Is Zambia “Africa”? Is the Copperbelt Zambia? Does the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute equal Africanist anthropology? This ambitious and insightful book leads to questions such as these. What is an ethnographic account of urban Zambian life is at the same time also a critique of anthropological theory in Africa and a discussion of how “Africans” understand modernity. Author James Ferguson conflates the Copperbelt and urban Africa in ways that are frustrating to the reader while also raising significant and exciting questions about the study of contemporary African society.

The problem of conflation is apparent in the very first sentences: “In the mid-1960s, everyone knew, Africa was ‘emerging.’ And no place was emerging faster or more hopefully than Zambia” (p. 1). Although Ferguson immediately moves into a quite detailed overview of what happened in Zambia between the 1960s and the 1990s, he continues to refer to Africa, in general, presumably seeing Zambia as a model for what has occurred on the continent. He is less concerned with the economic and political developments of the period than with what they have meant. He argues that a “myth of modernity” was accepted both by social scientists and by local people themselves.

For Ferguson, the “modern” and “modernization” are not simply concepts used by scholars. Rather, they have become key concepts in the minds of urban Zambians who understood that by moving to the Copperbelt and working in the copper mines, they were part of a significant process of industrialization, urbanization, and modernization.

But Ferguson is writing more than an ethnography of change on the Copperbelt. He is also concerned with the anthropological theory that derived from research carried out on the Copperbelt, under the auspices of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, that led to the Manchester School of social anthropology, with its focus on social change and urbanization. He argues that anthropologists became attached to a “metanarrative of emergence and progress” and that “scholarly thinking in Africa and elsewhere continues to be haunted ... by the imagined teleologies of the modern” (p. 16). Thus, he offers his book not as an ethnography of a particular locale or set of people, but as a way of “getting around the whole terrain of an urban Africa that continues to be haunted by ideas of modernity” (p. 21).

Ferguson uses several distinct techniques to accomplish this task. First, he uses rich ethnographic detail, based on his research on Copperbelt men over a period of years. This material shows that men who had assumed a degree of permanence to their lives in the urban setting experienced a quite different reality in the late 1980s and found that they were unable to maintain the type of lifestyle that they had expected. In several chapters, he also provides inset boxes with direct observations and comments on those observations made by his field assistant. Elsewhere, he presents a set of specific cases of individuals and also quotes from letters he received from some men the appendix contains more of these letters.

Ferguson also makes clear his theoretical concerns through several stylistic devices. In particular, he uses chapter titles and headings that refer to Rhodes-Livingstone Institute publications, such as “Open Systems and Closed Mines” (p. 17). He discusses specific theoretical perspectives that were based on earlier research in urban Zambia, and he engages in a critique of those perspectives. Borrowing the concept of a “full house” of strategies from Stephen Jay Gould, he argues that, contrary to the views of a linear trajectory from traditional to urban and modern, contemporary Zambians, instead, have followed a wide variety of strategies:“I suggest that the way to get beyond the limitations of linear and teleological accounts is to give full weight to the wealth of coexisting variation at any given moment of the historical process. ... The central reality is rather a complex range of actual strategies followed by actually existing Copperbelt residents over a period of time” (p. 80). He continues by arguing that “the more vital parts of the bush of residential strategy today lie ... in modes of straddling the urban-rural divide that seem, to the modernist imagination, as out of date as a trilobite, or a bacterium” (p. 81).

In this discussion, Ferguson refers to very little of the literature that focuses on migration and rural–urban linkages in West Africa. He almost seems to suggest that he is the first researcher to notice that many urban residents follow strategies later in life that involve some type of connection to rural communities, and the first to observe that no single linear trajectory runs from tradition to modernity, whereas, in fact, a considerable literature exists on this subject.

Nevertheless, his discussion of urban culture and the meanings that Zambians themselves associate with their situations leads to a set of significant conclusions about the ways in which people themselves have accepted ideas of modernity. Ferguson’s chapter on urban style is especially rich in insights. He argues that among urban men there are two major cultural styles, which he terms localist and cosmopolitan. He sees cultural style as a “performative competence,” similar to linguistic dialect or accent, which “tends to stick with a person” (p. 96). He is suggesting, then, that “localist” and “cosmopolitan” styles are performative aspects of daily life, not values or worldviews. Although he recognizes the possibility of code-switching, or of being able to perform different styles in different settings, Ferguson argues that the ability to do this is limited to a few “virtuosos.” Language and clothing are especially key; Ferguson suggests that a person who speaks urban Bemba may not have the linguistic competence to perform, and be accepted, in a rural area he claims as “home.”

Here, as elsewhere, Ferguson goes beyond the Zambian case to make claims for all of urban Africa. Although he states that he is not equating “cosmopolitan” with “Western,” he also argues that “de facto, cosmopolitan styles in urban Africa are dominated by Western and Western-derived cultural forms” (p. 108). He discusses dress and fashion in some detail. No single pattern based on Western style is found throughout urban Africa. In urban Nigeria, for example, cosmopolitan fashions vary with the context and, for the most sophisticated occasions, consist of clothes derived from “traditional” attire, not from Western styles.

This brings me back to my initial questions. Ferguson presents a set of stimulating and important theoretical ideas, which lead to insights about the culture and style of contemporary urban Zambians but which also lead to more questions than answers about how such perspectives apply to urban Africa, more generally.