Abstract:Since the arrival of European missionaries in Africa, there has been charged debate over people's marriage choices. This article outlines the major elements in the academic, theological, and popular discourses on marriage in Africa, focusing on two topics: the conceptual divide between monogamous Christian marriage and African polygyny, and the claim that women automatically prefer monogamy. By comparing the assumptions in the literature with ethnographic data from the Republic of Benin, this article demonstrates that marital choices cannot necessarily be predicted by a person's gender and rarely are characterized by a definitive conceptual divide. Instead, personal motives related to economics, prestige, and competition for power are the main factors in marriage choices.

While there are undoubtedly real barriers to men doing research on women, these barriers loom larger than they are. Despite the deconstruction of essentialized gender categories, the anthropology of gender and women continue to be the domain of women. This reflexive account of anthropological fieldwork among women in Benin documents the mistakes and successes the author has experienced, while arguing that the challenges exist not only in the field setting, but in the Academy and in the ethnographer's mind. The essay concludes with a plea to reinvigorate the anthropology of gender by attending to the possibilities for men to understand women's lives both through interaction with men as well as with women.

We wish to thank all contributors to this volume for sharing their experiences, insights, advice, and critiques, for they have advanced and enriched this discussion in a way we could never have done on our own. We also appreciate the input of John Chernoff and Kevin Yelvington, who participated in the original conference panel and offered insight and encouragement for this project from the beginning. Finally we would like to acknowledge the guidance and support of the journal's editor Michael Kimmel, who worked tirelessly in shaping this special issue and helping us overcome our hesitations.

The Republic of Benin (formerly Dahomey) is known as the African source of New WorldVodouandVoodoo, but the country’s religious landscape is best characterized by religious importation. Since precolonial times BeninoisVodúnhas exhibited ongoing amalgamation of deities introduced from neighboring peoples. This essay outlines historicalVodúnimports along with more-recent spiritual influences from abroad. I argue that while Beninois people have always been accepting of foreign religions, today this process is largely motivated by the dangers and promises of witchcraft. The current constellation of spiritual traditions embodies a dynamic moment of religious transformation that prompts people to collect even more distant spiritual remedies to seemingly old problems. In this analysis we see that what scholars call syncretism is not necessarily an ideological or hegemonic process, but a product of Beninois people’s pragmatic response to life’s troubles, inequalities, and opportunities.

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