Household budgets and women's incomes

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 28While explaining proposed studies of aspects of "household economics" to prospective informants in two different African societies, I have been advised very quickly that "Among us, a man and his wife do not share the same purse, and that "Over here, we have a men's side and a women's side. This paper explores some of the problems of applying a "household" methodology to the study of African rural economies. It focuses on one type of household study, namely budget analysis, and suggests that the classic assumption of the household as an undifferentiated decision-making unit applies poorly to many African kinship systems. The first part of the paper is a brief discussion of household methodology and its application to Africa. The second part is devoted to an analysis of the relationship between men's and women's incomes in the rural economy of the Beti of Southern Cameroun

The Provident Societies in the rural economy of Yaoundé, 1945-1960

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 3

The economic position of Beti widows, past and present

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 2

The raw, the cooked, and the half-baked: a note on the division of labor by sex

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 4

Women's work in the economy of the Cocoa belt: a comparison

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 7This paper is an empirical study of the cultural context and historical development of the division of labor by sex in two farming systems of the West African cocoa belt: the Yoruba of Western Nigeria and the Beti of South-Central Cameroun. Both societies are patrilineal. Both peoples inhabited the forest zone before the period of colonial rule, so that their hoe-farming systems had already adjusted to the forest environment before the cocoa era. The two societies differ, however, in overall political structure. The Yoruba had a centralised form of city-state government, while the Beti were organised in small village communities under autonomous headmen. The major difference which forms the theme of this paper is the different division of labor by sex in the indigenous economy. In a rough categorization of African farming systems, according to which sex does most of the work, the Yoruba would be classified as a male farming system, the Beti as a female farming system. [TRUNCATED

Women's Farming and Present Ethnography: Thoughts on a Nigerian Re-Study

Explores women's farming among the Yoruba of Nigeria, based on the author's experience of ten years of empirical research on the topic; and relates it to conceptual questions within the field of anthropology

Head tax, social structure and rural incomes in Cameroun, 1922-1937

African Studies Center Working Paper No.

Family and farm in southern Cameroon

This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

Anthropological models of African production: the naturalization problem

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 7