Distant Companions

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.- Janet L. Parpart (African Economic History)