This presentation examines aluminum pans as a prosthetic of infrastructure and intimacy in Ghana’s market landscapes. Drawing on research from her recently published book, “Headstrong: Women Porters, Blackness, and Modernity in Accra”, Bowles explains how porter work is governed by feminized regimes of obligation, patience, and care. Centering the everyday use of aluminum pans and the scientific history of aluminum, this lecture traces how an ordinary object can mediate power relationships between traders and the state, facilitate modes of protection and mutuality among workers, and re-enact colonial legacies of racial capitalism and uneven accumulation. Bowles also explores how intimacy functions as ethnographic method that reveals how porter work is a prototype of the global gig economy that animates the racial logics of coloniality and the improvisational strategies of precarious workers.

Laurian Bowles is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Davidson College. She is a cultural and visual anthropologist who researches, writes and teaches about social mobility and the visual economies of women’s labor in Ghana and the African Diaspora.