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...