in (enclaves', 'barracks' or biopo-lìtìcal 'camps' - this re-theorization of 'camp' shows how borders are alsoliterally and metaphorically mobílìzed through mobilities f1'o111below.

1 Concession

What makes carnps so different frorn other spaces? In order to under-stand their 'heterotopìan' nature (Foucault, 1984), a closer look at theharder between the CTI camp/concession and its immediate surround-ings is needed. The concession and its labor camps constituted a diffèrentspace, a zone of exception that was materially and affectively differenti-ated from its surroundings. This relative exceptionality is a direct resultof the legal and political-economic itnplications - and the historicalweight - of the concession system, which the Congolese government,despite the adoption of a new Forestry Code in 2002, has retained asthe only form of access for industrial logging companies. The Congolesestate thereby grants exclusive but temporary logging rights to private

Ethnographic Notes on 'Camp' 157

companies who are then allowed to cut down a lìmìted number of treeswithin the geographical boundaries defined by the concession contract,in return for the payment of taxes for a period of 25 years. This systemhence reproduces colonial concessionary politics in which the state - asthe legal owner of all the land in the country - granted companìes accessto huge tracts of land to develop their activities in relatively autono-mous ways in return for a share in their profìts.?What are the social and political implications of such a reproduced

concession system? How does such a spatial arrangernent affect everydaylife? There is surprisingly little social science literature available on thesequestions. Rebecca Hardin (2011), however, in her work on conces-sionary politics in the Central African Republic, directly addresses suchissues and understands logging concesslons not just as formal legalarrangements but as social processes in which different actors compete,Looking at timber companies, state admínìstratìons, conservation NGOsand local populations, she argues that concessionary politics are basedon 'persistent cultural logics' (2011, p. 117) which favor 'social relationsof patronage' (2011, p. 116) and 'deeply [shape] the range of action opento [concession managers], making a kind of big Inan of them, constrainedto compete with rivals and to redistribute elements of the wealth theygaìn through their work in the forest' (2011, p. 119; my emphasìs).Notwithstanding her rather one-diInensional actor-orientated frame-

work and her implicit cultural determinism, Hardin's work points to apowerful drive at the heart of concessionary politics. SIle shows how,when private actors appropriate what had been delegated to the state,such companies (and their representatives) come to behave as local'big men [... ] engaged in a form of social contest that was central totheir identities, as well as to their territorial control' (2011, p. 121). TheEuropean expat rnanagers aIllong whom I did my fieldwork at CTI wereindeed considered to be contemporary 'big rnen' reincarnating bygonecolonial patrons. TIle logging C0I11pany was therefore inadvertentlyentangled in what Hardin calls persistent cultural logics of patronage whichìntìmately integrated the concession into a regional economy of expect-ation that was, however, not - as Hardin Seel11Sto imply - of a 'cultural'origin but - as we wHI see - the product of a (post)colonial vernacularhistory and contemporary popular memories.

2 Enclave

Conceptualizing multinational companies as operated by 'big men'inadvertently entangled in networks of patronage, rather than by

158 Thomas Hendrìks

completely autonomous actors operating in ways unaffected by regionaleconomies of expectation and histories of exploìtatìon, has profoundspatial ímplicatìons. Logging concessions are hereby contained wìthìnexplicitly Inabile borders, crystallizing, expanding, and contracting atdifferent rates rather than understood as spaces hermetically closed offfrom their wider environment.Hardin thereby counterbalances James Ferguson's (2005, 2006) influ-

ential spatial analysis of neo-liberal investment in contemporary Africain which he argues that such investment gives rise to capital-intensiveenclaves which rem.ain socially very 'thin' with little impact on theirsurroundings. Ferguson sees new foreign investment in Africa concen-trated in secured enclaves, largely operated by expat workers and withlittle or no economic benefit to the wider society. In contrast to the oldmining towns of his earlier work on the Zambian Copperbelt (Ferguson,1999), with their company-provided housing, schooling, health care,social workers, move theaters, and sport clubs, new investment enclavesare 'tightly integrated with the head offices of multinational corpora-tions and metropolìtan centres, but sharply walled off from their ownnational societies (often literally walled, with bricks and razor wire)'(Ferguson, 2005, p. 379). Taking the offshore oil platform as a modelfor neo-liberal capital investment in Africa, Ferguson claims that' [t]hemovements of capital [... ] jump point to point, and huge areas are simplybypassed' and that '[cjapítal does not "flow"; it hops, neatly skippingaver most what lies in between' (2005, p. 379). As a result, extractiveneo-liberalisrn in Africa creates a series of gated enclaves firmly cut offfrorn their surroundings, with points of co:nnection separated by hugeareas of dìsconnectìon.Wllile this experienced difference of connection and disconnection

