Author Description

This volume integrates diverse bodies of demographic and anthropological scholarship, bringing new insights to bear on a topic of longstanding interest in African ethnography: the dynamics of conjugal union and their implications for reproduction. Two much-needed contributions to the literature are offered here. The first is an analysis of the dynamics of marriage and partnership-formation in Africa. Many of the studies are based on careful field research, making this a rich and original source of information on this diverse and rapidly changing area. The other contribution is to incorporate recent theoretical perspectives in anthropology into the interpretation of demographic data. The contributors argue that these perspectives are necessary in order to understand the marriage process and ascertain its effects on demographic events such as fertility, divorce, and child mortality. The volume's most unique contribution lies in an explicit reconceptualization of marriage, arguably the most interesting, yet least studied of the core demographic variables. In Africa, marriage is often less a discrete event than a process lasting years, it involves transfers of wealth, the inception of sexual relations, the birth of children, and so on. Confronting recent views of the fluidity and negotiability of marital statuses, the contributions in this book offer new ways of perceiving nuptiality and the contexts it sets for reproduction.