Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt

Journal of Third World Studies, Spring 2003 by Murdoch, Norman H

Ferguson provides an excellent field study primer in anthropology and ethnography as well as a fine intellectual-cultural-social history of developing countries in the early 21st century, particularly in southern Africa. He concludes that for many Zambians "recent history has been experienced not-as the modernization plot led one to expect-as a process of moving forward or joining up with the world but as a process that has pushed them out of the place in the world that they once occupied." "Abjection" pushed them down "into a world of rags and huts where the color bar had always told 'Africans' they belonged." (p. 236) As for the future, Ferguson asks a question that puzzles all friends of people in the Third World who are moving downward: "How can we reformulate the responsibility of first-world citizens, organizations, and governments to impoverished and disaster-stricken regions?" (p. 253). His answer is necessarily equivocal; but he points to several possibilities of a "new world order" focused on "ecology, sexuality, religion, and human rights" along with a. "revitalized Marxist critique, a re-energized global labor movement, a politicized humanitarianism, even a rejuvenated Keynesianism," But he believes that "resistance to the brutalities of global capitalism...must coexist with older forms, scrounged-like circular migration...from the dustbin of history." (p. 257)

Norman H. Murdoch University of Cincinnati