Thomas Cousins

I am a social anthropologist of South Africa and my fieldwork has focused on the question of what it is to live well in the peripheries of the post-apartheid state. I am interested in forms of life and endurance, and the living and its milieu. My fieldwork on the timber plantations of KwaZulu-Natal sought to understand the work of repair amongst plantation labourers who consume a corporate nutrition intervention, amongst other substances. New fieldwork, in the same locale, is concerned with communities resisting a coal mine in the midst of communal land under customary tenure, and in the midst of one of the largest demographic surveillance sites in the world, and alongside the famous conservation areas of the Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park and the iSimangaliso Wetland Park. I am interested in the various concepts of life that emerge in debates about the Anthropocene.