contributed to the affective exceptionality of the CT! logging conces-sion, and while Ferguson hi.ghlights crucial aspects of the transnationalorganization of capital in a globalized world, he rather overstates thestrict separation between so-called enclaves and their surroundings. Thelogging concession was not fenced off with 'bricks and razor wire' butvery much embedded in a moral economy of benefit-sharing and gift-giving, in spite of its intentions to stay out of regional politics. Evenbeyond the legally required 'social responsibility contracts' - accordingto which CT! had to build schools, health centers and roads for thevillages in the concession - the company was effectively entangled ina network of expectations and moral obligations from which it didnot have the power to disconnect. Road blocks set up by discontentedvillagers and the widespread trade in stolen cOlnpany fuel, for instance,

Ethnographic Notes 011 'Camp' 159

constantly pushed CT! back within the mobile borders of a broadermoral economy.The many popular attempts to (re)capture the cornpany in such a

moral economy need to be understood frorn an explicitly historicalperspective. As the latest rnanifestation of international capital in aregion with a long history of foreign investment, nostalgic memorieson bygone colonial labor constituted a moral yardstick against whichthe company could be tried and found wanting: as the unique employerin the wider region, CTI often failed to live up to popular expectations.Although their tmmedìate successor, the logging concession was thusindeed, as Ferguson (2005, p. 379) argues, very different from the colo-nial plantations that preceded it. But rather than isolating itself fromits surroundings, the concession remained. firmly embedded in a moraleconomy frantically reproduced through the experienced gap betweenidealized accounts of the past and the reality of industrial logging. Ascontemporary 'big men', the company rnanagers could not hi.de behindthe walls of a secluded enclave but neither could they live up to theexpectations produced by their presence.Another spatial difference between Ferguson's Investment enclaves

and logging concessions in contemporary Africa appears in the rela-tions between the private company and the national state. Althoughthe state delegated certain rights to CT!, the logging concession wasnot - as Ferguson argues - carved out from a national territory and statepresence. On the contrary, in compartson to its tmrnedìatc surround-ings, state presence was tntensifted inside the concession: the concessionattracted rather than put off state officials. Instead of deploying its ownprivate security force, CTI counted on the backup of regional authoriti.es,police forces and soldiers to guarantee the security of its investment. Theconcession was thus Ilot so much an enclave outside the law - a kind. offree playground for a private C0111pany - but the paradoxical reclam-ation of an area within the scope of the law, through the very presenceof the company to which the state delegated certain rights. If anything,the concession somehow 'normalìzcd' regional politics by opening upthe area for political control from different levels of government.A rnore nuanced analysis of the spatial politics of logging concessions

thus suggests that Ferguson's framework cannot be applied to all formsof contemporary neo-liberal investment in Africa. Ferguson seems tounderestimate the very real limits of corporate power in such constella-tions. In most discourses on globalization, private comparues are usuallystaged as powerful actors in complete control of their actions and envìr-onments, Close ethnographic attention to everyday life in the logging

160 Thomas Hendriks

concession, however, demonstrates how corporate strategies were oftenfailing and marked by doubts and uncertainties. For instance, laborcontrol- often assumed to be highly effective in neo-liberal investmentenclaves - could be rather weak on the work Haar. The relative autonomyof labor teams and the work sites' isolation deep in the forest madestrict surveillance impossible and opened up possibilities for employeesto reduce the length of the working day or to make rnoney Oll the sideby selling co:mpany fuel to smugglers. Measures of control and surveil-lance were equally failing in the labor camp itself. Whereas, because ofits architecture and spatial layout, the camp might seem to embody thedisciplining and controlling presence of CTI, everyday camp life usuallywent on largely outside the company 'gaze'. Camp management wasa matter of ad hoc decisions and improvisations, sometimes contestedbetween different camp managers and Inore often than not postponed.Even though, at SOUlemoments, such ìmprovìsatìons could suddenlyproduce harsh rneasures - such as the decision to destroy the so-called'squatter' houses in the camp built by people who were not official CTIemployees - the violence of such actions testifies more to the nervouscondition of company power than to its self-confidence.This characteristic nervousness arises from a specific political economy

