James Ferguson on Development, Modernity, and Labor

I ran across Jim Ferguson's first book, The Anti-Politics Machine (Ferguson 1990), shortly after it appeared on a bookshelf in the intellectually exciting chaos of Stanley Trapido's house in Oxford.Stan was one of the editors of the Journal of Southern African Studies and one of the most original and influential voices in the history of that part of Africa.Thumbing through the book I was intrigued and asked Stan if I could review it for the journal; this kind of personalized informality was how things were done in those days.Stan agreed.Some months later my review came out, with the following first sentence: "This is one of the most innovative and stimulating books I have read in recent years" (Cooper 1990).I usually don't write in such an effusive style, but thirty-five years later it is clear that Jim's book has had a multidimensional impact on the study of a region, of unequal political relations, of the connection between conceptual thinking and the study of material life.Not least of its achievements was to open up what has since become a lively field: the history, politics, and ethnography of economic development.Shortly after reading The Anti-Politics Machine, it was my pleasure to meet Jim and his partner Liisa Malkki during an all-too-short period when we overlapped in Ann Arbor, Michigan.Rereading some of Jim's major books in the last weeks reminds me how much Jim's writing as an anthropologist reverberates with my concerns as a historian.Both disciplines, at their best, combine attention to the specificities of time and place with attention to connections that cross such lines.Jim astutely points to what is lost when anthropologists, if asked about Africa, reply "I don't know about 'Africa,' but let me tell you about where I worked" (Ferguson 2006, 3).This observation could just as easily be made about historians.Jim makes this point in the context of a discussion of how complicated it is to write about "Africa" in a way that simultaneously takes into account the continent's diversity, its connections and commonalities, and the ways in which certain outsiders project a demeaning homogeneity on African social formations.His observations and his questions are still relevant to the way research and writing are conducted today, about Africa and other parts of the world.