AFRICA is notable for the extent to which women participate in cultivation. An -tJLexamination of the contribution of men and women by means of 'The Ethnographic Atlas (Ethnology, 1967) shows that women play the major part in cultivation in 45 per cent of societies in Africa as a whole, and in 53 per cent of sub-Saharan societies. We are concerned here with the contribution women make to cultivation (in pastoral as well as purely farming economies) and not to its over-all control, which is largely in the hands of men. An investigation of the reasons behind the part played by women in hoe agriculture is not the prime purpose of this paper, but it is possibly connected with their role in hunting and gathering economies. There is a striking uniformity about the division of labour in such societies: men hunt, women gather; men manage the more complex techniques, while women do basketry, fishing, and gather shell fish (Murdock, 1968: 335). As Steward has remarked, this sexual complementarity of labour is a marked feature of all hunting societies, with the gathering activities of women often supplying a large proportion of the diet (1968 : 330). If at the hunting stage women were the ones who collected vegetable produce, they would tend to be the ones concerned with cultivating the domestic varieties of these plants; just as men, who had formerly been concerned with hunting wild animals, would tend to take over the husbandry of domestic livestock. Thus in simpler systems of agriculture-those cultivating the ground by means of the wooden digging stick, 1 the stone hoe or an iron blade-the fields would tend to be cultivated by women, though the
Murdock's recent analysis of standardized behavior associated with pairs of cross-sex kin emphasizes the "nearly identical distribution" throughout the world. While recognizing the broad similarities, the authors point to certain differences between continental areas that are related to specific social factors, including the structure of descent groups and the nature of marriage arrangements.George Peter Murdock has recently analyzed (1971) the behavior between close kin and affines of the opposite sex. This subject, which has interested many anthropologists, covers the fields of formal interpersonal behavior-usually categorized as avoidance, respect, joking, and license. Looking at the data recorded from a world sample, Murdock finds a &dquo;nearly identical distribution of the behavior patterns for each of the nine pairs of relatives in all the world regions&dquo; (1971: 364). This &dquo;unique&dquo; distribution, he argues, appears to invalidate diffusionist and functionalist explanations; for example the evidence fails to confirm Tylor's plausible hypothesis that mother-in-law avoidance was associated with matrilocal residence, the situation where a husband is living with the kin of his wife (i.e. uxorilocally).
Two of these four recent books in Norwegian-American Studies are republications of immigrant literature in English translation, one a novel that originally appeared inOslo in 1926, the other a bilingual presentation of a long-running ethnic comic strip in book form. The other two books are works of scholarship, one a general immigrant/ethnic history that includes a long and detailed chapter on literature, the other a collection of essays about and by an early Norwegian immigrant author, Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen. Together these four works demonstrate increasing interest in and knowledge about this ethnic literature, as well as growing transatlantic cooperation to recover it for readers of today. Note that two of these titles are published jointly by Norwegian and American concerns, while one has two separate editions planned in cooperation, one in the language of each country. Waldemar Ager (1869-1941) is generally recognized as one of the best Norwegian-American authors, second only to Ole R^lvaag. He immigrated to Chicago in his teens, moved to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in 1892, and lived there the rest of his life as editor and publisher of the newspaper Reform, author, and ethnic leader. He devoted himself to working for a permanent Norwegian-American subculture in a pluralistic America, expressed not only in distinctive ethnic institutions but also in art and literature. A number of his essays advancing this view were republished in English translation as Cultural Pluralism versus Assimilation: The Views of Waldemar Ager, ed. Odd S. Lovoll (Northfield: Norwegian-American Historical Association , 1977). Ager was a prolific writer of fiction, producing ten collections of short stories (some of which are absolute gems) and six novels in his long career.
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