Among the many pleasures associated with working with the Asante, a West African ethnic group in the nation of Ghana, as I have since 1978, is the way they offer a contrary example to so many common assumptions about how human societies work. Their matrilineal kinship system still provides a strong contrast to models assuming paternal power, since the Asante nuclear family unit features brothers and sisters with their common mother. Duolo-cal marriage traditions keep many husbands and wives living separately today, and thus problematize abstract models of household income pooling in several ways. Asante exceptionalism, however, cannot resolve all the challenges posed by these contradictions. While their cultural patterns made it impossible to ignore these unexpected forms, the Asante example draws attention to parallel dynamics that had often been glossed over in researching more “normal” cultures.

In a similar way, the experience of Asante society with international trade destabilizes a commonsense model of stable traditional African cultures confronting commercialization and globalization as external shocks bringing rapid changes foreign to their indigenous values and institutions. The larger Akan ethnic group in what is now Ghana can claim to be present on the world system stage before the birth of capitalism. Regular voyages by Portuguese traders to the fort they had built on the Ghana coast at Elmina provided Christopher Columbus with an opportunity for training in long-distance navigation before he set out for the New World in 1492. The gold that gave Elmina its name, and later the slaves from its famous Door of No Return, played a key part in accumulating the financial resources that eventually fueled capitalist engines and colonial empires. Asante was founded around 1700 as a political unit precisely to control trade routes running from the European coastal forts to the even older caravan trading system that stretched across and along the Sahara. These caravans had carried gold, ivory, weapons, and slaves between West Africa and the Mediterranean since the days of Carthage. Perhaps because of this history, Asante people today enter enthusiastically into global networks with no signs of disappearing, while remaining fiercely attached to a cultural identity that their neighbors emulate.

Over the decades, mature traders located at central nodes of the marketplace system, like Kumasi Central Market, accumulate significant expertise in the assessment and prediction of trends in globalization.