Making Men in Ghana

Notes

209 Notes Prologue and Personae 1. The archival sources I consulted are listed in the bibliography. 2. Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 58. Tonkin distinguishes between written and oral genres, defined as “patterned expectancy,” labeling an agreement between speaker and listener. In oral genres, “the occasion of performance is clearly important and may be definite to the audience’s expectations” (51). 3. For proverbs and the intersection of masculinities and language, see Kwesi Yankah , The Proverb in the Context of Akan Rhetoric: A Theory of Proverb Praxis (Bern: Peter Lang, 1989); and Chenjerai Shire, “Men Don’t Go to the Moon: Language, Space and Masculinities in Zimbabwe,” in Dislocating Masculinity, ed. A. Cornwall and N. Lindisfarne , 147–58 (London: Routledge, 1994). 4. For feminist self-positioning, see Susan Geiger, TANU Women: Gender and Culture in the Making of Tanganyikan Nationalism, 1955–1965 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann , 1997); Belinda Bozzoli, with Mmantho Nkotsoe, Women of Phokeng: Consciousness, Life Strategy, and Migrancy in South Africa, 1900–1983 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1991); Sarah Mirza and Margaret Strobel, eds., Three Swahili Women: Life Histories from Mombasa, Kenya (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Marjorie Shostak, Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); Shula Marks, ed., Not Either an Experimental Doll: The Separate Worlds of Three South African Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Berida Ndambuki and Claire Robertson, “We Only Come Here to Struggle”: Stories from Berida’s Life (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2000); and particularly Ruth Behar, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story (Boston: Beacon, 1993). For postmodern critiques of Westerners doing research in non-Western settings, see Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, eds., Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York: Routledge, 1992); and the debate between Kirk Hoppe and Heidi Gengenbach in, respectively , “Whose Life Is It, Anyway? Issues of Representation in Life Narrative Texts of African Women,” International Journal of African Historical Studies (IJAHS) 26, no. 3 (1993): 623–36; and, “Truth-Telling and the Politics of Women’s Life History Research in Africa: A Reply to Kirk Hoppe,” IJAHS 27, no. 3 (1994): 619–27. 5. Emmanuel Akyeampong, Drink, Power, and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c. 1800 to Recent Times (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1996), 161. 6. Geiger, TANU Women, xvi. 7. Behar, Translated Woman, 272. 210 Notes to pages xix–2 8. For libations, see Kwesi Yankah, Speaking for the Chief: C kyeame and the Politics of Akan Royal Oratory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 172–80. Many Christian churches frown upon the practice; see S. G. Williamson, Akan Religion and Christian Faith (Accra: Ghana Universities Press, 1965), 132. Some of my academic predecessors took a different route by not disclosing the research location and informants’ names. Wolf Bleek called the town of Kwawu-Tafo “Ayere” (“it has become tough”) to protect his informants; he also published under a pseudonym. Returning twenty years later, Bleek found that his friends in Kwawu-Tafo were disappointed about not being mentioned; see his Marriage, Inheritance and Witchcraft: A Case Study of a Rural Ghanaian Family (Leiden: Afrika-Studiecentrum, 1975), 32. I am grateful to Sjaak van der Geest for sharing his research experience (Kwawu-Tafo, October 1994). Bleek’s case is not isolated. Clifford Geertz recalled that he and Hildred Geertz had referred to the Indonesian town Pare, the location of their 1950s research, as Modjokuto in their published work. Now Geertz uses the name Pare. He noted, “The last time I was there, in 1986, one of my old informants had gone through the Indonesian translation of the social history of the town that I wrote. I had changed the names of the people as well as the town, but he wrote all the right names in and photocopied it and sent it around to everybody” (Richard Handler, “An Interview with Clifford Geertz,” Current Anthropology 32, no. 5 [1991]: 605). 1. “To Be a Man Is Hard” 1. For a periodization and overview of this scholarship, see Nancy Hunt, introduction to “Gendered Colonialism in African History,” Gender and History (special issue) 8, no. 3 (1996): 323–37; and idem, “Placing African Women’s History and Locating Gender,” Social History 14, no. 3 (1989): 359–79. Recent collections include Ayesha Imam, Amina Mama, and Fatou Sow, eds., Engendering African Social Sciences (Dakar: CODESRIA, 1997); Dorothy Hodgson and Sheryl McCurdy, eds...