Home › Books & Reviews › Capsule Reviews › Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt

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

James Ferguson
Reviewed by By Gail M. Gerhart
July/August 2000
Print Email
Login or Register to leave a comment.

Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.
James Ferguson
University of California Press
1999
343 pp.
0520217012
$45.00

Ferguson is an astute analyst of ideologies of development and the misunderstandings they can generate. In this impressive study of economic decay and its social impact in Zambia, he brilliantly challenges the lingering assumptions of modernization theory to show how mineworkers are adapting to ever-shrinking incomes, diminished self-respect, and growing dependence on rural kinship networks for support in their old age. He focuses mainly on the micropolitical economy of the miners who make or prepare to make a painful migration back to the land. He also deconstructs the mythology of modernization that pervaded the anthropology of central Africa 40 years ago, in particular its misreading of trends in African family life. In his conclusion, Ferguson unleashes a broadside against the brutalities of a global capitalism that can so cruelly dash the aspirations of a country like Zambia and calls for a new politicized humanitarianism to push the issue of global inequalities higher on the world's agenda.

Related

Essay, Mar/Apr 2001
America's Two-Front Economic Conflict
C. Fred Bergsten

America now faces the prospect of economic conflicts with both Europe and East Asia. The United States and the European Union have already fired the first shots of retaliatory sanctions over their ever-growing trade disputes. On the other side of the world, meanwhile, Asian countries are creating a bloc of their own that could include preferential trade arrangements and an Asian Monetary Fund. These developments could produce a tripolar world and hamper global economic integration. To avert this outcome, the United States must quell its domestic backlash against globalization and reassert its economic leadership in the world. The new Bush administration should make multilateral trade liberalization a top priority -- or it will face unpleasant economic and political consequences as the U.S. and foreign economies slow.

Read
Essay, Mar/Apr 2001
Trade Policy for a Networked World
Charlene Barshefsky

The information economy creates both opportunities and challenges for global trade. The United States must lead its trading partners and multilateral organizations to extend the free-trade, open-market principles that govern physical goods to cover the intangible products now zipping through wire and air. Trade policy can lay the path for future growth in the new economy -- or block it.

Read
Essay, May/Jun 2001
The U.S. Trade Deficit: A Dangerous Obsession
Joseph P. Quinlan And Marc Chandler

The United States is obsessed with its ever-growing trade deficit. Yet trade is no longer a valid measure of global competitiveness. Today U.S. firms compete in the world marketplace through foreign-affiliate sales instead of exports -- and they do so with unparalleled success. Overblown fears about the burgeoning trade deficit, along with a slowing U.S. economy, could spark protectionist policies in Washington, which could then trigger retaliations around the globe. This outcome -- not the size of the trade deficit -- is the greatest danger.

Read