Analytic Narratives: Applications

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Rural Responses to Industrialization: A Study of Village Zambia by Bates reports on a study of Kasumpa village, a settlement in the Luapula Valley that borders Zambia and Congo and forms a portion of the hinterland of the great mining centers of those two countries. The author of this study notes how, in the initial stages of his fieldwork, he sought to discern the values held by the residents of the village, their perception of the alternatives available to them, and the beliefs that shaped their behavior. The residents of Kasumpa village, he learned, quite rightly viewed themselves as poor and the mining towns as prosperous. Economic life revolved around the export of produce and labor to the mining towns; political life centered on efforts to persuade the government to generate money and jobs by investing in projects in the region. The residents sought to use the markets for produce and labor to gain access to the wealth of the mining towns, and they used political protest to levy a portion of it for themselves.

Based on these insights, the author then turned to theory. In expositing this work, this essay focuses on his treatment of migration, a subject long central to research in the region. The dominant theory of the time, developed by John Harris and Michael Todaro, viewed migration as a decision made by individuals as an effort to maximize their expected incomes. Several implications flowed from that formulation, and the author randomly selected 100 or so out of around 1,000 villagers to test them. If the theory were correct, more men than women would migrate to seek work in town, because there were more jobs for men in the mines, and the probability of securing a job was therefore greater for males than for females. The likelihood of departure from the village should be higher for working-age men: They were more likely to secure jobs than youths were and could amortize the costs of job searches better than old men could. In addition, according to this theory, when people left, they should journey to towns where others had settled before them, thus lowering the costs of job searches and increasing the return from migrating. The demographic structure of the village should therefore be distorted, with a gap where working-age men could normally be expected and a disproportionate number of females and old people of both sexes. An implication for politics also followed: While the migrants might choose to “exit” as a way of escaping poverty, those who remained should “give voice,” pressuring the government to render fishing and maize growing more profitable. Phrased another way, while migrants might employ the market for labor as an alternative to political action, those who remained in the village should treat the market for commodities as a complement to it.

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