bridewealth

Here is a striking example of a new-institutionalist analysis of a concrete sociological phenomenon: Jean Ensminger's account of bridewealth in the cattle-herding culture of Kenya Making a Market: The Institutional Transformation of an African Society.

Archive 2009-02-01 Daniel Little 2009

Here is a striking example of a new-institutionalist analysis of a concrete sociological phenomenon: Jean Ensminger's account of bridewealth in the cattle-herding culture of Kenya Making a Market: The Institutional Transformation of an African Society.

The new institutionalism Daniel Little 2009

Mundlovu chiefs doled out these hoes with extreme care and ritual precaution to young Mundlovu men to use as bridewealth.

Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005

When a man marries, his family gives lovolo (bridewealth) to the family of the bride.

Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005

As households began to accumulate larger cattle herds, cattle assumed an increasingly important role not only as the principal anchor of agrarian livelihoods but also as the primary means of expressing intercommunity relationships and political power, notably power over people through the transfer of cattle as bridewealth.

Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005

Caissene said nothing in our two interviews about European-made iron hoes replacing or supplementing Vecha hoes as bridewealth, although Patrick Harries has written that, in the 1860s and 1870s, imported imitations were flooding southern Mozambique and playing a critical role in the mounting struggle, between young wage-earning men and chiefs/homestead heads, over access to bridewealth and marriage.

Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005

Note 13: Patriliny requires that children born to a couple who marry formally (i.e. with full bridewealth paid, or in an official civil or church ceremony) take the xivongo of their father.

Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005

Missionaries in particular (without, apparently, noticing the irony) mapped indigenous women in terms of their subjugation to polygynous marriage and lovolo (bridewealth), their "immoral" fondness for communal drinking and nocturnal "orgies," and their stubborn insistence on diagnosing illness and misfortune as symptoms of witchcraft.

Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005

Children born out of wedlock, or to a couple whose marriage formally ends with the woman's family repaying bridewealth to the family of her husband, take their mother's xivongo.

Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005

I do not know how to reconcile Caissene's insistence that "one hoe was for one woman" with Harries's meticulously documented report that chiefs had "inflated" bridewealth "from five hoes in the late 1860s to over fifty a decade later" except that perhaps the declining trade in hand-forged hoes made them that much more valuable and coveted in relation to mass-produced European imitations.

Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005