The Changing Relationships of Co-wives Over Time in Rural Southern Uganda

Co-wives are often portrayed both as being rivals for their husband's affections and resources as well as collaborators in managing the family. I explore a further dimension: historical time. The life trajectories of individual women in rural Uganda show how co-wife relationships are established, change, endure or end. In addition to ageing, which plays a part in women's changing conjugal arrangements, political upheavals and HIV and AIDS have also had a profound impact on their lives, affecting not only their relationship and attitude towards their husbands but also towards their children, as well as each other. © 2012 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

Household Surveys — Using Qualitative Data to Enhance Our Understanding of Household Dynamics over Time

Margo Russell suggested that the “household has become dangerously reified” (1993: 755). She had a point. As she and many commentators have explained, identifying “the household” in many African settings is not straightforward and, indeed, may be misleading because it fails to take account of linkages across a wider kinship or familial group (Guyer and Peters 1987; Martin and Beittel 1987; and, more recently, Müller 2004; McEwan and Samuels 2006; Hosegood et al. 2007). However, as Coast, et al. (2009: 1) have recently stated, “Household surveys are the mainstay of micro-level data for developing countries” and while the use of the household as a unit for data collection has well-documented limitations the important place of “the household” in research as well as for national health surveillance surveys suggests that developing a better understanding of how to define households, and distinguish among different types, is a worthwhile exercise. Demographers such as Sara Randall and Ernestina Coast have undertaken extensive research to understand the use of different definitions of the household in survey and census data, and whether they reflect the household and family structures in Europe and Africa (see, for example, Randall et al. 2011), and this chapter builds on this existing body of work