In the mid-1960s, everyone knew, Africa was “emerging.” And no place was emerging faster or more hopefully than Zambia, the newly independent nation that had previously been known as Northern Rhodesia. The initiation of large-scale copper mining in the late 1920s had set off a burst of industrial development that had utterly transformed the country; by the time of Independence in 1964, that industrial growth seemed sure to propel the new nation rapidly along the path of what was called “modernization.” From being a purely rural agricultural territory at the time of its takeover by Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa...

Urbanization has long been conceived as the dominant strand in the process of “social change” in Zambia, and the Copperbelt as a key locus for that process. Many of the most crucial and hotly debated questions posed about the larger society have hinged on the fundamental conception of “urbanizationm”—from colonial-era conflicts over “the Native question” and the role of urban Africans, to post-Independence ideas of an emerging Zambia whose modernity was guaranteed by its industrial urban core, to more recent structural adjustment prescriptions for checking “overurbanization” and “urban bias.” But there has been an uncertainty at the core of all...

In an era of decline, expectations of urban permanence have been disappointed, and Copperbelt workers have been increasingly obliged (whether they wish to or not) to contemplate and plan for rural futures. Indeed, migration on the Copperbelt has been, in recent years, more a matter of leaving the city than coming to it. But while coming to town is a chapter in a well-rehearsed story (urbanization), fleeing it opens up a tale not quite so easily told. Social scientists, confronted with the apparent anomaly of urban-to-rural migration, tend to abandon the familiar “-izations” of the modernist narrative for premodern circular...

To get a good understanding of the ways that the harsh political-economic realities of the Copperbelt’s recent past have conditioned workers’ urban lives, we must have a view of the range of different ways in which workers have experienced and dealt with those realities. But to capture that “full house” of variation-to convey the sense of a real “bush” of possible trajectories, thick with branches (and not a spindly tree with a few spare ideal types)-we need to move from the general analytic model developed in the last chapter toward the ethnographic concreteness of actual lives played out over time....

I first became aware that something had happened to my idea of modernity not during my fieldwork in Zambia but some years earlier, when I paid my first adult visit to Disneyland. The spectacular, glittering amusement park that I had visited several times during my middle-class, southern California childhood had aged badly; like the deteriorating Anaheim neighborhood in which it lay, it had seen better days. With the premises visibly fraying at the edges, the Magic Kingdom was losing its magic; the seamless illusions on which the Disneyland experience depended were in danger of being laid bare as cheap gimmicks...

The photograph on the following page is a reminder of an unsettling sort of fieldwork experience. At a glance, it looks like an example of a familiar genre of anthropological field photo: the ethnographer in a celebratory state of good-natured communion with his informants: a classic field snapshot that serves simultaneously as a personal keepsake of a pleasant evening and a public testimonial of the achievement of good rapport. But this fieldwork photo has a twist. For the people in the photo are not my Copperbelt informants but a group of strangers I ran into in a Lusaka bar. I...

When Godfrey Wilson published his “Essay on the Economics of Detribalization in Northern Rhodesia” in 1941, he considered that the Africans of Northern Rhodesia had just entered into an economically and culturally interconnected “world society,” a “huge world-wide community” within which they would soon find a place for themselves as something more than peasants and unskilled workers (Wilson 1941, 12-13). The “civilized” clothing and manners to which so many urban Africans attached such importance, he argued, amounted to a claim to full membership in that worldwide community. Indeed, Wilson suggested, it was for this very reason that many white settlers...

As we move into the final year of the twentieth century, the long process of economic decline that I have described for the Zambian Copperbelt seems almost shockingly relevant to the news of the day. In Russia, the last few years have brought “the worst economic and social devastation ever suffered by a modern country in peacetime,” according to one authority; in the name of reform, the country has experienced “its virtual demodernization” (Cohen 1998). Indonesia is in the midst of an economic collapse that makes the U.S. depression of the 1930s look mild, while many other Asian economies are...