Virtually all models of the household assume that the allocation of resources is Pareto efficient. Within many African households, agricultural production occurs on many plots controlled by different members of the household. Pareto efficiency implies that factors should be allocated efficiently across these plots. I find, in contrast, that plots controlled by women are farmed much less intensively than similar plots within the household controlled by men. The estimates imply that about 6 percent of output is lost because of inefficient factor allocation within the household. The paper suggests a new approach to modeling intrahousehold allocation consistent with the empirical results.

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Gender, Agricultural Production, and the Theory of the Household

All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. C. B. Stack. New York: Harper & Row. 1974. Carol Stack wrote one of the most powerful books of the last half century about African American families. The book's power derived from its focus on the stories and the lives of persons who were struggling to manage with limited resources and who had evolved seamless methods of survival and coping strategies. Stack was not content to view the problems of impoverished African American families from an outside perspective, as had been done in the past, but chose instead to present her work from the view of the participants. She presented a sensitive view of families that has not been duplicated to this day. Stack put specific emphasis on being accepted by the families before she began interviewing them. She and her son took a long time to be accepted by the families as they gradually became participants in the day-to-day lives of the "Flats." She was sensitive to the patterns of interactions among the networks of family and friends that would have been overlooked by almost any other researcher or method of observation. The book showed how a person from another racial and economic group was able, with skill, to become an intimate part of the experience and the lives of very poor families. Her anthropological approach stands in sharp contrast to the countless attempts of others to quickly go in and pull out slices of families' lives with a preexisting conceptual framework. The African American families of the Flats were presented as they were, not from a White academic theoretical perspective that was not based on reality. Stack made many observations that allowed one to see the intricate workings of the families that "outsiders" had not been documented before. Participants were allowed to make observations about their own families' patterns of interaction and to uncover truths of family functioning based on the reality of their lives. Important data on these second-generation urban dwellers are presented in such a calm manner that one could overlook their significance to the field. The impact of the economic pressures on the men and women in the African American community show how persons can have mainstream values but are prevented from achieving them because of the lack of employment and economic security within the community. In response to the reality, Stack found that African Americans have cooperated to produce an adaptive strategy of exchanging goods and trading resources, as well as offering child care or temporary fosterage. Kinship boundaries were more elastic than they were in more affluent families because these individuals immersed themselves in a domestic network of kinfolk and fictive kin, or those who became as kin. The participants in Stack's study moved around and had loyalties to more than one household grouping at a time, making their family networks unlike the "household" structures of most American families. These networks were diffused over several kin-based households that changed frequently. The usual method of arbitrarily specifying widely accepted definitions of the family as nuclear or matrilocal may block one from seeing the world as it exists in very poor communities. Stack's observations refuted the "culture of poverty" position that had seen African Americans as having no culture or totally negative qualities of family disorganization, personal disorganization, and fatalism. Unfortunately, too many current writings on African Americans still take these same positions. The views may be the result of ignorance, naivete, or complex levels of racism that insidiously make their way into present family literature. Stack continued to reflect on the poverty of the participants' situations. By doing so, she avoided another position that is all too common-assumption that all African American families are the same, regardless of their levels of poverty or affluence. …

All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community

Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Briggs, Asa and Peter Burke. 2005. A Social History of the Media from Gutenberg to the Internet. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2006. \"Introduction: Did Somebody Say New Media?\" In Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Kennan eds., New Media/Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 1-11. Deibert, Ronald. 1997. Parchment, Printing and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation. New York: Columbia University Press. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2006. \"Early Film History and Multi-Media: An Archaeology of Possible Futures?\" In Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Kennan eds., New Media/Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 13-26. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Luhman, Niklas. 2000. The Reality of the Mass Media. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2006. \"Network Subjects or, The Ghost is the Message.\" In Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan eds., New Media/Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 335-345. Saenger, Paul. 1997. \"Introduction\" to Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 1-17. Thorburn, David and Henry Jenkins eds. 2003. Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. Boston: MIT Press.

