Work and Control in a Peasant Economy

Peasants in southern Africa have too often been portrayed as technologically backward, chronically underemployed, and politically passive. Such views, says Elias Mandala in this finely particularized study of the lower Tchiri Valley in Malawi, partake more of myth than reality. Peasants are first and foremost laborers, he points out, who spend most of their lives working with their hands to meet basic human needs. In making labor the center of his analysis, Mandala refocuses attention on peasants as workers, actively engaged in the effort to control their own destinies through complex forms of both resistance and accommodation. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival material, Mandala weaves together aspects of peasant economy usually ignored or treated separately, such as the ecological conditions of production, the division of labor between and within households, and gender and generational conflict.