Africana Studies Commons^™

Political Mobility And The Pedestrian Society, Norman Miller

Dartmouth Scholarship

For many parts of Africa and Asia a rural society is often a pedestrian society. There are limited means of transport; the peasant is largely immobilized and his movement to the outside is a major undertaking. He lives in an economic and political microcosm Typically his world may be ten miles long and twelve miles wide, bounded by where a road comes through a swamp and ending where it drifts over hills. It is a world that is effectively cut off from the outside; in his own view the pedestrian lives on an island, surrounded by a vast sea of …