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (review)

When the red harvester ant is threatened, nestmates rush to its assistance. The message is a chemical one. Distress is communicated and help summoned by the potential victim ejecting a tiny cocktail of alkanes and terpenoids. Professor E 0 Wilson, who made this discovery, is a distinguished zoologist whose writings have twice been awarded Pulitzer Prizes. His interests extend far beyond entomology, however. Why should human communication be qualitatively different from that of the ant, in being achieved by definable, physicochemical processes? And, if this is the case, surely the same must be true of other social phenomena? Having conceded so much, on what grounds can we exclude other products of human activity such as the social sciences, arts, humanities and ethics? In a mechanistic universe, the whole of human civilization is the ultimate product of the interaction between genes and environment, incredibly complex, as Wilson admits, but susceptible to fundamentally the same analytic techniques as communication in the harvester ant. Consilience (literally, a 'jumping together') is the notion that a common groundwork of explanation applies not only to the sciences but also to the arts, ethics and religion. In his book Consiliencel Wilson applies a combination of broad learning and a style of baroque exuberance to put the case for such a unity of knowledge. Wilson is thus, as he makes clear, a child of the Enlightenment, paying homage to Bacon and Newton but most of all to Condorcet, who trod the same intellectual path (and who came to grief in the Revolution for reasons probably not unrelated to his philosophy). He mourns the triumph at the end of the eighteenth century of revelatory religion fearful of the outcomes of science, and most of all of Romanticism although regrettably overlooking the

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

Presented in two parts, this article proposes a research programme devoted to examining ‘processes of economization’. In the first instalment, published in Economy and Society 38(3) (2009), we introduced the notion of ‘economization’. The term refers to the assembly and qualification of actions, devices and analytical/practical descriptions as ‘economic’ by social scientists and market actors. Through an analysis of selected works in anthropology, economics and sociology, we discussed the importance, meaning and framing of economization, unravelling its trace within a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. This second instalment of the article explores what it would mean to move this research programme forward by taking processes of economization as a topic of empirical investigation. Given the vast terrain of relationships that produce its numerous trajectories, to illustrate what such a project would entail we have limited ourselves to the examination of processes we call ‘marketization’. These p...

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Economization, part 2: a research programme for the study of markets

In America, almost all the money in circulation passes through financial institutions every day. But in Nigeria's "cash and carry" system, 90 percent of the currency never comes back to a bank after it's issued. What happens when two such radically different economies meet and mingle, as they have for centuries in Atlantic Africa? The answer is a rich diversity of economic practices responsive to both local and global circumstances. In "Marginal Gains," Jane I. Guyer explores and explains these often bewildering practices, including trade with coastal capitalism and across indigenous currency zones, and within the modern popular economy. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, Guyer demonstrates that the region shares a coherent, if loosely knit, commercial culture. She shows how that culture actually works in daily practice, addressing both its differing scales of value and the many settings in which it operates, from crisis conditions to ordinary household budgets. The result is a landmark study that reveals not just how popular economic systems work in Africa, but possibly elsewhere in the Third World.

Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa

The theme of democratization in Africa is being raised more urgently now than at any time since independence. The nature of new political activity and the terms of new political debate, however, are bound to reflect the widely differing configuration of conditions in those two periods, a generation apart. A main thrust of recent literature implies that, whereas the anti-colonial struggles united “the people,” the organizations of “civil society,” and the leadership under a banner of freedom, these same segments of the body politic are now in “a precarious balance” with one another (Rothchild and Chazan 1988), either because social dynamics have penetrated the state (Joseph 1987), because they escape the state's control altogether, and/or because there is active antagonism between social classes (Graf 1988), the rulers and the ruled. My argument here is not that any of these observations is mistaken. Rather I want to draw attention to an institutional element of the current dynamic that appears extremely rarely in the current analyses but whose relative absence from both the social processes and the intellectual debates forms, when seen from a comparative perspective, the negative space that alone makes these other dynamics intelligible, namely public revenue. Completely contrary to the historical sequence in Europe, and even differing quite profoundly from the processes in place at the time of independence, the present African leadership has to seek consent first and enforce taxation afterwards. The history, social dynamics and implications of this conjuncture in rural Nigeria are the subject of this article.