of logging that produces its own instabilities. Industrial logging is afundamentally uncertain affair. CTI operated on the verge of failure andcontinued its production as long as doing so was less costly than shuttingdown. Since the concession was opened 20 years ago, its prospects haveoften been grim: more than a thousand kilometers of river to Kinshasa,rising fuel prices, uncertain global timber markets, political instability,wars and the latest financial crisis produced a fluctuating profitabilityfrontier on which the company tried to make a profit. In this context,there often simply wasn't enough money in logging for the emergenceof Ferguson's secured investment enclaves. In comparison to mìnìng,industrial logging is often not capital-intensive enough to rnake a neo-liberal future of enclaves feasible.Far from being a powerful company capable of disconnecting from its

surroundings and the national state, CTI was thus a relatively insecure,doubting and failing actor deeply entangled in a regional moral economyand socìo-polìtìcal environment. Illustrating the relative Iìmìts ofcorporate power Oll the ground somehow corrects the taken-far-grantedimage of multinational corporations as powerful actors fully in controlof their actions and surroundings. This is, however, not to deny the realpower and influence of multinatìonal companìes (CTI obviously had thepower to get access to land, timber, labor, and finance), but to argue that

Ethnographic Notes 011 'CaI11p' 161

companies are not always what they pretend to be. Indeed, althoughCTI might very well have liked. to disen tangle itself from popular claimsand from the costs of what Ferguson (2005, p. 379) calls 'social thick-ness', it simply did not have the power to do so. Ferguson too easilytakes the companies at face value, accepting their own claíms of powerand neglecting their entanglernen¡ with the state and regional society.Ethnographically illustrating the lirnitatians of corporate power opensup possibilities for imagining other ways of th-inking about globalizationand its malcontents, ways that could suggest new forms of resistance inthe face of the taken-far-granted power of multìnatìonal corporations(Gibson-Graham, 1996).

3, Frontier

Realizing the relative limits of corporate power and the uncertaintyand nervousness that so much characterized everyday life in the laborcamps brings us one step closer to a contextualized understanding of theparticular structure of feeling of the CT! logging concession. But beforeprobing deeper into the emotional and affective context of 'camp', acloser look at the political economy and technical conditions of trop-ical rainforest logging is needed. To understand why the concession andits camps were definitely' other places' and zones of exception withouttherefore automatically being 'enclaves', the materiality of the frontier-as a specific mobile border - has to be Inade explicit.The logging frontier is a particularly eph emera I time-spare whose

instabilities and fluctuations are the result of, on the one hand, thetechnical-biological reality of logging and, Oll the other hand, the polit-ical eC0110111yof the tropical timber trade. In contrast to the mining andoil business on whích Ferguson builds his argument, industrial rainforestlogging is an inherently mobile activity due to the specifics of rainforestecology. Although rainforests consist of a huge variety of tree species,each species is only represented by a handful of fully-grown individualsper hectare and only a dozen or so of these species fetch sufficiently highprices 011 the timber market to make their harvesting financially profitable.Because commercially valuable trees are thus often few and far between,they have to be actively searched for before they can be cut down. Incontrast to mediatized images of clear-cutting, logging companies in theDRC thus generally 'cream off' the most valuable trees and leave the othersstanding, constantly being 011 the move searchìng for trees to cut down,This inherent mobility of rainforest logging is, moreover, heightened by

the unpredictability of the tropical timber market, which renders industlial

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162 Thomas Hendriks

logging Ì1.1the Congo Basin a risky financial undertaking. For instance, withthe onset of the global financial and economìc cri.sis in the last trimesterof 2008, timber prices dropped by 15 to 300;0 in just a couple of weeksand European tropical timber import decreased by more than 400/0overthe next year, forcing Congolese logging companies to close down conces-sions and layoff approximately 3,000 workers (De Wasseige, et al., 2012,p. 172-173). Between 2008 and 2009, Congolese log exports decreased byhalf anel, despite temporary tax benefits, most timber companies accurnu-lated considerable deficits, forcing multìnatìonal corporations to recon-sider their forestry-related activities (2012, p. 178). Although, since 2010,production orders have increased (2012, p. 173), at the ti:me of writing,established companies seem once again to be freezing their logging opera-tions and even withdrawing from the timber sector altogether.CTI thus operated on a constantly fluctuating profitability frontier, an

