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African Market Women: Seven Life Stories from Ghana

African Market Women: Seven Life Stories from Ghana

by Gracia C. Clark (Author)

  • New

    Paperback 2010

    $34.15
Synopsis

In these lively life stories, women market traders from Ghana comment on changing social and economic times and on reasons for their prosperity or decline in fortunes. Gracia Clark shows that market women are intimately connected with economic policy on a global scale. Many work at the intersection of sophisticated networks of transnational commerce and migration. They have dramatic memories of independence and the growth of their new nation, including political rivalries, price controls, and violent raids on the market. The experiences of these women give substance to their reflections on globalization, capital accumulation, colonialism, technological change, environmental degradation, teenage pregnancy, marriage, children, changing gender roles, and spirituality. Clark's commentary illuminates the complex historical and cultural setting of these deeply revealing lives.

$34.15

Quantity

20+ in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 280
 Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 01 Apr 2010
ISBN 10: 0253221544
ISBN 13: 9780253221544
Book Overview: The lives and experiences of women traders in Kumasi

Media Reviews
African Market Women is a wonderfully evocative compilation of seven life histories from Kumasi, Ghana, of women Gracia Clark encountered in the course of a lifetime of fieldwork with marketers and study of the anthropology of marketing.April 2012 * African Studies Review *
Clark . . . offers intriguing insights into the lives of seven Akan women traders. . . . Recommended. * Choice *
Provides rich and nuanced insight into a range of themes which are at the very heart of late colonial and postcolonial scholarship on Africa: globalization, gender and economic security, economic decline, structural adjustment, changes in family structure, urbanization, environmental degradation, new forms of spirituality, transnational migration, and the politics of memory. -- Jean Allman * Washington University *
Overall, this is an excellent book: it will be useful in undergraduate teaching and makes an important contribution to our understanding of the richness and variety of women's lives in West Africa. * Journal of Africa *
African Market Women provides a unique insider's view into the highly complicated workings of the West African commodities trade. Through the words of some of the market's most accomplished veterans, readers can see the daily efforts involved in distribution and marketing of some of Ghana's most essential household items.Vol. 43, no. 2, 2010 * Intl Jrnl. of African Historical Studies *
Shows, in direct speech, how family, kinship, marriage and age/generation work together in a daily life which is shaped by political, demographic, cultural, and wholly accidental change in people's circumstances. -- Jane Guyer * Johns Hopkins University *
[This] book may be read as both a scholarly study and a collection of primary sources: accessible to a general reader, and likely to be of particular interest to students and scholars seeking knowledge about Ghana, women's studies, and/or African social history and economic life. For readers who are already familiar with Clark's first book, African Market Women will be a welcome and rewarding companion volume. July, 2010 * H-Africa, H-Net Reviews *
Author Bio

Gracia Clark is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. She is author of Onions Are My Husband: Survival and Accumulation by West African Market Women and has edited several volumes dealing with gender and economic life in West Africa.