Karen Tranberg Hansen

Getting Stuck in the Compound: Some Odds against Social Adulthood in Lusaka, Zambia

The young people on whose everyday experiences in Lusaka this article draws come from three different socioeconomic groupings: very poor, middle income, and rich. They are living in an urban setting where space and opportunity have changed in many ways since their parents were young. Focusing on urban space and mobility in relation to gender, the article discusses structural transformations of the city and their ramifications for young women and men. Young peoples reactions depend on their socioeconomic location and the kinds of skills and resources they draw from within households and society. Most young people experience urban life simultaneously as exclusion and inclusion. These processes intersect their sociospatial experiences, fueling contradictions between their livelihoods and desires.

Transcriptional termination signals for RNA polymerase II in fission yeast

Transcription ‘run‐on’ (TRO) analysis using permeabilized yeast cells indicates that transcription terminates between 180 and 380 bp downstream of the poly(A) site of the Schizosaccharomyces pombe ura4 gene. Two signals direct RNA polymerase II (pol II) to stop transcription: the previously identified 3′ end formation signals located close to the poly(A) site and an additional downstream element (DSE) located at the region of termination. The downstream signal (135 bp) appears to act by pausing the elongating polymerase. TRO analysis indicates that elevated levels of transcribing polymerases accumulate over the DSE and that removal of this signal leads to transcription proceeding beyond the normal termination region. Furthermore, when inserted between two competing polyadenylation signals, this DSE increases the utilization of upstream poly(A) sites in vivo. We show that polymerase pausing over an extended region of template ensures termination of pol II transcription close to the poly(A) site.

The Multiplication of Labor: Historical Methods in the Study of Gender and Agricultural Change in Modern Africa [and Comments and Reply]