immatertal mobile border continuously expanding and retracting. Inmoments of crisis, when timber prices drop and fuel prices rise, thisfrontier írnmedìately recedes and forces companies to temporarily closedown production sites. In April 2009, for instance, C'TI fired rnore than200 of its forest workers because of such declining profitability, only tore-employ most of thern six months later. At the tíme of my fieldwork,its financial prospects once more seemed rather grim and rurnors of yetanother closure circulated in the labor camps. When, in early 2012, theEuropean mother company sold. CT! to another investor, who there-upon decided to effectively close down the concession, these rumorsbecame an immediate and fierce reality for the camp's inhabitants.

4 Camp

Under such conditions of mobile borders, fluctuations, uncertainty, andcharacteristic nervousness, camps seem to be particularly useful. Morethan Ferguson's enclaves, they are first and foremost camps that come inhandy at the present moment of neo-liberal capitalism in Afrìca. Campsof all kinds arise as spatial manìfestatìons of natural resource extractionon the continent, whether it be in mínìng, the oil or gas sector, or ini.ndustrial timber production. As generic architectural forms, camps area recurrent elelnel1t in an ever-shifting Iletwork of transnational capital.In tlle following paragraphs I therefore argue for the central position ofthe notion of canIp in understanding contemporary neo-liberal capit-alism in Africa, reworking Giorgio Agalnben's (1998) famous analysis of'camp' as the central tIOInos of modernity froln a postcolonial Africanpers pective.

Ethnographic Notes on 'Camp' 163

While camps seem to be on the rise at the present neo-Iiberal moment,they are by no means a new phenomenon. On the African continent,camps date back to the early days of colonìalìsm and calnp planningand architecture was an essential part of labor and race politics. As ageneric spatial grid, the calnp was extremely useful in a system of capit-alist exploitation of natural resources and labor power. In the BelgianCongo, several camp models were first developed in the Karangan copperindustry and were later replicated at diamond and gold mining sites, oilpalm, coffee, and cacao plantations and timber concesslons (De Meulder,1996). The CT! Ioggìng camp firmly stood within this colonial trad-ition and its neat rows of houses built alongside a rectangular road gridevoked the specter of nearby abandoned labor carnps that once belongedto colonial plantation companies. But whereas the latter were part ofwhat Ferguson (2005, p. 379) called a wider social project, the former nolonger provided company SIlOpS,missionary schools, club houses, organ-ized leisure activities, or broad lanes bordered with flowering trees. TheCTI camp seemed to be undone from all these paternalistic niceties andundressed to its essential core: a spatial technology of labor dìscìplìne.However, as argued in the previous paragraphs, such an understanding

of the camp as a. naked technology of discipline and control would.ignore CTI's relative lack of power over itself and its surroundings. Theethnographic illustration of the relative limits of corporate power in thevery context of a 'camp', whose generic architecture appears to materi-alize a powerful company gaze, thus nuances Giorgio Agamben's boldstatements on the central logic of the calllp in his political philosophyand, specifically, in his spatial theory of power as developed in HornoSaeer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998).Starting from Carl Schmitt's notion of the 'sovereign' as whoever has

the power to decide on the 'state of exception' - a temporary situationiI1which the law no longer applies - Agamben redefines the latter not asa state of emergency but as a type of exclusion. For Agarnben, the state ofexception defines an 'inclusive exclusion', a 'relation of the ban' that iskey to understanding political power. Sovereign power always produceswhat he calls 'bare life', subjects abandoned by the law and expulsedfrom the polis. Because this exclusion is an originary and 11ecessary condi-tion of politics, biopolitics is thus the essence of all politics and not - asFoucault Ilad argued - a particular stage in political history. Agalllbenthen exernplifies l1is analysis through the contemporary multiplicationof calnps which, as particularly transparent biopolitical spaces, wouldeffectively lay bare the hidden paradigm of politics. Observing a fright-ening generalization of calnp situations in today's world and, thus, a

