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 Leiden University catalogue |
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| Title: | Onions Are My Husband: Survival and Accumulation by West African Market Women |
| Author: | Clark, Gracia |
| Year: | 1994 |
| Pages: | 464 |
| Language: | English |
| City of publisher: | Chicago, IL |
| Publisher: | The University of Chicago Press |
| ISBN: | 0226107795; 0226107809 |
| Geographic term: | Ghana |
| Subjects: | Ashanti marketplaces market women |
| Abstract: | This book deals with market women of Kumasi Central Market in Kumasi, Ghana, whose positions vary from hawkers of meals and cheap manufactured goods to powerful wholesalers who control the flow of important staples. Drawing on more than four years of field research (1978-1980; 1982-1984), during which the author worked alongside several influential market 'queens', she explains the economic, political, gender, and ethnic complexities involved in the operation of the marketplace and examines the resourcefulness of the market women in surviving the various hazards they routinely encounter. The first part of the book features the marketplace system as a heterogeneous whole, setting Kumasi Central Market in its commercial context visually, spatially and historically. The second part drops down to the smaller units of individuals and enterprises within the market, describing their behaviours and intentions and their internal dynamics. The third part concerns middle-level organization within the market, including informal networks and formal commodity groups. The fourth part shows how these small units and the marketplace system itself are imbedded in broader regional and national processes of State and class formation and the renegotiation of gender, lineage and ethnicity. |
