Iva Peša.  Roads through Mwinilunga: A History of Social Change in
Northwest Zambia.  Afrika-Studiecentrum Series. Leiden  Brill, 2019. 
Illustrations. 444 pp.  $59.00 (e-book), ISBN 978-90-04-40896-8;
$59.00 (paper), ISBN 978-90-04-40790-9.

Reviewed by Dmitri M. Bondarenko (Institute for African Studies of
the Russian Academy of Sciences)
Published on H-Africa (November, 2020)
Commissioned by David D. Hurlbut

Iva Peša's project is ambitious, as she tries to trace the history
of social change, or more accurately oscillations between continuity
and change, in Mwinilunga District in northwest Zambia between the
1750s and 1970s. This demands a study of local societies in three
consequent historical periods: precolonial, colonial, and
postcolonial. At the same time, Peša does not intend to study
equally changes in every subsystem of the local societies. For her
analysis, she has selected sociocultural subsystems and phenomena
("spheres of social change," as she calls them [p. 38]),
transformations she considers to be the most important for describing
and discussing general directions and trends of social change in
northwest Zambia throughout time. Peša claims to study four spheres
of social change: production, mobility, consumption, and social
relationship. However, it appears that she is actually studying the
historical dynamics of two complex and multifaceted factors of social
change in Mwinilunga in the most detail. The first is political
economy--the economic subsystem from production to distribution and
exchange to consumption (discussed mainly in chapters 2 and 4). The
second is patterns of immobility (village life) and mobility
(cross-border trade and labor migration) addressed in chapters 3 and
5, respectively. Other subsystems are involved in Peša's analysis to
the degree they are inseparable from these two factors. In
particular, Peša studies the role of authentic and colonial and
postcolonial political institutions in social change at both the
village and regional levels (in chapters 2 and 5).

Peša's research serves as convincing proof of the nonlinear,
nondirectional, and evolutionary (continuous) rather than
revolutionary (intermittent) nature of the historical process, even
under such seemingly punctuated developments as transitions from
precolonialism to colonialism and from colonialism to
postcolonialism. It is an extremely valuable conclusion that is very
well grounded by Peša both in theory and in her analysis of the
evidence. Her monograph confirms the argument that "the interplay of
evolving institutions explains the non-linear, alternative-pathways
character of social evolution"--an idea that has become powerful in
both history and anthropology.[1]

Proving the continuous nature of social change in Mwinilunga, Peša
masterfully shows that authentic social relationships were flexible
and susceptible enough in northwest Zambia to accommodate serious
innovations in different spheres without the destruction of the
typical African sociocultural community. The indestructibility of a
community based on kinship affiliation and village as a settlement
pattern was the result of the evolutionary course of processes of
social change, and Peša is completely right articulating and
defending this position. The community's indestructibility is also
what allows cultures in Mwinilunga and elsewhere across the continent
to keep their distinctive African identities under external
sociocultural pressures during the precolonial and especially
colonial and postcolonial periods. The principle of communality as
the foundation of Africa's sociocultural tradition is not reducible
to the temporal and spatial universality of the institution of
community (in this or that form) in sub-Saharan Africa. As communal
sociopolitical norms and relations, consciousness, and behavioral
patterns spread beyond community as social institution, the principle
of communality plays a crucial role at all levels of societal
complexity and in a great variety of institutions, including, though
in modified or sometimes even corrupted form, sociologically supra-
and non-communal formations, such as modern African cities and
African diaspora networks.[2]

Peša's book promises to become a much welcome contribution not only
to Zambian studies but also to fields beyond. The evidence of social
change in northwest Zambia between the mid-eighteenth and late
twentieth centuries--from the precolonial to colonial to postcolonial
period--exemplifies how the interaction between and intricate
interlacing of local and Western and pre-industrial and industrial
institutions could give dynamism to a colonial and then postcolonial
societal system.[3] An exceptionally detailed and nuanced description
of social change in concrete cultures in changing historical
situations, _Roads through Mwinilunga _is a significant text for
theorists in the social sciences who study general trends of
institutional transformations.[4] In short, Peša's book will no
doubt find many grateful readers.

Notes

[1]. Stephen A. Kowalewski and Jennifer Birch, "How Do People Get Big
Things Done?," in _The Evolution of Social Institutions:
Interdisciplinary Perspectives_, ed. Dmitri M. Bondarenko, Stephen A.
Kowalewski, and David B. Small (Cham: Springer, 2020), 30. See also,
for example, Christopher S. Beekman and William W. Baden, eds.,
_Nonlinear Models for Archaeology and Anthropology_ (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2005); and Dmitri M. Bondarenko and Ken Baskin, "Big
History, Complexity Theory, and Life in a Non-Linear World," in _From
Big Bang to Galactic Civilizations: A Big History Anthology_, ed.
Barry Rodrigue, Leonid Grinin, and Andrey Korotayev, vol. 3, _The
Ways That Big History Works: Cosmos, Life, Society and Our Future_
(Delhi: Primus Books, 2017), 183-96.

[2]. Dmitri M. Bondarenko, "Toward a Philosophy of African History:
Communality as a Foundation of Africa's Socio-Cultural Tradition," in
_Knight from Komárov: To Petr Skalník for His 70th Birthday_, ed.
Adam Bedřich and Tomáš Retka (Prague: AntropoWeb, 2015), 61-80.

[3]. See, for example, Georges Balandier, _Sens et puissance: Les
dynamiques sociales_ (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004);
Ato Kwamena Onoma, _The Politics of Property Rights Institutions in
Africa_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Jürgen
Osterhammel, _Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview_ (Princeton, NJ:
Markus Wiener Publishers, 2010); Crawford Young, _The Postcolonial
State in Africa: Fifty Years of Independence, 1960-2010_ (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012); Chrisitan K. Højbjerg,
Jacqueline Knörr, and Anita Schroven, _The Interaction of Global and
Local Models of Governance: New Configurations of Power in Upper
Guinea Coast Societies_ (Halle/Saale: Max Planck Institute for Social
Anthropology, 2013); Ørnulf Gulbrandsen, _The State and the Social:
State Formation in Botswana and Its Precolonial and Colonial
Genealogies_ (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014); Mahmood Mamdani,
_Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late
Colonialism_ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); and
Amy Niang, _The Postcolonial African State in Transition: Stateness
and Modes of Sovereignty_ (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

[4]. See, for example, John Bryan Davis and Asimina Christoforou,
eds., _The Economics of Social Institutions _(Cheltenham: Edward
Elgar, 2013); Anita Konzelmann Ziv and Hans Bernhard Schmid, eds.,
_Institutions, Emotions, and Group Agents: Contributions to Social
Ontology_ (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014); and Bondarenko, Kowalewski,
and Small, eds., _Evolution of Social Institutions_.

Citation: Dmitri M. Bondarenko. Review of Peša, Iva, _Roads through
Mwinilunga: A History of Social Change in Northwest Zambia_.
H-Africa, H-Net Reviews. November, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55890

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