Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe - Hardcover

Burke, Timothy James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0718500679 ISBN 13: 9780718500672

Publisher: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd., 1996

Synopsis

How do people come to need products they never knew they even wanted? How, for example, did indigenous Zimbabweans of the 1940s begin to believe that they required "Lifebuoy" soap? With particular attention to cosmetic products and the contrast between colonial and pre-colonial ideas about cleanliness, this text examines the role played by commodity culture and its agents in the making of modern Zimbabwe. It combines history, social 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, the author explores the interactions between commodity culture and embodies aspects of race, gender, sexuality, domesticity, health and aesthetics in a colonial society.

About this title

Review:

"The overlapping layers of this book are as successively fascinating as the subject matter is unusual and treated thoughtfully, both theoretically and empirically."
--"Choice"

"For those who work in Zimbabwe," Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women" will be a welcome addition to the literature. It will also be of great use to other Africanists, as well as those interested in the theoretical intersections of commodity culture, desire, and the colonial encounter."
--Mathew Engelke, "American Anthropologist"

"Burke has produced an imaginative, even thought-provoking, work. . . . "Lifeboy Men, Lux Women" remains a lively addition to the historical literature on Zimbabwe and southern Africa more generally. It will no doubt be variously acclaimed and assailed, but it is unlikely to be ignored."
--Michael O. West, "Journal of Social History"

"["Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women's]" greatest contribution is its theoretical connection of previously disparate fields of inquiry and its development of perspectives and strategies about the changing conceptualization and realization of cleanliness and body care in Zimbabwe."
--Jeanne Marie Penvenne, "The Journal of Interdisciplinary History"

"Burke . . . has a keen eye for many ironies and paradoxes occurring at the point of reception, where African men and women, variously located in colonial society, gave their own twist and meaning to products and messages as these reached them. . . . [A]dmirably nuanced and subtle."""

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--Rob Kroes, "The Journal of American History"

"This important, engaging, and theoretically sophisticated study explores the history of consumption in twentieth-century central Africa. . . . [A]t the same time that Burke provides a compelling 'biography' of a commodity, he raises and reframes a series of crucial questions regarding the histories of modern African societies.""
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--Charles Ambler, "American Historical Review"

"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."
--Timothy Scarnecchia, "International Journal of African Historical Studies"

“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

"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

From the Back Cover:

"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

About this edition

• Publisher: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd.
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0718500679
• ISBN 13: 9780718500672
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 328