Overview

How do people come to need products they never even knew they wanted? How, for example, did indigenous Zimbabweans of the 1940s begin to believe that they required Lifebuoy soap? Offering a glimpse into the intimate workings of modern colonialism and global capitalism, Timothy Burke takes up these questions in Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women, a study of post-World War II commodity culture in Zimbabwe. With particular attention to cosmetic products and the contrast between colonial and pre-colonial ideas of cleanliness, Burke examines the role played by commodity culture, changing patterns of consumption, and the spread of advertising in the making of modern Zimbabwe. His work combines history, anthropology, and political economy to show how the development of commodification in the region relates to the social history of hygiene. Within this framework, and drawing on a wide variety of historical sources, Burke explores dense interactions between commodity culture and embodied aspects of race, gender, sexuality, domesticity, health, and aesthetics in a colonial society. Rather than viewing the production of needs simply as an imposition from above, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women shows what heterogeneous and complex processes, involving the aims and histories of both colonizers and colonized, produced these changes in Zimbabwean society. Integrating political economy, cultural studies, and a wide range of the social sciences, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women will find readers among scholars of colonialism, African history, and ethnography as well those for whom the problem of commodification is a significant theoretical issue.

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9780822317531

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Reviews

“Well researched, highly intelligent, well written, and markedly original—there is nothing like it in the literature of East, Central, and Southern Africa.”—Terence Ranger, Oxford University

An exciting and original contribution to a number of areas of study: the history of Africa, the history of the body, and the history of commodification. It is clearly the result of painstakingly thorough research combined with considerable analytical skill and historical imagination. It is one of the few pieces of African historical writing I have read recently which successfully combines empirical research with a real grasp of theory. -Megan Anne Vaughan, Oxford University Well researched, highly intelligent, well written, and markedly original-there is nothing like it in the literature of East, Central, and Southern Africa. -Terence Ranger, Oxford University

Burke's overall project is successful in combining trends in current cultural studies and history to delineate changes in individual appropriations of toiletries within a social historical context of African and European interaction in colonial Zimbabwe. In this respect the work will serve well to break from the one-dimensional body of literature that exists in much of the social history covering this period and region. <br>--Timothy Scarnecchia, International Journal of African Historical Studies

Author Information

Timothy Burke is Associate Professor of History at Swarthmore College.

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