Rethinking the Akan Household: Acknowledging the Importance of Culturally and Linguistically Meaningful Images

Conceptualizing the household, especially in non-Western cultures, has never been easy. Studies undertaken in sub-Saharan Africa indicate that what we consider the household is a fluid, open-ended interaction of diverse dynamics, which are often contingent upon and enmeshed within specific sociocultural interactions and economic relations, raising questions as to how meaningful a Western household conceptualization is to research in these cultures. Apart from the obvious cultural sensitivity lesson (people in different cultures do things differently), there is no doubt that the extant household conceptualization and its focus on location, residence, fixity, and simplicity reflects a modernizing, capitalist world, which privileges individual property and domesticity as a goal to be attained. This paper contends that Ghanaian Akan families do not reside in households; rather, they exhibit living arrangements that are unique to this ethnocultural group. It is critical that research in this culture adopt a more culturally and linguistically appropriate image—namely, the bokyea (cooking-hearth and eating group)—if we seek to understand and map out the lived worlds of Akans.