164 771.01naS Hendriks

generalized production of bare life, he posits the camp - and no longerthe city - as the central nomos of modernity. For Agamben, the stateof exception has become the norm and camps proliferate as territoriesoutside the law, as enclaves beyond the Inabile borders of a juridicalsphere where anything is possible, and where matters of life and deathcan be decided upon arbitrarily.A fine-grained ethnography of everyday life in the CTI logging camp

suggests that the latter was not a classic example of Agamben's camp asa biopolitical zone of exclusion. Although, from the outside, the loggingcamp certainly seemed to materíalìze the cold rationality of biopolitics,its internal power dynamics were very different. Instead of a fine-tunedpanoptìcon under close surveillance, the camp was a site of relativecompany neglect and failing control policies where life went on largelyoutside the company 'gaze' and was only rarely disrupted by direct inter-ventions, which were rnore illustrations of a desperate inefficiency to getthings under control than of the insidious effectiveness of biopower.This failing nature of company control and the relative autonorny ofeveryday camp life are profoundly at odds with Agamben's analysis.Moreover, for Agamben. camps are irrevocably connected to a strong

sovereign who proclaitns the 'state of exception' and thereby createscaInp situations producing bare life. In the rainforest where CTI openedits concession in the early 1990s, however, the 'state' di.d not havethe powers to declare such a state of exception and to create campsas enclaves beyond the law where politics can reveal its true face. AsAchille Mbernbe has argued, postcolonial states do not work accordingto a logic of bìopolìtìcs and have their own rnode of political reproduc-tion, no longer occupied with colonialism's desire to create useful, docileand productive individuals but with requisitioning 'people's bodies andmake them join in the displays and ceremonies of the commandment,requiring them to sing or dance or wriggle their bodies about in the sun'(Mbembe, 1992, p. 12). In the postcolony, where sovereign power isan obscene and grotesque everyday banality disjointed from modemistbìopolìtìcs and its focus on usefulness and efficiency, there can be no'camp' in Agarnben's understanding because such a camp would need abiopolitical state as its condition of possìbìltty'And yet, during the last decades, camps are on the rise (again) in

contemporary Africa. To return to Iames Ferguson's (2005) argument,the sovereign is no longer the state but global capitalism in its neo-lib-eral shape. The dyllarnics of neo-liberal investrnent in extractive indus-tries indeed carve out spaces from national state territories and integratetheIn into a network for hopping global capital. The concession, as a

Ethnographic Notes on 'Camp' 165

state of exception, is not the product of the decìsìon of a 'powerful' sover-eign state but the result of a sale of exploitation rights over a farawayregion by a central government in need of cash. Nevertheless, as arguedin the preceding paragraphs, the result of this sale of rights was not an'enclave' carved aut from state territory but a concession paradoxicallyreclaimed by regional and local state authorítìes. Neither, however, wasit a 'camp' in Agamben's terms. The logging camps repeated a (colonial)generic architecture and spatial technology of power without realizingits disciplining potential. C1'! did not need to invest in efficient discip-line and control rnechanìsms, its corporate power mostly operated alongMbembe's postcolonial lines: an unpredictable and grotesque explosionof sudden violence interrupting a generalized neglect and disinterest insustained surveillance.

S Exceptionality

The preceding ethnographic reflections on the nature of concessionarypolitics and their manifestation in the notion of the 'camp' dernon-strate that the CT! concession was an inherently unstable space at thecrossroads of a set of mobile borders very much entangled in a regionalmoral economy of expectations and profit-seeking strategies of multìplestate actors in which corporate power could not help but reveal its ownlimits and di.savowed Ilervous condition. Close ethnographic attentionto everyday life shows how such a particular polìtìcal-economìc constel-lation propels people's affects into certain directions, giving rise to whatRaymond Williams (1977) has called a specific 'structure of feeling', Inthese last paragraphs, I will illustrate how paradoxical feelings of excep-tionality and Iimìnalìty strongly resonated wìth their political-economiccontext,Because the Ioggìng camp was the only place where relatively decent

salaries were paid on a regular basis, its inhabitants shared profoundfeelings of exceptionality in which the camp signified a quick circula-tìon of money and conspicuous consumption attracting people fromthe wider region. Moreover, as the unique contemporary reproductionof bygone colonial labor, the camp also produced characteristic feel-ings of nostalgia evoking idealized memories in everyday conversations.These experiences of exceptionality and nostalgic attitudes were aspectsof a performative reproduction of 'labor' - understood as farInaI salariedlabor errlbodied by contractual workers - and quite some time andresources were invested in tl1e production and 1.1l.aÏIltenance of a diffe-rence between so-called 'workers' and nlere 'villagers' (for instance, in

