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Powdermaker, Hortense : Copper Town: Changing Africa: The Human Situation On The Rhodesian Copperbelt

Harper & Row, 1962

Hardback, first edition, 21 x 15 cm. (8½ x 5¾), very good condition, in a good unclipped ($7.95) dust-jacket worn with small tears at edges, some light foxing to end pages and page edges, publisher's original tan clothboards withblack blocking to spine, 392 pages including index, b/w photo illustrations, 600gm----"The many readers who are more than a little confused by the conflicting images of Africa offered in daily news and commentaries will greet this distinctive study with eager relief. Thoroughly and vividly it traces the changes of our time in the behavior and in the recorded words of one single African community .... and the reader comes to feel that in visiting with [the author's] one town in the Copperbelt he is learning something essential about Africa—and about the modern world.' To show the influences of Western culture on a primitive society, a noted anthropologist here describes the changes taking place in the heart of Africa. Northern Rhodesia, an area where European mining interests are steadily absorbing tribal peoples into a new pattern of industrial organization, is the focus of Dr. Powdermaker's study. With the help of a small native team which she recruited and trained, the author recorded the talk of people in households, in beer halls, at the public washing stands, union meetings, and on the road. These conversations, exposing the fiber of personal and social life, add a personal dimension to objective study, sharpening insight into the confluence of tribal and modern forces. Through them, the reader learns directly of individual responses to conditions of everyday life—native reactions to European and American mass media, opinions about witchcraft, a miners' strike, adultery. To explain what the present community has changed from, Dr. Powdermaker skillfully contrasts the arrival and spread of European culture with the background of traditional tribal life. The study is local, the lesson is universal, revealing the response of individuals and groups—African and European —to the pressures of the twentieth century."---bumped, .

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