Introduction

Abstract

In recent years academic and policy concerns about Africa have shifted definitively away from static description and short-term intervention, towards a concern with depicting and influencing the long-term dynamics of change. One among many contentious areas of debate opened up by the dramatic shift in perspective has been the 'nature' of African familial structures. While much anthropological work has documented culturally specific -even though changing -patterns of familial organization, the other social sciences have tended to understate cross-cultural variation in favour of approaches drawing on generally applicable household models. In the recent search for an approach to variation and dynamics in the study of familial relations, the various disciplines have found the need to extend their questions and methods into empirical areas and conceptual realms beyond their traditional arenas. This in turn, as outlined in more detail in section 1 of this Introduction, has provoked a critical cross-disciplinary exploration which can only sharpen awareness of disciplinary assumptions and provoke focused debate on the application of various concepts and models to research and policy.The workshop entitled 'Conceptualizing the Household: Issues of Theory, Method and Application',* at which earlier versions of the present contributions were presented, was not necessarily intended to achieve a synthesis, but rather to explore how the various dialogues were developing. The hope was to discern, through the issues which emerged as central, whether there were untapped conceptual resources within certain disciplinary or theoretical perspectives; whether research questions were being posed in useful and manageable frames; whether there were unexplored links between particular

Development and the Household: Missing the point?

“…For example, this literature points out that all women (for example Jackson, 1993a, b;Agarwal, 1997aAgarwal, , b, 1998Locke, 1999;cf. Shiva, 1988) and households headed by women (for example Guyer and Peters, 1987;Varley, 1991;Ekejiuba, 1995;Peters, 1995) are not alike.…”

“…That safety, like the uncertainty and adversity of life in development contexts, is assumed to be distributed equally among the members of the household. A number of authors (Guyer and Peters, 1987;Haddad and Kanbur, 1990;Adams, 1991;Haddad and Hoddinott, 1994;Udry, 1996) note the common use of the household as the minimum unit at which development studies or projects are aimed. Haddad and Kanbur (1990) sum this trend up most clearly:…”

Are Urban Black Families Nuclear? A Comparative Study of Black and White South African Family Norms

“…Serious academic debate on the nature of household was uncommon before the 1980s, when a spate of papers suddenly pushed the problem into prominence, driven in part by new feminist concerns, in part by the realisation that households in the West were experiencing seismic shifts, and in part by the recognition of the distortion that the export of this reified unit was imposing on data collection outside the West (Wallerstein and Martin, 1979;Harris, 1981;Whitehead, 1981;Peters, 1983;Arnould, Wilk and Netting, 1984;Vaughan, 1985;Evans, 1989;Guyer and Peters, 1987;Martin and Beittel, 1987;Murray, 1987;Laurie and Sullivan, 1991;Wallerstein and Smith, 1992). It has taken time to assimilate that it is common for people in Africa to lay claim to several households simultaneously, or that households, defined as those who share house and hearth, may embrace any number of quite distinctive domestic groups, many far removed from the conveniently discrete compact conjugal family households which were found in Europe.…”

Women's Employment and its Relation to Children's Health and Schooling in Developing Countries: Conceptual Links, Empirical Evidence, and Policies

“…al., see Doss (1996a) and Strauss and Thomas (1995) for surveys of empirical studies by economists. For anthropological or sociological evidence, see Dwyer and Bruce (1988), Blumberg (1988), and Guyer and Peters (1987) and references therein.…”