Of the several forces reshaping West African rural societies and economies in the post-colonial period, one of the most pervasive is the rapid growth of urban demand. This book studies a Yoruba community in the supply hinterland of Ibadan over twenty years. It tells the social and agricultural history of its various producers, from the Nigerian civil war, via the oil boom and bust, to structural adjustment. It argues that principles of occupational organisation inherited from the past are now being applied to the creation of a competitive and responsive regional market that promises to be one of the most important social forms in West Africa's future.
The main body of the book is based on anthropological field research. It describes the contours of growth from 1968-88 through narratives of change for all the major participants. The final section draws together all the threads and discusses the interplay amongst the technical repertoire for production in a savanna ecology, forces emanating from the political economy of the urban hinterland, and the tenets of Yoruba occupational culture.
The main body of the book is based on anthropological field research. It describes the contours of growth from 1968-88 through narratives of change for all the major participants. The final section draws together all the threads and discusses the interplay amongst the technical repertoire for production in a savanna ecology, forces emanating from the political economy of the urban hinterland, and the tenets of Yoruba occupational culture.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Unevenness and inequalities form a central fact of African economic experiences. This book challenges conventional wisdoms about economic performance and possible policies for economic development in African countries, using the striking variation in economic performance as a starting point. African Economic Development: Evidence, Theory, and Policy highlights not only difference between countries, but also variation within countries. It focuses on issues relating to gender, class, and ethnic identity, such as neo-natal mortality, school dropout, and horticultural and agribusiness exports. Variations in these areas point to opportunities for changing perfomance, reducing reducing inequalities, learning from other policy experiences, and escaping the ties of structure and the legacies of a colonial past. African Economic Development rejects teleological illusions and Eurocentric prejudice, criticizing a range of orthodox and heterodox economists for their cavalier attitude to evidence. Instead, it shows that seeing the contradictions of capitalism for what they are - fundamental and enduring - may help policy officials protect themselves against the misleading idea that development can be expected to be a smooth, linear process, or that it would be if certain impediments were removed. Drawing on decades of research and policy experience, this book combines careful use of available evidence from a range of African countries with economic insights to make the policy case for specific types of public sector investment.
"What does it mean to say that rural areas of Africa are poor? Many people insist that in rural African countries areas poverty is prevalent. This is either because the smallholder agricultural practices are unproductive or it is because economic policies have not protected and promoted African farming. But whether this deprivation is the fault of the peasant, or the government, both sides agree on the facts of rural poverty. However in both cases rural poverty is described using measures which make it hard, if not impossible, to capture new forms of wealth that rural people may be accruing. These new forms of wealth, which largely comprise productive assets, are especially important because they feature so prominently in rural people's own definitions of wealth. Using an unprecedented collection of longitudinal surveys, in which experienced researchers have revisited villages which they have known for decades, we track surprising increases in assets in diverse locations in Tanzania. These findings the result is a compilation which is fascinating in itself and important far understanding of rural economies development data and agricultural policy"--
Drawing on rich ethnographic data as well as archaeological evidence, The Boundaries of Ancient Trade challenges long-standing conceptions of highly centralized sociopolitical and economic organization and trade along the Afar salt trail—one of the last economically significant caravan-based trade routes in the world. For thousands of years, farmers in the Tigray, Amhara, and Afar regions of Ethiopia and Eritrea have run caravans of nearly 250,000 people and pack animals annually along an eighty-mile route through both cold, high-altitude farmlands and some of the hottest volcanic desert terrain on earth. In her fieldwork, archaeologist Helina Solomon Woldekiros followed the route with her own donkey and camel caravan, observing and interviewing over 150 Arho (caravaners), salt miners, salt cutters, warehouse owners, brokers, shop owners, and salt village residents to model the political economy of the ancient Aksumite state. The first integrated ethnoarchaeological and archaeological research on this legendary route, this volume provides evidence that informal economies and local participation have played a critical role in regional trade and, ultimately, in maintaining the considerable power of the Aksumite state. Woldekiros also contributes new insights into the logistics of pack animal–based trade and variability in the central and regional organization of global ancient trade. Using a culturally informed framework for understanding the organization of the ancient salt route and its role in linking the Aksumite state to rural highland agricultural and lowland mobile pastoralist populations, The Boundaries of Ancient Trade makes a key contribution to theoretical discussions of hierarchy and more diffuse power structures in ancient states. This work generates new interest in the region as an area of global relevance in archaeological and anthropological debates on landscape, social interaction, and practice theories.
As the transition from socialism to a market economy gathered speed in the early 1990s, many people proclaimed the final success of capitalism as a practice and neoliberal economics as its accompanying science. But with the uneven achievements of the "transition"--the deepening problems of "development," persistent unemployment, the widening of the wealth gap, and expressions of resistance--the discipline of economics is no longer seen as a mirror of reality or as a unified science. How should we understand economics and, more broadly, the organization and disorganization of material life? In this book, international scholars from anthropology and economics adopt a rhetorical perspective in order to make sense of material life and the theories about it. Re-examining central problems in the two fields and using ethnographic and historical examples, they explore the intersections between these disciplines, contrast their methods and epistemologies, and show how a rhetorical approach offers a new mode of analysis while drawing on established contributions.