terms their claims to goods produced outside of their own restricted cycles, apart from the material embodiments. At this stage womens claim on the products of their own cycle was not an issue, but a basis had been laid in the material severance of the two cycles for their attenuation at the jural level. The expansion of demand for food in Yaounde as a result of post-Independence urban growth cut into processes of domestic and technical adjustment which were already under way. Given that returns to labor were still low in the food sector, male labor was not lured back en masse into food farming in the initial expansion period. Requisitioning female labor back into a jointly defined agricultural operation would now be both technically and socially difficult. Women had already expanded the restricted cycle of the field system to cover both growing seasons. The groundnut field was already managed on an individual, day-in/day-out work rhythm, and its staple crops of cassava, groundnuts, and leafy vegetables had become the dependable core of the diet. The three main strategies available to women for expanding production, given an already intensified cultivation system, were (i) expansion and intensification of the groundnut field itself to include more marketable crops, (2) a revival in some areas and by some women who could still get access to male labor for heavy clearing of a smaller version of the esep field, feminized in its products and labor patterns not to conflict with the insistent labor rhythms of the groundnut field, and (3) extension of the most restricted cycle of specialized onecrop, one-season plots not requiring male labor or multiyear occupation of the land. Again, patterns of labor have adjusted without major dispute, because they have built on rather than breaching the increasing separation of the two cycles. In a greatly intensified way, the terms of dispute have centered on income. At this juncture, however, it is mens claims to womens income which are at issue, rather than vice versa. The a li, a di formula loses conviction when the cycles of production are disconnected, when there is very little clearing of virgin forest any more, and when women clear their short-fallow plots for themselves. On the other hand, a yet longer cycle of claims has always existed behind the one embedded in production itself, namely, intergenerational inheritance of resources in the male line and a husbands unlimited claims on his wife by virtue of bridewealth payment. The two cycles-social and productive-provide layers of justification to claims, neither necessarily more important than the other. In fact, the relative prioritization of the two-one within the cycle of production itself and the other within the cycle of social reproduction-has been thoroughly confused by modern customary and civil legal interventions which have tried to institutionalize bits and pieces of each framework: they have strengthened inheritance in the male line, tried to undermine bridewealth payment, and given legal backing to rights gained through mise en valeur, through actual development (cultivation) of the land. The net effect of these measures is to provide legal backing to two of the cycles linking act and claim, while undermining or ignoring others. The longest cycle is intergenerational, inking the initial act of settlement and clearing with claims on resources and subsequent production, passed on in the male line, which are definitive in nature even if negotiable in content. The shortest is a single production cycle in which the actual worker, the clearer of the plot, has claims against its harvest. Where legal practice accommodates both principles, the terms of their coexistence can resemble various differentiated systems: landlord and worker, owner and sharecropper. But this interpretation misses the fact that other cycles of act and claim may be part of the culture and history of access to products and resources, may have been far more important in the past, and may still be invoked. In the present case there is the cycle initiated by bridewealth payment, which was once the main means of intergenerational transfer of wealth but is now rendered quite ambiguous in the temporal reach accorded to it. The other cycle is the long cultivation cycle, currently less practiced and also increasingly uncoupled from the shorter cycles. As Moore (I986) has pointed out for customary law in general, the rules are always open to interpretation, and one of the most flexible or ambiguous aspects of rei8. The hen does not crow in front of the cock (Tsala I975:295). I9. The first rainy season has lower rainfall and more interspersed sunshine, resulting in consistently higher groundnut yields than in fields cultivated in the second season, with more torrential rains. 258 1 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 29, Number 2, April 1988 source systems in which power is embodied in temporal reach may be which level of linkage between act and claim predominates as conditions shift. The subject of contention may be which level should predominate. People may be in much less dispute about the general nature and validity of the claims themselves. Shifts in the length of the rhythmic tensions invoked may have profoundly different implications for resource distribution. Beti men have an interest in maintaining some kind of encompassing concept of productive cycles. The interpretation of a li, a di most favorable to a man is: because he clears-no matter how long ago, or even if it was his father or fathers father who organized the actual workhe eats. The primary claim is reaffirmed even though its material representation has receded into the past. The strongest basis of all for male claims would be to fix the key act so far back in personal and family time that it is no longer contingent on any production cycle, of whatever length. Ownership of the land could be claimed by virtue of inheritance, and ownership of womens productivity could be claimed by virtue of bridewealth payment. Women, on the other hand, have an interest in a narrow and literal interpretation, with respect at least to their cash income: if he clears-recently, himself-he eats. Using the same act, clearing, and by slightly extrapolating to clearing secondary bush rather than virgin forest, women can elevate what used to be a derivative claim to a primary claim. Abstraction of principles about claims to crops, income, and land involves successive layers of extrication from the material objects-the crop, the technique, the task, the generative intervention-which have embodied them in the past. Description of the division of labor in terms of timespace rhythms highlights how temporalities with material, cultural, and jural dimensions can become dissonant in ways which open up new possibilities to the actors. In some cases the dissonances may be unintended consequences of other changes, whereas in others they may be deliberately produced. Ideally the difference between the two could be supported with evidence. But the issue is not so much to categorize responsesopportunism, innovation, passive resistance, or concerted conscious struggle-as to develop systematic ways of recognizing dissonance so that some sense of the parameters of agency is preserved, even where the documentation is lacking, and even where there is no clear agreement on the criteria for defining elusive processes such as struggle. The terms and implications of struggles or negotiation can be brought into center focus, even if actual cases are either difficult o retrieve at all or difficult to invest with any persuasive sense that the interpretation has captured the meanings given by the actors themselves. This method may also help to illuminate the interaction of local systems with the wider political and economic context. Prices, legal policy, and a host of other interventions affect the conditions under which local negotiation takes place, and working outwards from rhythms of work and income to the forces which account for them may help to incorporate supralocal levels into local-level analysis. The influence can work in the other direction as well. At certain moments, issues which have smoldered within local communities subject to a variety of particularistic solutions may blaze across the regional or national horizon. Dispute over control of womens incomes made waves at the national level in southern Cameroon in i982 in a way which cannot be understood in terms of a history of stagnant food-farming techniques or female subordination alone. Through the I96os and I970S most womens cash incomes were not only too low but earned on too much of a routine, penny-penny basis to be devoted to any expenditures beyond direct analogs of their past in-kind responsibilities for food plus a few personal needs. By the early I98os, and as soon as the change in national government provided a somewhat more liberal atmosphere for local organizations, womens incomes had risen enough to support a mushrooming growth in rotating credit associations. In I982 a furor developed within the national political party about the apparent loss of control by the womens branch of the party of these womens associations in the Beti area, the Center-South Province. In the national political context, the concern was that spontaneous associations were growing far too fast to be incorporated into the structures of a one-party state. But dismay was expressed in other terms: in the relationship between the mens and womens branches of the party and between men and women in the rural economy. Criticism of the association meetings invoked the symbolism of male claims: in sexual terms (what were women really doing at their credit association meetings?) and in terms of the grounding of womens life rhythms in insistent domestic demands (were they neglecting their cooking and child-care duties to take off on Sunday afternoons?). The ambiguous state of

