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In this ethnographic study of post-paternalist ruination and renovation, Christian Straube explores social change at the intersection of material decay and social disconnection in the former mine township Mpatamatu of Luanshya, one of the oldest mining towns on the Zambian Copperbelt. Touching on topics including industrial history, colonial town planning, social control and materiality, gender relations and neoliberal structural change, After Corporate Paternalism offers unique insights into how people reappropriate former corporate spaces and transform them into personal projects of renovation, fundamentally changing the characteristics of their community.
“Straube’s book offers a valuable approach to capture social aspects of the material dimensions of infrastructure and the process of ruination.” • Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI)
“Christian Straube’s book is a fine-grained ethnography of dynamic living amidst the infrastructural remains of corporate paternalism in present day Zambia. It is less a story of how ‘things fall apart’ but rather one of things ‘getting reassembled’ in Mpatamatu. The author offers a bold conceptual framing of renovation within ruination and insights on built environments becoming sites for creative opportunity on the part of township residents—its men, women, former miners-turned-teachers, and preachers.” • Pamila Gupta, University of the Witwatersrand
Christian Straube was a PhD candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), Germany, from 2014 to 2018. From 2019 to 2022, he managed the China Programme at Stiftung Asienhaus. Currently, he is a project manager at the Centre for Europe in the World of Stiftung Mercator in Essen.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Things Fall Apart
Chapter 1. Of Company and Government
Chapter 2. Of Men and Women
Chapter 3. Of Miners and Teachers
Chapter 4. Of Miners and Preachers
Conclusion: Things Reassembled