166 Thomas Hendriks

the field of housing, clothing, consurnption patterns, children's educa-tìon, and language use).Thìs difference was, however, always very fragile, depending on the

actual payment of salaries that was, in turn, affected by the unpredict-ability of work (given frequent rains, road blocks and fuel shortages) andthe fluctuations of a global timber market pushing company managersto layoff workers and temporarily shut down logging activities. Thevery status of a CTI worker, and his performed difference with merevillagers, was thus a permanently threatened one. This (proto-class'border of difference was, moreover, more permeable than maintained byvernacular labor ideology: villagers and farmers were often temporarilyemployed and experienced workers were fired; day-laborers working ona daily basis without any form of written contract operated in a Iimìnalspace between both statuses; and traders and smugglers frequently Inademore money than CT! employees, thereby actively contesting the latter'shigher status.Nevertheless, the idea of 'exception' was frequently repeated by CTI

workers and actively encouraged by CTI managers who constantlyemphasized how 'lucky' their employees should be to have a job at all.At the same tímehowever, these politically mobilized feelings of excep-tionality ran into their own contradictions. Workers' life-stories almostinvariably revealed that the logging camp was just one node in a largernetwork of sites through which the same bodies 1110ved in and out ofsimilar temporary situations. The ideological reproduction of I excep-tionality' could not hide the concession's integration into a network oftrade and commercial opportunities, connecting cities, towns, villages,markets, diamond mines, gold pits, plantations, mission posts, andtimber caInps. Through their own mobìlìtìes, workers effectively movedfrom one 'exception' to the next, thereby fundamentally underrnìnìngthe affective exceptionality of each temporary situation anei revealinghow a supposed exception was actually the norm.A similar observation has been made by anthropologist Danny

Hofftnan in his research on the regional networks through which youngmen in Sierra Leone and Liberia move 'as laborers on the battlefield,workers on the plantation, or diggers in the nline' (2007, p. 402). Parallelto the arguInent rnade in t11is chapter about the fundamental lilnitsof Aganlben's notion of the 'carnp' to elucidate postcolonial politics,HoffInan suggests what he calls the 'barracks' as a better way to concep-tualize Africa's conternporary politics. Tile barracks 'concentrate bodies(particularly male bodies) and subjects into formations that can bedeployed quickly and efficiently to any corner of t11eelnpire' (2007). In

Ethnographic Notes 011 'Camp' 167

contrast to the 'camp's logic of classification of bodies and subjects, thebarracks represents a shift in emphasis to the body's capacity for over-consumption and vìolence' (2007, p. 408). Thìnkìng of the postcolonyas a 'zone of excessive production' (2007, p. 401) that 'leaves no space ortime for the modemist project of fixed city spaces, services, institutions,or relations' (p. 407), Hoffman translates Mbembe's understanding ofpostcolonial politics into the nornos of the barracks, which spreadsthroughout the region and is 'governed by the efficient assembly anddeployment of workers in a violent economy' (p. 422).Although the CTI logging camp was certainly merely one node in a

larger spatial arrangement and not the 'exception' it pretended to be,Hoffman's barracks Implicitly brings back a notion of power that I havecriticized in both Ferguson's enclaves and Agamben's camps. Imagìnlngbodies as being deployed efficiently in a violent econorny, Hoffmanindeed presupposes the existence of a higher power or agency doing thedeployment - actors who consciously organize labor in the postcolonialbarracks. While this might be evident in what he calls 'war economies', itis unclear how this works in relatively peaceful settings, such as the onearound the CTI logging concession during the last decade. If, as I haveargued, the powers of Ferguson's powerful multìnatìonals or Agarnben'sstate are more lìmìted than is often supposed, the trajectories of peoplemoving between different nodes of a regional network were Ilot directedby a scheming and planning agency from above but the result of mobilt-ties that grew frorn below.

