Beer also offers Colson and Scudder a wide perspective on a variety of dimensions and structural strains in social change. Broader structural stresses are illuminated along the way. The reader learns how the commodification of beer often strained traditional status relations. For example, younger men, having easier access to wage jobs, could host beer parties and thereby undercut the traditional deference owed more senior men. For their part, younger men suffered heightened anxiety about the witchcraft and sorcery that might be used against them in reprisal.
Trap offers anecdotal snapshots of alcohol's place in diverse cultural settings.
It is a free-form work, often personal and uninhibited in its topic selection and narratives. Beckman slotted fully 29 short, vignette-like chapters into her monograph's brief 170 pages. Throughout, Beckman's book offers striking parallels and echoes of cultural phenomena described in Colson and Scudder's more detailed account of Gwembe. Such convergence is both welcome and problematic. It is welcome to the extent that convergence suggests that both books have attended to broadly similar pathways and structural features of change, factors and phenomena often operating in much the same ways across much of Africa.