Cosmopolitan and Localist Styles

1
Cosmopolitan and Localist Styles

• On Chapter 3

2
Social Hierarchy is Marked through Culture

• Mitchells quote, p. 105-106
• Rural life traditional past indigenous
  African ways
• City life Westernized

3
But urban and rural people are connected in one
social system.

• Economic ties between them
• Male migration to earn bridewealth to marry a
  woman from home village
• Remittances sent home to support rural kin
• Urban residents retired to home villages

4
But the distinction between urban and rural
people seemed not so great.

• Some practices thought to be traditional in
  fact seemed to be growing in strength and
  intensity in urban areas, the areas considered
  most modern. These were expected to wither
  away with modernity.
• Ethnicity (a loyalty to the nation superseding
  ethnic identities)
• Witchcraft (a belief in science and medicine
  superseding traditional practices of healing
  and ensuring well-being)

5
Why Was Ethnic Identity Stronger among Urban
Africans than Rural Ones in Southern Africa?

• Home-town associations among miners and other
  urban folks, to help one another in town and
  promote development projects at home
• Concern for tradition in order to control women
  at home
• African intellectuals promoted ethnic identities
  in alliance with chiefs (recall the Nso kingdom)
  who were supported by Indirect Rule.
• Missionaries wanted to teach in the local
  languages in their schools.
• Vail, p. 66

6
Why did a concern with witchcraft grow among
urban, modern Africans?

• Witchcraft was about moral obligations towards
  others
• Social sanction against hoarding wealth/not
  sharing ones wealth
• Ferguson, p.118
• Social stratification some people had more
  wealth than others
• Fear of witchcraft or violence allows for
  economic levelling between migrants and their
  rural kin
• Continued salience of witchcraft idioms to deal
  with the uncertainty and economic stratification
  created by capitalism.

7
Some More Challenges to the Concept of Tribe in
Africa

• A sense of ethnic identity can grow (or decline)
  in changing circumstances (what are the
  conditions that cause an emotional attachment to
  ethnic identity to decline or increase?)
• Cultural pluralism within a group subcultures.
  Men and women, people in different social classes
  might see the world differently. Examples?

8
But this social hierarchy has become locally
significant as cultural styles among the same
group urban Zambians

• Localism vs. cosmopolitanism
• Localism and cosmopolitanism are strategies of
  survival under compulsory systems, in this case
  the compulsory political economy of rural-urban
  relations in the deteriorating economic space of
  late twentieth-century Zambia (Ferguson 1996, p.
  99).

• Some Zambian young people who have gathered to
  recite a poem at a church youth meeting.

9
Styles as Identities

• One cant take them on and off like clothing
• One invests resources (time, money, energy) into
  these styles (Ferguson, p. 101)
• One cant change ones style immediately or
  change styles in different situations
  (code-switching, Ferguson, p. 107)
• Ferguson, p. 98

• Some Zambian young people

10
Being Localist

• Why would one want to take on a local style?
• What would be the dangers or difficulties?

• Young people performing a traditional dance in
  southern Zambia as part of a church youth meeting.

11
Being Cosmopolitan

• Some peer educators working for Youth Vision
  Zambia, a sexual and reproductive health and
  rights group

• Why would one want to be cosmopolitan?
• What are the dangers?