6 Centrifttgality

A spatialized political-economic constellation in which the camp'sexception has become the barracks' norm and people move in to andout of temporary places and situations strongly resonates with yetanother characteristic of the structure of feeling in the CTI loggìngcarnps. The latter indeed evokes a specific camp temporality character-ized by a dialectic of mobìlity and irnmobllity. As several C'TI el1lployeeshad grown up, worked in and spent their lives IIlovirlg between differentlabor compounds, this apparent Inabili ty paradoxically produced feelingsof itnnlobility sirlce all of these camps actually looked the same. Despitetheir promises of easy money and access to modernity, its inllabitantsoften felt blocked in their aspirations, caught in a continuing temporari-ness, alld tried to break camp Illonotony by indulging in heavy driI1king,gan1bli11g, and sexual adventuring - heterochronic escapes tllat artificiallysped up boring camp tinle (Foucault, 1984). As tllese experiences of

168 Thomas Hendriks

mobility and ìmmobìlity were two sides of the same coin, camp time wasentangled in its own dynamics and produced an ambivalent structureof feeling. Ever-lurking sentiments of sadness, frustration, disappoint-ment, neglect, and boredom tainted rnomentary flashes of excitement,joy, possibility, consumption, and distinction. This very contradictionbetween both sides of a particular camp atmosphere gave rise to whatI would call a centrifugal work of the imagination: instead of focusingon the here and now of everyday camp life, people's imaginations wereusually propelled outwards to 'another' place beyond camp borders.This centrifugality was, for instance, clearly manifested in workers'

homemaking practices that tried to make the wooden camp house intoa real home. These practices were symbolically invested in the so-called'living room' that was provided ìn each standard CTI house. Ratherthan actually lived in, these r00111Scontained a collection of 'modern'household items put on display in order to evoke a homely sense ofbourgeois dìstínctìon with surrounding villagers. The same objects,however, because of their outward referentiality, simultaneously hintedat processes of disptacement at the very heart of homemaking, The ornní-present colorful Chinese posters hanging on the walls of most workers'houses and depicting supposedly 'modern' interiors clearly visualizedthis continuous dreaming about other places, revealing the sheer empti-ness of the calnp. Profoundly desirous of a different life, people wereoften 'somewhere else', mentally wandering off to a utopian world ofendless abundance and civilized standing. As imaginary windows onan outside world, these posters replaced the standard windows in thewooden houses, frarrling and displacing the gaze from the immediatecamp surroundings to a faraway 'otherwhere' (Malaquais, 2006).Similar centrifugal dynamics, albeit less directly visible, characterized

the making and unm.aking of selves in the logging camp. CTI employees,negotiating between reproduced colonìal bourgeois worker identities -as responsible housefathers and breadwinners - and a set of alternativemasculinities - as resourceful adventurers and entrepreneurs in the post-colonial barracks - constantly performed profoundly ambiguous selves.This constant preoccupation with one's self (and how that self might beperceived and evaluated by others) and the continuous rotation aroundone's own axis produced its own centrifugal force: drealIls about one's selfdisplaced to an 'otherwhere' . Although 1lome-nlaking and self-rnakingconventiorlally suggest the production of a stable ceIlter, camp centrifu-gality constantly undernlined these centers, up to a point where 'home'and 'self' were produced in and through the very displacernent itself.Centrifugality, I would argue, is therefore the experiential dinlensian

Ethnographic Notes 011 'Camp' 169

of camp limìnality: the constantly in-between status of camps, neitherrural nor urban, permanently temporal, mobile yet ímmobile. Whensuch a lìmìnalìty, rather than being a phase in between two fixed states,.becomes a more permanent experience, a centrifugal outreach to otherplaces (and other times) is what makes everyday carnp life bearable.

