Karen Tranberg Hansen is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Northwestern University. She is the author of Keeping House in Lusaka and Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia and the editor of African Encounters with Domesticity.
Utilizing an impressive array of research methods—from historical
archives to social surveys—Hansen provides both historical depth
and current insights into this most contentious of
employer-employee relationships. She discovers that the intimacy of
the home as a workplace, with its daily contact between servant and
employer, requires elaborate rituals to maintain and preserve
social distance between employer and employee. Class conflict and
tension, often intertwined with race and gender, have a special
drama in the household, making this form of labor peculiarly
revealing for the study of these issues. Distant Companions is a
superb book—carefully crafted, broadly researched, and deeply
committed to improving the conditions of domestic labor. It has
important implications for the comparative study of domestic work
and should be required reading for Africanists and feminists
alike.
*African Economic History*
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