Home Expectations of Modernity
book: Expectations of Modernity
Book
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Expectations of Modernity

Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt
  • James Ferguson
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 1999
View more publications by University of California Press

About this book

Once lauded as the wave of the African future, Zambia's economic boom in the 1960s and early 1970s was fueled by the export of copper and other primary materials. Since the mid-1970s, however, the urban economy has rapidly deteriorated, leaving workers scrambling to get by. Expectations of Modernity explores the social and cultural responses to this prolonged period of sharp economic decline. Focusing on the experiences of mineworkers in the Copperbelt region, James Ferguson traces the failure of standard narratives of urbanization and social change to make sense of the Copperbelt's recent history. He instead develops alternative analytic tools appropriate for an "ethnography of decline."

Ferguson shows how the Zambian copper workers understand their own experience of social, cultural, and economic "advance" and "decline." Ferguson's ethnographic study transports us into their lives—the dynamics of their relations with family and friends, as well as copper companies and government agencies.

Theoretically sophisticated and vividly written, Expectations of Modernity will appeal not only to those interested in Africa today, but to anyone contemplating the illusory successes of today's globalizing economy.

Author / Editor information

Ferguson James :

James Ferguson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of The Anti-Politics Machine: "Development," Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (1990). He is also coeditor, with Akhil Gupta, of Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science (California, 1997) and Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology (1997).


Publicly Available Download PDF
i

Publicly Available Download PDF
vii

Publicly Available Download PDF
ix

Publicly Available Download PDF
xi

Publicly Available Download PDF
xiii

Publicly Available Download PDF
xv

From "Emerging Africa" to the Ethnography of Decline
Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
1

Mobile Workers, Modernist Narratives, and the "Full House" of Urban-Rural Residential Strategies
Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
38

Theorizing Cultural Dualism
Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
82

The Micropolitical Economy of "Return" Migration
Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
123

Men, Women, and "the Modern Family"
Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
166

Signification, Noise, and Cosmopolitan Style
Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
207

Abjection and the Aftermath of Modernism
Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
234

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
255

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
259

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
269

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
295

Requires Authentication Unlicensed

Licensed
321

Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
October 1, 1999
eBook ISBN:
9780520922280
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
343
Downloaded on 18.10.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1525/9780520922280/html
Scroll to top button