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Negotiating Asante family survival in Kumasi, Ghana

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2011

Gracia Clark
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Extract

Extreme flexibility in the residential and financial arrangements attached to marriage and matrilineal kinship have remained a consistent characteristic of Asante throughout this century. The constant renegotiation processes that constitute and renew family relations have kept them remarkably strong through a series of radical changes in the enacted content and boundaries of those relations, linked with dramatic fluctuations in the economic and political environment of Ghana. The degree of personal agency sustaining this Asante social framework has challenged and stretched a succession of theoretical models, since this negotiability extends to the principles and limits of negotiation itself. The continuing vitality of Asante matriliny actually requires a high degree of individual autonomy, including the economic autonomy that anchors the negotiating position of each social adult. Recent life history work among Kumasi women traders shows that the elastic framework of family relations can absorb considerable change in the expectations and the balance of power between spouses or between parents and children as long as the pace remains slow enough and individual self-reliance stable enough to preserve the continuity of the renegotiation process. The economic crisis of the final decade of the century has threatened the basis of social reproduction by reducing the opportunities for financial independence. Without basic autonomous subsistence young men and women can no longer function effectively as Asante adults.

Résumé

Tout au long de ce siècle, la très grande souplesse des dispositions en matière financière et en matière de résidence afférentes au mariage et à la parenté matrilinéaire a été une caractéristique constante des Asantes. Grâce aux processus constants de renégotiation qui forment et renouvellent les rapports familiaux, ces derniers sont restés remarquablement solides malgré une série de changements radicaux du contenu et des limites de ces rapports, liés à des fluctuations spectaculaires du contexte économique et politique du Ghana. Le degré d'action personnelle qui soutient ce cadre social Asante a mis à rude épreuve une succession de modeies theoriques, dans la mesure ou cette négotiability s'etend aux principes et aux limites de la négociation elle-même. La vitalité permanente de la parenté matrilinéaire Asante requiert un degré important d'autonomie individuelle, y compris l'autonomie économique qui fixe solidement la position de negociation de chaque adulte social. Des études historiques récentes sur la vie des femmes commerçantes de Kumasi montrent que le cadre élastique des rapports familiaux est capable d'absorber des changements d'attentes et d'équilibre du pouvoir considérables éntre epoux ou entre parents et enfants, à condition que le rythme de ces changements demeure suffisamment lent et que l'autosuffisance individuelle demeure suffisamment stable pour préserver la continuité du processus de renégotiation. La crise économique de la dernière décennie de ce siècle a menacé la base de reproduction sociale en réduisant les possibilités d'indépendance financière. Sans une subsistance autonome de base, les jeunes (hommes et femmes) ne peuvent plus fonctionner de maniere efficace en tant qu'Asantes adultes.

Type
Women's practice of Kinship in modern Ghana
Information
Africa , Volume 69 , Issue 1 , January 1999 , pp. 66 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 1999

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