Journal ArticleDOI
Which Family? Problems in the Reconstruction of the History of the Family as an Economic and Cultural Unit
Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
In this article, the role of matrilineage vis-a-vis the household over time is explored, concluding that the historian must be careful to distinguish between idealized family forms and the reality of family structures.Abstract:
This paper explores some of the major methodological problems associated with the study of the history of the family in Africa. It sets out to explore the problem of the unit of analysis, concluding that the historian must be careful to distinguish between idealized family forms and the reality of family structures. Using both historical and contemporary examples from southern Malawi the paper explores this problem further by analysing the role of the matrilineage vis-a-vis the household over time.Both oral and written sources specifically concerned with the history of the family tend to emphasize the formal structure of kinship relations and it is difficult to know how these relate to the facts of social and economic organization. Even using present-day evidence it is difficult to integrate cultural perceptions of kinship and family relations with realities – in particular with the economic realities, which may change much faster than cultural norms. In the final section of the paper it is suggested that the nearest we can get to a knowledge of the history of the family, avoiding the problems of ideology and the drawbacks of structural and evolutionary models, is to approach the subject ‘sideways’. By studying other institutions and relationships which impinge on family structures, we may get closer to defining the boundaries of these structures. This approach is illustrated using the example of chinjira - a non-kin-based relationship between women which exists in parts of southern Malawi. A study of chinjira indirectly demonstrates both the strength and the limits of kinship relations.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Social Institutions, and Access to Resources
TL;DR: For over a decade African economies have been plagued by recurrent food shortages, economic decline and growing disparities between the living standards of rich and poor as discussed by the authors, and to a large extent food shortages and rural impoverishment may be attributed to external shocks such as world recession, oil price shocks, deteriorating terms of trade and mounting debt service obligations.
Journal ArticleDOI
Women, Wives and Land Rights in Africa: Situating Gender Beyond the Household in the Debate Over Land Policy and Changing Tenure Systems
TL;DR: The authors argued that women have faced different forms of tenure insecurity, both as wives and in their relations with wider kin, as landholding systems have been integrated into wider markets and drew out these arguments from experience of tenure reform in Tanzania and asked how policy-makers might address these issues differently.
Journal ArticleDOI
African marriage systems: Perspectives from evolutionary ecology
TL;DR: The birth rate remains high in both urban and rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa in spite of the presence of several factors that supposedly promote lowering of fertility (McNicoll 1980), some of these factors are increased survivorship of children into adulthood, increased availability of education and levels of educational attainment, increased urbanization, and increased monetarization of the economy via migratory wage labor and cash cropping as discussed by the authors.
Journal ArticleDOI
African Famines and Food Security: Anthropological Perspectives
TL;DR: This paper reviewed a few findings in the thinly bridged gap between anthropology and economics, mainly by anthropologists and other researchers who have done extended rural research south of the Sahara since 1970.
Journal ArticleDOI
Against the Odds Matriliny, land and gender in the Shire Highlands of Malawi
TL;DR: The Shire Highlands in southern Malawi (with origins in Nyanja, Mang'anja, Yao, and Lomwe-speaking groups) practice a form of matriliny, including matrilineal descent and inheritance and uxorilocal mariage, that has proven remarkably resilient in the face of direct and indirect challenges as discussed by the authors.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Household and Community in African Studies
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors describe the evolution of the macro-processus de l'organisation sociale en Afrique, i.e., de la signification of certains concepts-cles comme les concepts de groupe domestique, de lignage, de famille.
Journal ArticleDOI
An Estimate of Fertility in Some Yao Hamlets in Liwonde District of Southern Nyasaland
Abstract: In this paper an attempt is made to present in more detail some demographic material on an African non-literate people. The main object of the paper is to estimate the probable gross and net reproduction-rates prevailing at the moment in the areas studied. The data on which this paper is based were collected incidentally to a study of the social organization of the Yao people living in the Liwonde District of Nyasaland in Central Africa. In this study a number of typical hamlets varying from 5 to 50 or more dwellings were visited and genealogies of the residents recorded. In 20 of these hamlets further details were secured on points of demographic interest. Each census in a village took a day or two and individual censuses were taken between November 1946 and March 1947. In this analysis of the material I have assumed that the survey was done at the end of 1946. The survey was conducted on a de facto and de jure basis in that the population who had slept in a hamlet the previous night was enumerated but the mobility of the population is so high that usually it was necessary to consider a de jure count as constituting the true population of the village. The twenty hamlets studied were grouped in three areas two in the area under N. A. Kawinga and one in N. A. Nyambis area. (excerpt)