Knowledge of life: health, strength and labour in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Abstract

The article examines the production of new modes of calculation, calibration and measurement of bodies at work in the timber plantations of northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa — modes that echo older, diverse technologies of self and health while producing new ways of talking about the body and its social context. I describe two sets of substances that augment wellbeing for those who work the plantations, one in the form of a nutrition intervention and the other a class of popular curatives that operate in the registers of traditional medicine, vitamin supplement, and herbal tonic. I track the concepts and techniques of measurement, calibration and intervention in this locale in order to understand how they employ and generate ideas about culture, history, and wellbeing to produce new populations available for labour — as timber plantation labourers and as compliant HIV surveillance subjects.