Conclusion

Ethnographic reflections on the camp's structure of feeling illustrate that,in the Iìmìnal tiIne-space of the camp, the centrifugality of everyday lifeproduces a constant iInaginary transgression of its borders. The workof the ímaginatìon in the CTI logging camp indeed produces 'mobileborders' in two fundamental ways. On the one hand, the iInaginationrenders the camp's borders filabile by pushing them outwards throughcentrifugal imaginary forces and phantasmagorical evacuations. On theother hand, the imaginatìon simultaneously 'mobilizes' borders - thatis, uses them in everyday thinking, imagining and talking - to createand reproduce differences between 'workers' and 'villagers' (but alsobetween 'black' employees and 'white' expats). This chapter thus illus-trates border mobility in multiple ways. The canlp itself is a temporaryephemeral space on all ever-moving profitability frontier. Close ethno-graphic attention to the camp's structure of feeling shows how the fluc-tuating dynamìcs of global capitalism are experienced from a seeminglyperipheral but actually highly connected place. TIle camp was part of anextra-territorial concesslon that paradoxically reconuected the region tothe nation-state. As one node in a 'barracks' configuration, the loggingcanlp was also part of a wider network comprised of bodily trajectorieswithin their own Inabile borders.This chapter demonstrates how the idea of 'mobile borders' and

the notion of the postcolonial 'camp' (post-Agamben) can be thoughttogether in productive ways. Camps are particularly useful architec-tural and spatial configurations surfing on Inabile borders and, in turn,evoking their own border mobìlìty, Carnps share the liminality of mobileborders, an in-between status that can become quasi-permanent but isalways threatened by sudden change. They are profoundly ephemeralspaces arising and disappearing on shifting borders and frontiers. It isthis liminal and epherneral nature of calnps that nlakes their defin-ition - always a fixating atternpt - so difficult. The centrifugality oftheir structure of feeling always points to sOlllething else, another placeor another time. In their slipperiness, can1ps defy the binary divisionbetween the urban and the rural, upsetting both the urbanity of the city

170 Thomas Hendriks

and the rurality of the country. The logging camp muddles assumptìonsof linear progression from rural to urban and spoils the image of therainforest as a 'wilderness' and 'last frontier'. No longer spatial mani-festations of modernity and development - which assume and operatealong fixed borders - camps (rather than enclaves) physically embodythe mobile borders produced by a Ilea-liberal world order on the Africancontinent.

Notes

1. Between November 2009 and July 2011, I completed 15 months of fieldworkin the CT! logging concession in the north of the Democratic Republic ofCongo. My ethnography focused on the issues of labor, race and desire, whichwere continuously renegotiated between hundreds of Congolese workers andfive European managers living in nearby expat quarters. Ta accommodate itsworkers and their families, CT! built one labor camp In the middle of theconcession and another one near its private port along the Congo River. Sincetheir construction, hundreds of families from nearby villages and towns havemoved to these camps, attracted by new economic opportunities and by theunique source of formal employment in the wider area.

2. Note that the attribution of a concession reconfirms the power of the state asthe legltìrnate owner of all lands and forests but at the same time destabilizesstate autonomy as the national government discards certain responsibilitiesand control mechanisms over specific territories.

3. Note, however, that Mbernbe's postcolony itself can be read as a 'camp' wherelife is reduced to bare life without productive value that can be arbitrarilykilled or Inade to dance in the sun. The camp thereby encompasses the wholepostcolony: the state of exception overlaps with the juridical sphere andmakes the distinction between them meaningless.

10Smuggling: Power Networks,Moral Geographies and NormEnforcement at Work atSouthern Cone BordersAdriana Dorfman

1 Smuggling: a view from the territory 1~.~

'jThe act of smuggling is recognized as being one capable of moving verylarge amounts of goods, even if it is always a challenge to get a precisemeasurement of the scale involved. The World Customs Organizationestimates the market value of merchandise smuggled in 2012 at 650billion dollars. The value fises to 2 trillion dollars, if financial transac-tions are included (WCO, 2013). It is estimated that only two percent ofthe 420 million containers circulating around the world are inspected(UNODC, 2014), and at ports, borders and airports, between one-thirdand more than two-thirds of cargo inspected is found to be illegal insome way (Nordstrom, 2007). Although little studied, smuggling ispervasive.The academic discussion of smuggling usually takes into account

economic policies, social practices and the legal framework (Cantens,2012). We believe that this debate benefits from a consìderatìon of thepower of internatìonal illicit trade agents and their territorialization,including their relations within the political-institutional frameworkof each state. An international commercìal operation is considered tobe smuggling (or not) depending on its legality. But what is the lawregarding tertitortal terms? Establishing formal laws is a prerogativeof the territorialized sovereign state and of the international organiza-tions that it recognizes. The country's laws are supposed to representthe entire nation, but the territory is too large, the population is verydiverse, and there are various conflicts of interests, so that, in reality,

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