Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (review)
Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (review)
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现代性的期望：赞比亚铜带上城市生活的神话和意义（评论）
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发表时间：
2001
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通讯作者：
Charles Piot
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作者：
Charles Piot
现代性的期待：赞比亚铜带城市生活的神话与意义。詹姆斯·弗格森。伯克利：加州大学出版社，1999；“非洲衰落”的故事——一个深陷经济和政治危机的大陆，现代化项目不仅失败了，而且还发生了逆转——这些天已经变得再熟悉不过了。正如大众媒体所描述的那样，这是一个典型的指责受害者的故事，涉及裙带关系、腐败、盲目的种族依恋和永恒的传统。在学术文献中，它经常成为非洲遭受殖民主义和新殖民主义、疾病和环境侵害的叙述。无论人们对原因的描述是什么，这些问题似乎令人沮丧地难以解决，而且左右两派的“非洲悲观主义者”人数都在不断增加。詹姆斯·弗格森（James Ferguson）的新书涉水进入了这个令人不安的领域，分析了赞比亚铜带的兴衰，并对伴随其崛起的学术/人类学文献进行了精彩的批判——这是弗格森的标志。在20世纪50年代和60年代，铜带被誉为非洲的成功故事——“非洲伯明翰”——铜带生产了世界上大部分的铜，并极大地提高了当地的生活水平。观察人士认为，这就是非洲的未来，一个蓬勃发展的工业部门的利润可以支持快速现代化的城市人口的未来。然而，与非洲大陆其他大部分地区一样，铜带也在20世纪80年代迅速陷入衰退。铜价下跌和外债增加导致了人们熟悉的高失业率、政府服务暂停和基础设施被忽视的下行周期。今天，铜带已经成了一片废墟，正如弗格森所说，“历史似乎正在倒转。”去工业化取代了工业化，工人们离开城市回到土地上，矿山被卖回私人公司——南非英美公司——在殖民时期拥有它们。弗格森在这里关注的与其说是崩溃的原因，不如说是描绘其社会和文化影响。因此，他描述了被煤矿解雇的失业工人的绝望，无法再指望养老金的退休人员，不情愿地被迫回到农村的城市移民，以及在被忽视、嫉妒和巫术的肮脏故事中表现出来的城乡紧张关系。弗格森复活了一种古老的人类学方法，他运用案例研究的方法，对那些离开铜带城市回到农村的失业和退休工人进行了跟踪研究，取得了有益的效果。这些屈辱和背叛的故事是现代在千禧年非洲失败的尖锐证明。弗格森巧妙地将这个经济危机和崩溃的故事折叠成一个关于人类学认识论危机的平行故事，他认为，由著名的罗德·利文斯通研究所（Rhodes Livingstone institute）的成员领导的20世纪50年代和60年代的铜带人类学，在不知不觉中依赖并具体化了现代主义的范畴。…
Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. JAMES FERGUSON. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999; 326 pp. The story of "Africa in decline"--of a continent in deep economic and political crisis, where the modernization project has not only failed but also reversed itself-has become all-too-familiar these days. As narrated in the popular press, it is typically told as a blame-the-victim tale of nepotism, corruption, blind ethnic attachment, and timeless tradition. In the scholarly literature, it often becomes a narrative of Africa's victimization-by colonialism and neocolonialism, disease and the environment. Whatever one's script of the causes, the issues seem depressingly intractable and the "Afro-pessimists"on both right and left-keep growing in number. James Ferguson's new book wades into this unsettling terrain with an analysis of the rise and fall of the Zambian Copperbelt, and-a Ferguson trademark-a brilliant critique of the scholarly/anthropological literature that accompanied its rise. Trumpeted during the 1950s and 60s as an African success story-an "African Birmingham"-the Copperbelt produced much of the world's copper and dramatically raised local standards of living. Here, observers suggested, was Africa's future, a future in which the profits of a booming industrial sector could support a rapidly modernizing urban population. Just as precipitously, however, and along with much of the rest of the continent, the Copperbelt slid into recession during the 1980s. Falling copper prices and increasing external debt led into the familiar downward cycle of high unemployment, the suspension of government services, and the neglect of infrastructure. Today, the Copperbelt lies in ruins, and, as Ferguson puts it, "history seems to be running in reverse." De-industrialization has replaced industrialization, workers are leaving the city to return to the land, and the mines are being sold back to the private company-the Anglo-American Corporation of South Africa-that owned them during the colonial period. It is not so much with the causes of collapse that Ferguson is here concerned, as with mapping its social and cultural effects. Thus, he describes the desperation of unemployed workers laid off by the mines, of retirees who can no longer count on their pensions, of urban migrants unwillingly forced back to the villages, of rural-urban tensions made manifest in sordid tales of neglect, jealousy, and witchcraft. Resurrecting an old anthropological device, Ferguson deploys the case study method to useful effect in following unemployed and retired workers who have left the cities of the Copperbelt and returned to the land. These stories of humiliation and betrayal are poignant testaments to modernity's failure in this Africa at the Millenium. Ingeniously folding this story of economic crisis and collapse into a parallel story about the epistemological crisis in anthropology, Ferguson argues that Copperbelt anthropology of the 1950s and 60s-onducted by members of the famed Rhodes Livingstone Institute-unwittingly relied on and reified modernist categories. …