After Copper Town: The Past in the Present in Urban Zambia

Abstract

Hortense Powdermaker's "Copper Town (1962)" easily got lost among the more prolific writings on urban social interaction by social anthropologists associated with the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Northern Rhodesia. Using a very different explanatory framework, Powdermaker's study nevertheless exhibited a remarkable sensitivity to the race, gender, and class relations of the late colonial situation that has proved of lasting influence on later cohorts of urban researchers in Zambia. This paper reflects on Powdermaker's observations on urban life and leisure in the light of the author's own research during six stints of urban fieldwork in Zambia between 1971 and 1989.

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