Lisa Shutt

My research is located in Gabon (Central Africa) and deals specifically with the way categories of labor are assigned different values and meanings in that country. I am particularly concerned with the way issues of work have impacted Gabon's nation-building project as well as the way memories and experiences of transnational migration and of colonialism/neo-colonialism have impacted the way work and labor have come to be understood. I have carried out three months of fieldwork in the capital city of Libreville where living with the Biyogho family and working with "Pito" Nuema Ongoro has also enabled and encouraged my studies of the Fang language and ethnicity. Currently, my research is located in Gabon's economic center and the primary site of its oil industry, Port Gentil. Constructed exclusively as a place of work, Port Gentil embodies the tensions between work, nationality and citizenship that mark the contemporary social and political scene in Gabon. Focusing on Port Gentil as a site of daily interactions and as a construct in national imagination, my current research examines how meanings of work define and constitute nationhood and the state-citizen relationship in Gabon. My past research concentrated on the perceived authenticity created by the Appellation d'Origine Contrôllée laws in France.

Ethnographic areas: Gabon, Francophone Africa, France

Topical concentrations: work/labor practices, colonialism/post-colonialism, gender, race nation-building/nationalism, foodways, history of anthropology