SECOND-HAND CLOTHING ENCOUNTERS IN ZAMBIA: GLOBAL DISCOURSES, WESTERN COMMODITIES, AND LOCAL HISTORIES

This is the second in a series of New Directions papers commissioned by the US Social Science Research Council In common parlance in Zambia since the mid-1980s, the term salaula has referred to second-hand clothing imported from the West. It means approximately, in the Bemba language, to select from a pile in the manner of rummaging. As such, it graphically captures what takes place in urban and provincial markets as consumers pick through the piles of imported clothes, selecting garments to satisfy clothing needs and desires. The second-hand clothing trade has a long but unexplored history in Africa. It has grown rapidly in recent years in tandem with the liberalisation of economies with previously tightly regulated import regimes. Its rapid growth masks considerable regional variation that is shaped by sociopolitical norms and pre-existing clothing and textile production practices. This article argues that there is much more to the piles of second-hand clothing displayed conspicuously in public markets up and down Africa than meets the eye. If non-local observers have paid passing attention to the phenomenon at all, they have tended to view it as akin to dumping and the consumption practices it is giving rise to as a faded and worn imitation of the West. Rather than elaborating the obvious, that is, how the international second-hand clothing trade provides yet another example of inequitable North-South relations, this article focuses on the agency of the consumer, suggesting that a cultural economy is at work in local appropriations of the Wests unwanted clothing. Turning to Zambia, I approach the popularity of salaula with a view to teasing out some of the striking contradictions of that countrys on-going marginalisation. My long-term engagement with issues arising from urban life in Zambia convinced me in the late 1980s that the ways in which people there were dealing with the Wests cast-off clothes were rarely what they seemed to be in the view of external observers and critics. As the research project from which this particular discussion draws unfolded, I continued to be struck by the diversity of local constructions that helped transform the Wests no longer wanted garments into desirable clothes.(1) For instance, while dressing in jeans and T-shirts to achieve the `big look in 1997, young adult men who worked as open-air barbers and street vendors around a Lusaka shopping centre strove for `distinction (their term). This is why, one of them explained, he did not like `common clothes and imitations but preferred something that was `outstanding and made people look. He went on: `In salaula you will find things you dont know how good they are. A middle-aged married woman I interviewed in a medium-income residential area put it this way when explaining why she shopped `from salaula. `I dont want to wear what everyone else is wearing. `Clothes from salaula are not what other people wear, said another woman in the same area, explaining why salaula is viewed as `exclusive. These comments demonstrate that the West and Zambia come together in complicated ways when dealing with clothing. Indeed, Zambian involvements with second-hand clothing tell a story of a global encounter that offers insights into the diverse meanings of `the West in peoples lives, depending on their biographical location, its context, and time. Because second-hand clothing appears so inextricably bound to the West, insisting on a local perspective on clothing consumption may appear problematic to some. I have chosen to forefront this issue because it encapsulates the developmental dilemma in Zambia. The `allure or `craze for foreign that Zambians display in clothing consumption (both of new and used clothes) turns this particular commodity into a central token of modernity (Orlove and Bauer, 1997: 13).(2) That is to say that peoples preoccupations with clothing are an important key to understanding the process of becoming modern in this part of Africa, and thus to understanding local experiences of development. …

Negotiating Sex and Gender in Urban Zambia

Many studies of modern African towns are concerned with the changing relationships of women and men as they engage in the daily struggle to make a living. I Similar struggles took place during the coloinial era, and pre-colonial African societies probably also experienced conflict along gender lines. But there is no reason to assume that conflicts between men and women on the one hand, and between ordinary people and state authorities on the other hand, either took the same form through time or can be attributed to the same causes through time. The available studies of colonial and post-colonial Zambia invite a preliminary exploration of the changing nature of such conflicts. The specific concerns of this article are prompted by observations made during two periods of anthropological field research in a low-income settlement on Lusakas outskirts, first in 1971 -72 and again in 1981.2 In the sense that malefemale relations in the domestic domain were strained and that men dominated the ranks of the wage-employed, my observations paralleled those made by others in urban studies undertaken during the colonial period. But parallel observations need not be due to the same combination of factors. Although its aim is largely empirical and descriptive, this article seeks to explain how low-income women and men in Zambia have made a living in changing economic and political circumstances. In order to answer the question of how livelihoods are made, it is necessary to explore issues of sex and gender which overlap with those of class in complex ways. At stake in this article is their imprint, specifically at the urban end, on the evolving structure of Zambian society, and the kinds of factors which have brought it about. Curiously enough, this issue was ignored by the contributors to an Edinburgh

Transnational biographies and local meanings: used clothing practices in Lusaka

Drawing on preliminary field research in Zambia in 1992 and 1993 into the rapidly expanding trade in and consumption of used clothing imported from the West, this paper examines some methodological questions that arise from research‐in‐progress into the changing local appropriations of used clothing in Zambia. Because the processes that converge in this topic are not tied to any fixed locale, but call for contextualization in both politicoeconomic and local cultural terms, the shape of this research project is influenced by broader political changes in the region and beyond it as well as by paradigmatic shifts in accounts of local‐global relationships. Granting used clothing a history in which what becomes of it does not inhere in its commodity status as a western cast‐off, but is a result of what people have made with it and of it, investing and divesting it of meanings, this paper explores how used clothing assumes meanings as it becomes embedded in a variety of contexts, particularly in the capital cit...