Representation without taxation: An essay on democracy in rural Nigeria, 1952-1990

Household budgets and women's incomes

INTRODUCTION CAROLINE BLEDSOE, JANE I. GUYER, AND SUSANA LERNER PART I OVERVIEW 1 MALE FERTILITY TRENDS IN INDUSTRIAL COUNTRIES: THEORIES IN SEARCH OF SOME EVIDENCE DAVID COLEMAN 2 TRADITIONS OF STUDYING PATERNITY IN SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY JANE I. GUYER PART II SHAPING MALE REPRODUCTIVE CULTURE 3 THE SEEDS OF MAN: ETHNOLOGICAL NOTES ON MALE SEXUALITY AND FECUNDITY AMONG THE MAYA MARIO UMBERTO RUIZ 4 MAKING 'RESPONSIBLE' MEN: PLANNING THE FAMILY IN EGYPT KAMRAN ASDAR ALI 5 MALE PROTAGONISTS IN THE 'COMMERCIALIZATION' OF ASPECTS OF THE FEMALE LIFE CYCLE IN GHANA JOHN ANARFI AND CLARA FAYORSEY PART III MEN IN MULTIPLE UNIONS 6 MEN, POLYGYNY, AND FERTILITY OVER THE LIFE COURSE IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA ANN BLANC AND ANASTASIA GAGE 7 MALE NUPTIALITY AND MALE FERTILITY AMONG THE QING NOBILITY: POLYGYNY OR SERIAL MONOGAMY? JAMES LEE AND WANG FENG 8 DIMENSIONS OF SEXUALITY AMONG NIGERIAN MEN: IMPLICATIONS FOR FERTILITY AND REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH NOSA OROBATON PART IV CONUNDRUMS OF ENTRY INTO FATHERHOOD 9 'SOMEONE TO TAKE MY PLACE': FERTILITY AND THE MALE LIFE COURSE AMONG COASTAL BOIKE, EAST SEPIK PROVINCE, PAPUA NEW GUINEA PHILIP STEEL 10 FATHERHOOD IN EAST AND WEST GERMANY: RESULTS OF THE GERMAN FAMILY AND FERTILITY SURVEY KATHERINA POHL 11 FATHERS AND FAMILIES IN CONTEMPORARY SPAIN: FROM DICTATORSHIP TO DEMOCRACY PAU MIRET GAMUNDI PART V FATHERHOOD OF WHICH CHILDREN? 12 DEMOGRAPHIC PATTERNS OF MOTHERHOOD AND FATHERHOOD IN FRANCE LAURENT TOULEMON AND EVELYN LAOIERRE-ADAMCYK 13 MEN, PARENTHOOD, AND DIVORCE IN THE ERA OF THE SECOND DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION FRANCES GOLDSCHEIDER, PAMELA WEBSTER, AND GAYLE KAUFMAN 14 MALE FERTILITY AS A LIFETIME OF RELATIONSHIPS: CONTEXTUALIZING MEN'S BIOLOGICAL REPRODUCTION IN BOTSWANA NICHOAS TOWNSEND INDEX CONTRIBUTORS

Fertility and the Male Life-Cycle in the Era of Fertility Decline

Introduction: the currency interface and its dynamics, Jane I. Guyer. Part 1 Pre-colonial currency dynamics: Raphia monies among the Teke, Marie-Claude Dupre cowries, gold and dollars - exchange rate instability and domestic price inflation in Dahomey, Robin Law. Part 2 Currency revolutions redescribed: the history and the adventures of a monetary object of the Kwele of the Congo, George Dupre monetization and the Asante state, Kwame Arhin. Part 3 Colonial situations in long-term perspective: the value of Beti bridewealth, Jane I. Guyer currency instability and social payments among the Igbo of Eastern Nigeria 1890-1990, Felicia Ekejiuba money and informal credit institutions in colonial Western Nigeria, Toyin Faloa changes in marriage and funeral exchanges in Asante, Takyiwana Manuh. Part 4 Long-term themes in present situations: money, self-realization and the person in Yoruba texts, Karin Barber the state, the courts and "value" - caught between matrilineages in Ghana, Gwendolyn Mikell how Gambians save - culture and economic strategy at an ethnic crossroads, Parker Shipton the capitalization of money and credit in the development process in Nigeria, Akin L. Mobogunje. Part 5 Epilogue: stable prices, unstable values - some thoughts on monetization and the meaning of transactions in West African economies, Sara S. Berry.

Jane I. Guyer

Papers

Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa

Representation without taxation: An essay on democracy in rural Nigeria, 1952-1990

Household budgets and women's incomes

Fertility and the Male Life-Cycle in the Era of Fertility Decline

Money matters : instability, values, and social payments in the modern history of West African communities