Anthropology Colloquium: Laurian Bowles

Aluminum’s Past, Contemporary Coloniality and Porter Labor in Ghana Reading aluminum’s infrastructural history alongside Accra’s contemporary market porters, this talk argues that women porters’ embodied labor extends and exposes the same extractive logics, revealing enduring coloniality within Ghana’s built and human infrastructures. Centering the everyday use of aluminum pans and the scientific history of aluminum, Bowles traces how an ordinary object mediates power relationships between traders and the state, facilitate modes of protection and mutuality among workers, and animates racial ca