Lusaka's Squatters: Past and Present

Between 1967 and 1970 the number of squatter settlements in Zambias capital, Lusaka, increased from 9 to 32, accounting for more than one-third of the citys population (Simmance, 1974: 503). In 1973, one in every two persons in Lusaka was a squatter (Andrews, Christie and Martin, 1973: 17). Today, people continue to squat in Lusaka despite a four year upgrading project (1976-80) sponsored by the World Bank. Although they certainly grew in density and number after independence in 1964, such settlements were not new phenomena. Rather, they have been part of Lusakas socio-economic map ever since the town began to grow. The persistence of squatting exemplifies grassroots involvement by an urban work force that takes possession of vacant land and uses its own resources to create living space. The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the processes at work in creating and maintaining Lusakas squatter settlements. Squatting was a response on the part of ordinary people to the changing structure of Zambias economy, beginning with the colonial era when Zambia became a subordinate part of a system of capitalist production. The administrative framework of ordinances and policies that structured rural-urban migration first impelled men to seek wage labor and gradually brought whole families to the cities. This affected the housing situation in Lusaka, colonial social policy and labor employment. Government and private industry interests were instrumental in shaping the urban policy which formed the background to the development of squatting.

Household Work as a Man's Job: Sex and Gender in Domestic Service in Zambia

The author is assistant professor in the department of anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Introduction Gender roles are not given, but made as a result of mens and womens changing social and economic experiences. If women are domestic by nature then, certainly, nature itself is constructed. The case of domestic service, through time and across cultures, shows quite clearly that men and women have passed in and out of this occupation depending on time, place and economic circumstances. The division of labour is social. How, when and why its slots are differentially allocated to the two sexes become issues for investigation. The case of Zambia provides an interesting setting in which to explore these questions. For the entire colonial period in that country, domestic service remained almost exclusively a male preserve. Today, the great majority of servants continue to be men, although women have entered the occupation in growing numbers since independence in 1964. Here I seek to clarify why domestic service persists with these peculiar gender dynamics in Zambia. My article is based on extensive research that seeks to explain the continuities and changes within this occupation in terms of race, gender and class from the turn of the century to the present. To explore these questions, I have used historical and economic sources as well as life history data, sample surveys and participant observation. I begin with brief remarks on the gender division of labour in domestic service, both historically and cross-culturally. Then follows a discussion of continuities and changes within domestic service in Zambia after independence. I finally examine womens gradual entry into paid domestic work and some of the consequences of this change for men and particularly women servants.

Markets in Africa in a New Era

The following articles are all authored by scholars who started out their research careers on African economies in the latter half of the 1990s. They had an unusual opportunity. The world they were studying posed new logistical challenges to researchers, while the realities they eventually came to know also challenged the theoretical co-ordinates with which they were familiar. Their work reflects these dilemmas; it represents a new engagement with the empirical situation and a corresponding new breadth of allusion to theory and to work from the past.

Gender and housing: the case of domestic service in Lusaka Zambia.

These distinctions in access to housing are a product of cultural assumptions about gender that have informed the historical reproduction of a dominant convention in Zambia to wit domestic service as a mans job. The notion that houses belong to men is part of a widespread ideology of male authority and female subordination within households in much of urban Africa (cf. Barnes 1990). This ideology is shared by men across Zambias occupational spectrum and its consequences for the gendered meanings of work and of housing can be examined at very close range within domestic service. This article examines how this gender construction enters into and helps to constitute male/female inequality in domestic service with regard to housing that has consequences far beyond individual attempts to find shelter. My observations are based on long-term field research including archival work life history collection and a large sample survey of contemporary servant employment practices in Lusaka. To develop my argument I first sketch how the colonial city of Lusaka was laid out: for a long time with disregard to Africans and especially women. Then I identify some legacies of this skewed opportunity structure in the post-colonial city noting some contemporary changes in these respects. Next I turn to my own study of domestic service in Lusaka during the mid-1980s to describe the unequal involvement of women and men in this occupation. In my conclusions I briefly explore some of the consequences of these processes asking questions about the possibility of establishing gender awareness in housing policy in Zambia in the future. (excerpt)