Bøger i Women in Africa and the Diaspora serien

Shows how gossip and the responses to it form an ongoing dialogue through which the moral reputations of trading women and businessmen, and cultural ideas about moral value and gender, are constructed and rethought. This work reveals a different perspective on the globalization of the market economy and its meaning and impact on the local level.

In the Red Sea Hills of eastern Sudan, where poverty, famines, and conflict loom large, women struggle to gain the status of responsible motherhood. But biological fate can be capricious in impoverished settings. This work shows how Muslim Hadendowa women manage health and reproductive suffering in their quest to become ""responsible"" mothers.

In this study of maternal reactions to child death in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa, anthropologist Jonina Einarsdottir challenges the assumption that mothers in high-poverty societies will neglect their children and fail to mourn their deaths as a survival strategy.

Presents a portrait of Muslim women in Niger as they confront the challenges and opportunities of the twentieth century. Based on research and fieldwork, this work offers insights into the meaning of modernity for Muslim women in Niger. This is a multilayered vision of political Islam, education, popular culture, and war and its aftermath.

Provides a wide-ranging investigation of the gendered nature of historical memory and its influence on the development of the Mara region of Tanzania over the past 150 years. Shetler's exploration of oral traditions and histories opens new vistas for understanding how women and men in this culture tell their stories and assert their roles.

Using the Agwagune community in southeastern Nigeria as a case study, David Uru Iyam asserts that women are not stereotypically submissive, oppressed, or passive. Though women are often misrepresented in studies that fail to ask about their agency, Iyam highlights the overlooked contributions of women that uphold and change entire social systems.

In this innovative work, Joanna Allan demonstrates why we should foreground gender as key for understanding both authoritarian power projection and resistance. She brings an ethnographic component to examine how concerns for equality and women's rights can be co-opted for authoritarian projects.

Shows how the debate on female genital excision has evolved over the last four decades of the twentieth century, in response to changing attitudes about ethnicity, nationalism, colonialism, feminism, and human rights. The author discerns a gradual evoluti