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THE MEANING OF LIVELIHOOD Impressive tenacity and ingenuity enable Africans to survive and even prosper under extremely challenging circumstances. The widespread stereotype of the passive victim crumbles away in the face of Africans’ incessant efforts to protect their families’ interests and ensure security and progress for the next generation. It is a struggle that some people shirk and that many do not win. Even so, people’s agency must be taken seriously. Continuous experimentation and innovation are among the legacies of African societies in every part of the continent, as people make their living often under severe resource constraints and despite external shocks such as the recent spiraling prices of gasoline and corn. Analyzing the strategies that people employ for preserving and adapting families and communities to these constraints has led researchers to adopt the term “livelihood ” to indicate the paid and unpaid activities that together sustain communities and individuals over the long term. Conventional U.S. economic analysis makes a sharp distinction between work and family, confining the economy to the work side, measured primarily in monetary terms as gross domestic product (GDP), the value of goods and services produced in a country in a given year. Even calculations that try to include the production of goods and services that are not part of the official record, such as farming for direct consumption or using unpaid family labor, often disregard the domestic and cultural work that maintain a family’s well-being over the long run, from cooking and cleaning to the values and social institutions that keep people working together. The concept of livelihood does justice to the way most Africans interweave their varying public and domestic areas of responsibility and reflects their realities better than earlier studies that analyzed productive and reproductive activities separately. Productive activities, identified conventionally as those taking place in the farm, market, office, factory, or workshop, are not cleanly detached in practice from those Gracia Clark and Katherine Wiley Making a Living African Livelihoods 4 84 A F R I C A that reproduce the proper relations of family and gender, childbearing and child rearing, and community solidarity. A diverse repertoire of choices of work and family arrangements strengthens the flexibility that best prepares people for an unpredictable future. Out of this repertoire, people strategize collectively and individually to achieve and maintain sustainable economic positions. This chapter examines productive and reproductive activities together, asking how both contribute to people’s abilities to get by and lead meaningful lives. The concept of livelihood proves useful at many levels of analysis, including the individual, household, and extended family or clan as well as local community, economic class, ethnic group, region, nation, and subcontinent. At each level a viable livelihood must be constructed from a multiplicity of different activities that, taken together, provide for material needs. The ever-changing configuration of resources, local cultural practices, and historical experiences sets the parameters for viable agency at each level of analysis. For an obvious example on a national level, countries with petroleum deposits have a valuable resource that others do not, but its impact has differed in Nigeria, Sudan, and Angola, just as it has in Norway, Britain, and the United States. On an individual level, children’s likelihood of attending school depends a great deal upon where their parents live and the affordability of school fees. Still, poverty does not automatically exclude young people from receiving an education, since some children of poor parents manage to get their schooling sponsored by relatives, neighbors, or teachers. Livelihood approaches also recognize that multiple dimensions of disadvantage and privilege (such as race, gender, class, nation, ethnicity, geography, and ecology) interpenetrate within this analysis of human agency and shape people’s options and constraints. Barbara Cooper has shown how an elite Hausa woman in Niger faces much stricter norms of seclusion than her lower-class cousin who cannot afford to stay home because her family has no servants to fetch water and shop. Unlike her wealthier cousin, the poor woman can visit the market and the well without censure and work in the fields with her family and neighbors. She has more freedom of movement than her rich cousin, but less financial security and less prestige since her life does not conform to cultural ideals of modesty and restrictions on women’s movement . In this case, ethnicity (Hausa), gender (man or woman), class (wealthy or poor), and religion (Islam) all make a big difference to the consequences of the same action...

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