Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T05:25:48.518Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Between ‘forced marriage’ and ‘free choice’: social transformations and perceptions of gender and sexuality among the Balanta in Guinea-Bissau

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 March 2019

Marina Padrão Temudo
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

African women are frequently portrayed as a subaltern group in need of external support, used as property in forging social relations, producing wealth in people and doing most of the agricultural work to feed household members in societies where ‘modernization’ does not always seem to change their unfortunate predicament. This article destabilizes such narratives by showing the complexities of marriage practices and the difficult dialectics between freedom and subjugation in one West African agrarian society – the Brasa-speaking people of Guinea-Bissau. Among this patrilineal and virilocal group, marriage was usually arranged at birth or when girls were still small children. However, after marriage, women enjoyed great freedom of movement to have distant sexual partners and to pursue private profit-making activities. Paradoxically, while at present most young women are allowed to marry a young husband of their choice, having lost the support of their descent groups they are becoming more subjected to their husbands’ power and control.

Résumé

On présente souvent les femmes africaines comme un groupe subalterne dépendant d'un soutien extérieur, utilisées pour forger des relations sociales, produire de la « richesse en personnes » et faire l'essentiel du travail agricole pour nourrir leur famille dans des sociétés dans lesquelles la « modernisation » ne semble pas toujours changer leur difficile condition. Cet article déstabilise de tels récits en montrant les complexités des pratiques du mariage et la dialectique difficile entre liberté et subjugation au sein d'une société agraire d'Afrique de l'Ouest, les locuteurs du balante de la Guinée-Bissau. Dans ce groupe patrilinéaire et virilocal, le mariage était généralement arrangé à la naissance ou pendant la petite enfance des filles. Néanmoins, après leur mariage, les femmes jouissaient d'une grande liberté de mouvement leur permettant d'avoir des partenaires sexuels éloignés et de poursuivre des activités lucratives privées. Paradoxalement, alors qu'actuellement la plupart des jeunes femmes sont autorisées à épouser un homme jeune de leur choix, le fait qu'elles aient perdu le soutien de leur groupe de filiation les rend plus soumises au pouvoir et au contrôle de leurs époux.

