African Market Women: Seven Life Stories from Ghana (review)

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. In the introduction Clark says, “I could honor them most effectively by promoting more respect for their indigenous economic knowledge” (7). And so she does, by recording what they chose to tell her about themselves and their lives. The results are highly individualized accounts that focus on different aspects of the lives according to the women’s interests. Clark followed a noninvasive methodology, without a questionnaire to structure the multiple interviews with each woman. She then read back the transcripts done by Twi transcribers/translators to the women, allowing them to edit out anything they wished, and only lightly edited the end text herself to produce the manuscript. In that editing she eliminated some repetition and most of the questions she had interjected. Adding to the ethical aspects of this work, Clark is transparent about her own subject position with regard to her subjects and about the conditions that obtained during the recording of the interviews. Thus the life histories are interactive in that their subjects had direct input not just in creating their stories but also in editing them. Readers can thus evaluate these narratives according to the conditions of their creation.

The stories have much to tell us about trade in Kumasi in the late twentieth century (the interviewing was done in 1994, for the most part). Readers with a strong interest in how women’s market trade is organized, profitable or not, enabled or impeded, strategized, endured, exploited, and conducted, will find much to enlighten them here. However, even though the bulk of the content is economic in focus, there is also substantial coverage of such topics as marriage, initiation rites, family economy in general, family structure and inheritance, and religion in women’s lives. One of the more interesting aspects is the description of inheritance that documents in several cases the decline of matrilineal practices in favor of patrilinearity, which is favored in Ghanaian law. The high value placed on wisdom derived from experience is also evident. The discussions of how market commodity queens are selected is revealing and counter to stereotype. Also evident is the increasing dependence on husbands for key resources, as I predicted in the 1970s, but there is also a newer strategy of sending one or more children abroad. A theme of interest is the pervasive discussion of modernization, civilization, and modernity in their Asante equivalents.

At the end Clark analyzes the similarities and differences among the narratives, while maintaining a resolute belief in their individuality. She points out some factors that I also found in the 1970s, including that women’s moral judgments of people’s actions more often than not rest on their evaluation of the economic impacts of their actions. Clark is at her best in this area, with one of her most perspicacious statements being, “Negotiating a balance between short-term profits and longer-term savings through risk reduction is a delicate process precisely because it triggers very sensitive evaluations of moral intentions and trading competence” (237). The values she enunciates as characteristic of the narratives include hard work, reliability, wisdom and intelligence, patience, love, generosity, unselfishness, competition for the sake of mutual benefit, good organization, and respect for others. Her subjects clearly are presented sensitively and as worthy of respect.

There are some flaws here, however. In life history work the standards regarding presentation and methodology have risen. While Clark is admirably interactive and transparent about the process of generating the manuscript, including even an appendix demonstrating how a transcript page became a manuscript page, the book lacks citations of the transcripts, which current practices dictate should be paginated and made available in the public domain. The unfortunate choice was made to put English words used by informants, who...