conditions to explore the dynamics of belonging for African immigrant home care workers. This well-researched ethnography is a welcome addition to studies of race, immigrant incorporation, labor, and aging. Her main argument is that eldercare is a mediating institution for immigrant incorporation and political belonging. Coe defines political belonging as “the affective ways in which people identify with political orders and political forms of membership, or feel excluded from them, through perceptions and performances of commonality, mutuality, and material and immaterial attachments” (7). Challenging existing sociological research on immigrants in which workplaces are sites for successful immigrant incorporation, Coe persuasively argues that the experiences on the job that these African immigrants have lead them to take an oppositional approach to sentiments of belonging as residents of the United States. Coe makes the point that care work both creates and destroys feelings of belonging, highlighting both the intimacy and social distancing that occur for African immigrant home care workers using a range of examples and experiences throughout the text. Moreover, Coe successfully contextualizes her discussion of care work in the United States within larger global labor flows as well as within national and local policies that affect the workplace for home care workers. The book is organized into an introduction and conclusion and five substantial chapters, in which each chapter is followed by an interlude that focuses on the individual stories of certain African home care workers in detail. The introduction of the book provides a theoretical discussion of political belonging and recognition, explores statistics on growing numbers of African immigrants in the United States and the expansion of the direct-care workforce in general, and describes the methods employed in the study. Moreover, Coe also discusses what brought her to the research topic, as she moved from her ethnographic work in Ghana to conducting research among Ghanaian immigrants, many of whom worked in home care in the United States. She also reflects on her own personal experiences as a middle-class white woman whose family employed care workers in different capacities in the past. This positionality was interrogated in relation to her interviews, where “my loyalties swung back and forth between patients and care workers in their sometimes conflictual relationships” (29). Coe’s experiences helped her to create a richly layered text providing multiple perspectives on interpersonal relations and conflict in home care settings. Chapter 1 focuses on the racialization of the care force, examining how African immigrants are often pulled into care work very soon after arriving in the United States. Here Coe also examines being African as a form of “cultural capital” that draws on certain stereotypes that support conceptions of Africans as natural caregivers. Chapter 2 is one of the more compelling chapters in the book, examining racial insults and exercises of power. The chapter highlights stories of humiliation in which African care workers are mistreated by patients and their families, looking at these incidents from multiple perspectives, including those of the patients and the caregivers themselves. Coe discusses here metaphors of slavery and servitude that are used by both care workers and patients to describe a number of situations, especially in relation to conflicts over household labor. Coe highlights how the care workers often act as a buffer between patients and their families, such that the care workers receive the brunt of the aggression and abuse that come from ill patients, including racial insults. Chapter 3 looks at how forms of kinship are created between patients and their families and African immigrant care workers through kin terms and naming practices, kin behavior, and inheritance. Chapter 4 looks at feelings of irritation among patients and their families in relation to care workers while also exploring the vexing complications that arise from gift giving and expectations of reciprocity. Chapter 5 focuses on the real-life impacts of local and national policies that shape low wages, benefits, contingent employment, and negative workplace conditions for home care workers. One of the valuable contributions of this book is to show how the often negative experiences that African immigrants have doing care work (as part of an often overlooked and underappreciated workforce that is largely staffed by marginalized racial groups and women) shape their perceptions of belonging in the United States more generally. As a reader, I wanted to know more about the lives of the African immigrant care workers before immigrating and outside the workplace. Yet Coe’s focus on workplace dynamics in general fills a specific gap in the existing literature through her examination of the distinct experiences of African immigrant care workers. Overall, I highly recommend this ethnography as a crucial text for undergraduate and graduate students, general scholars, and practitioners alike, especially if they have interests in aging, immigration, and labor practices.

中文翻译：

---

在人类世劳作

探索非洲移民家庭护理工作者的归属感动态的条件。这种经过充分研究的民族志是对种族、移民融入、劳动力和老龄化研究的一个受欢迎的补充。她的主要论点是，老年护理是移民融入和政治归属的中介机构。Coe 将政治归属感定义为“人们通过对共同性、相互性以及物质和非物质依附的感知和表现，认同政治秩序和成员的政治形式，或感到被排除在外的情感方式”（7）。挑战现有的关于移民的社会学研究，在这些研究中，工作场所是成功移民融入的场所，Coe 令人信服地辩称，这些非洲移民的工作经历导致他们对作为美国居民的归属感采取反对态度。Coe 指出，护理工作既会创造归属感，也会破坏归属感，他在整本书中使用了一系列例子和经历，强调了非洲移民家庭护理工作者的亲密感和社交距离。此外，Coe 成功地将她对美国护理工作的讨论融入到更大的全球劳动力流动以及影响家庭护理工作者工作场所的国家和地方政策中。本书由引言和结论以及五个实质性章节组成，其中每一章后面都有一个插曲，详细介绍了某些非洲家庭护理人员的个人故事。本书的引言对政治归属和承认进行了理论讨论，探讨了美国非洲移民人数不断增加和直接护理劳动力总体扩张的统计数据，并描述了研究中采用的方法。此外，当她从在加纳的民族志工作转向在加纳移民中进行研究时，Coe 还讨论了是什么让她进入研究主题，其中许多人在美国从事家庭护理工作。她还反思了自己作为一名中产阶级白人女性的个人经历，她的家人过去曾以不同身份雇用护理人员。这种立场在她的采访中受到质疑，在采访中，“我的忠诚度在患者和护理人员之间有时会发生冲突的关系中来回摇摆不定”（29）。Coe 的经历帮助她创作了一个层次丰富的文本，提供了关于家庭护理环境中人际关系和冲突的多种观点。第 1 章侧重于护理队伍的种族化，研究非洲移民在抵达美国后很快就经常被拉入护理工作。在这里，Coe 还将非洲人视为一种“文化资本”形式，它借鉴了某些支持将非洲人视为自然照顾者的观念的刻板印象。第 2 章是本书中最引人注目的章节之一，审查种族侮辱和权力行使。本章重点介绍了非洲护理人员受到患者及其家人虐待的屈辱故事，从多个角度看待这些事件，包括患者和护理人员本身的角度。Coe 在这里讨论了护理人员和患者用来描述许多情况的奴隶制和奴役的隐喻，特别是与家务劳动冲突有关的情况。Coe 强调了护理人员如何经常充当患者与其家人之间的缓冲，以至于护理人员首当其冲地受到来自病人的攻击和虐待，包括种族侮辱。第 3 章着眼于如何通过亲属术语和命名惯例、亲属行为和继承在患者及其家人和非洲移民护理工作者之间建立亲属关系的形式。第 4 章着眼于患者及其家人对护理人员的刺激感，同时还探讨了因送礼和对互惠的期望而引起的令人烦恼的并发症。第 5 章重点关注地方和国家政策对家庭护理工作者的低工资、福利、临时就业和负面工作环境的影响。本书的重要贡献之一是展示了非洲移民从事护理工作（作为经常被忽视和被低估的劳动力的一部分，主要由边缘化的种族群体和妇女担任工作人员）的负面经历如何塑造他们的归属感。美国更普遍。作为读者，我想更多地了解非洲移民护理人员在移民之前和工作场所之外的生活。然而，Coe 对工作场所动态的总体关注填补了现有文献中的一个特定空白，通过她对非洲移民护理工作者的独特经历的研究。总的来说，我强烈推荐这本民族志作为本科生和研究生、普通学者和从业人员的重要文本，特别是如果他们对老龄化、移民和劳动实践感兴趣。