Type
Gender, sexuality and kinship
Information
Africa , Volume 89 , Issue 1 , February 2019 , pp. 1 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abbink, J. (2005) ‘Being young in Africa: the politics of despair and renewal’ in Abbink, J. and van Kessel, I. (eds), Vanguards or Vandals: youth, politics and conflict in Africa. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Amadiune, I. (1987) Male Daughters, Female Husbands: gender and sex in an African society. London: Zed Books.Google Scholar
Arnfred, S. (2007) ‘Sex, food and female power: discussion of data material from Northern Mozambique’, Sexualities 10 (2): 141–58.Google Scholar
Bledsoe, C. (1976) ‘Women's marital strategies among the Kpelle of Liberia’, Journal of Anthropological Research 32 (4): 372–89.Google Scholar
Bledsoe, C. (1980) Women and Marriage in Kpelle Society. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Bryceson, D., Jønsson, J. and Verbrugge, H. (2013) ‘Prostitution or partnership? Wifestyles in Tanzanian artisanal gold-mining settlements’, Journal of Modern African Studies 51 (1): 33–56.Google Scholar
Callewaert, I. (2000) The Birth of Religion among the Balanta of Guinea-Bissau. Lund: University of Lund.Google Scholar
Challinor, E. (2017) ‘Caught between changing tides: gender and kinship in Cape Verde, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 82 (1): 113–38.Google Scholar
Cole, J. (2004) ‘Fresh contact in Tamatave, Madagascar: sex, money, and intergenerational transformation’, American Ethnologist 31 (4): 573–88.Google Scholar
Constable, N. (2009) ‘Commodification of intimacy: marriage, sex and reproductive labour’, Annual Review of Anthropology 38: 49–64.Google Scholar
Cornwall, A. (2002) ‘Spending power: love, money, and the reconfiguration of gender relations in Ado-Odo, southwestern Nigeria’, American Ethnologist 29 (4): 963–80.Google Scholar
Coulter, C. (2009) Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers: women's lives through war and peace in Sierra Leone. New York NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Ferme, M. (2000) The Underneath of Things: violence, history, and the everyday in Sierra Leone. Berkeley and Los Angeles CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Gable, E. (2000) ‘The culture development club: youth, neo-tradition and the construction of society in Guinea-Bissau’, Anthropological Quarterly 73 (4): 195–203.Google Scholar
Groes-Green, C. (2013) ‘To put men in a bottle: eroticism, kinship, female power, and transactional sex in Maputo, Mozambique’, American Ethnologist 40 (1): 102–17.Google Scholar
Handem, D. (1986) Nature et fonctionnement du pouvoir chez les Balanta Brassa. Bissau: INEP.Google Scholar
Hirschman, A. (1970) Exit, Voice and Loyalty: responses to decline in firms, organizations and states. Harvard MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Honwana, A. (2012) The Time of Youth: work, social change, and politics in Africa. West Hartford CT: Kumarian Press.Google Scholar
Hunter, M. (2002) ‘The materiality of everyday sex: thinking beyond prostitution’, African Studies 61 (1): 99–120.Google Scholar
Li, T. M. (2014) Land's End: capitalist relations on an indigenous frontier. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Lovett, M. (1996) ‘“She thinks she's like a man”: marriage and (de)constructing gender identity in colonial Buha, Western Tanzania, 1943–1960’, Canadian Journal of African Studies 30 (1): 52–68.Google Scholar
Mahmood, S. (2001) ‘Feminist theory, embodiment and the docile agent: some reflections on the Egyptian Islamic revival’, Cultural Anthropology 16 (2): 202–36.Google Scholar
Mahmood, S. (2005) Politics of Piety: the Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Mokuwa, E., Voors, M., Bulte, E. and Richards, P. (2011) ‘Peasant grievance and insurgency in Sierra Leone: judicial serfdom as a driver of conflict’, African Affairs 110 (440): 339–66.Google Scholar
Ortner, S. (1995) ‘Resistance and the problem of ethnographic refusal’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (1): 173–93.Google Scholar
Oyewùmí, O. (2002) ‘Conceptualizing gender: the Eurocentric foundations of feminist concepts and the challenge of African epistemologies’, Jenda: Journal of Culture and African Women's Studies 2 (1): 1–7.Google Scholar
Perry, D. (2005) ‘Wolof women, economic liberalization, and the crisis of masculinity in rural Senegal’, Ethnology 44 (3): 207–26.Google Scholar
Sarró, R. (2009) The Politics of Religious Change on the Upper Guinea Coast: iconoclasm done and undone. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press for the International African Institute.Google Scholar
Sarró, R. and de Barros, M. (2015) ‘History, mixture, modernity: religious pluralism in Guinea-Bissau today’ in Chabal, P. and Green, T. (eds), Guinea-Bissau: from micro-state to ‘narco-state’. London: Hurst.Google Scholar
Shipton, P. (2007) The Nature of Entrustment: intimacy, exchange and the sacred in Africa. New Haven CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Tamale, S. (2006) ‘Eroticism, sensuality and “women's secrets” among the Baganda’, IDS Bulletin 37 (5): 89–97.Google Scholar
Tannock, S. (1995) ‘Nostalgia critique’, Journal of Cultural Studies 9 (3): 453–64.Google Scholar
Temudo, M. P. (2018) ‘Men wielding the plough: changing patterns of production and reproduction among the Balanta of Guinea-Bissau’, Journal of Agrarian Change 18 (2): 267–80.Google Scholar
Temudo, M. P. and Abrantes, M. (2015) ‘The plow and the pen: Balanta youth and the future of agriculture in Guinea-Bissau’, Development and Change 46 (3): 464–85.Google Scholar