HE FOCUS OF this cluster of artides' is the analysis of African agricul-T tural marketing systems, notably for food crops. Despite the specialist and somewhat exotic ring of our topic, problems confronting students of economic behavior and social change in Africa have strong parallels to discussions in 'mainstream' (read European) rural sociology. In order to tease out these links, let us begin our discussion a bit closer to home.
Real and rhetorical marketsSince 1989, the world has been watching Eastern and Central Europe's seemingly unprecedented transition to a 'free market economy' with both exhilaration and anxiety. The anxiety, especially for those peoples sharing borders with the new nations of the former socialist empire, stems largely from the intuitive premise that market liberalization and the incumbent relaxation of state controls on economic activity may also foster 'uncontrolled' behaviour in other areas of life. The exhilaration derives, at least in part, from the close normative associations in the Western cultural heritage between the notions of 'liberalization' and 'liberty,' the hallowed values of individualism and freedom.
Planned villagization is a recurrent feature in modern Africa. Apart from their official goals, which were missed in most cases, rural settlement schemes can be seen as attempts by colonial and postcolonial states to inscribe a new territorial order into the countryside. Taking a group of villages in northwest Zambia as an example, this article examines the process and impact of territorialization in a long-term and interactionist perspective. The result is a history of contestation about competing concepts of spatiality and sociality which opens new perspectives on the making of both locality and the nation state in Central Africa.
Abstract:Regional distinctions such as “East” and “Central” Africa have been constructed, originally very much from an outsiders’ perspective. Different East and Central African historiographies reflect – and reproduce – these distinctions. However, the inhabitants of those spaces never stopped crossing and entangling them. Likewise, this section approaches East and Central Africa empirically as a space of historical entanglement. Moreover, the authors question the traditional divide between both regions epistemologically, by transferring research perspectives from one region’s historiography to the other. They thus illustrate that bridging histories of East and Central Africa can reveal histories that would otherwise remain hidden or marginal.
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