The "African" family

Entering the final leg of field work, I’m feeling fairly fatigued. I’m ready to get back home and start processing all that I have learned. I’ve started to build in more breaks to my day, to make sure that I am giving myself enough mental rest to keep processing more information… because despite me being fatigued, the information just keeps right on flowing. Especially now that I’ve been here long enough to begin observing more subtle nuances of the culture I’m surrounded by. And, of course, now that I’ve been in both regions where STEWARD is working, I notice some very obvious differences between these two regions.

One of the more pronounced differences between this side of the country (Madina Oula area) and Mt. Nimba (where I was working previously) is that the Madina Oula prefecture is almost totally Muslim, while the Mt. Nimba region is heavily Christian. This changes family structure quite considerably, and obviously has a lot of implications for land use, resource use, agricultural systems, and land tenure. One big implication it has for me is that suddenly question 4 (what are the ages of the people in your family?) can take over 30 minutes, and is often times just not completely answerable. I’ve had to switch tactics to make any headway on this question. Rather than asking how many 0-4 year olds there are in this family, I begin by asking, how many wives do you have? How many children does each wife have? Are any of those children married? How many wives do they have? How many children do they have? Which of your children still eat with you? Which of your grandchildren eat with you? Does anybody besides your wives, children, and grandchildren eat with you? Who? (If I have the mental energy, and we haven’t totally exhausted ourselves, I start to ask ages as well.) Even after all of this, often times we realize we forgot up to 10 people, or we erroneously included several people who actually do not eat together. It’s very challenging.

The challenge boils down to one of the major challenges I’ve encountered this trip - which is trying to establish a meaningful and appropriate unit of analysis for social research. Until we hit Madina Oula, it worked fairly well to define “family” as people who eat together. (This is not to ignore other definitions of family, it simply served as a systematic method to avoid double counting people, or not counting people at all, when we try to get at the number of people in each household.) We’re interested in some comparative numbers on household size, as a way to understand how much labor a family has, how many mouths to feed, and how many people STEWARD interventions are potentially supporting. I wasn’t totally satisfied with any one definition, but this definition of people who eat together worked pretty well around Mt. Nimba. Generally, in Mt. Nimba, men have one wife, they live together in one house, and they all eat together. Simple. Less simple in Susuland. It is fairly typical for a household head to have four wives, and 20 children, some of whom may still live with him, some of whom may live in other houses (but still eat with the family), and some of whom may be totally independent. Then there are grandchildren, being supported by the grandparents to various degrees. Then there are just other children, nephews, nieces, brothers, sisters, some of them in the same house, some of them elsewhere, some of whom eat together, some of whom sometimes eat together… it has just been a headache for my American brain to sort out.

I had a bit of an epiphany though - I’ve come to realize that the concept of family-unit and household-unit, and “people who eat together” unit, changes not only when you move between “Western” and “African” households, but also when you move from African household to African household. This may be very obvious to most people, but I was slow to catch on. The way a male household head defines family may be totally different from the way his fourth wife defines family. (He may claim he feeds everybody, when in reality, each wife has a distinct farm, and prepares food separately.) And given the household head’s social prominence, the definition of family (even defined as “people who eat together”) may be broader still. (As the chief is responsible for feeding many more people than a mere farmer.) This realization on my part is actually not that astounding, and it really doesn’t help me figure out my unit of analysis problem. I do find it interesting though, how concept of family changes as concept of self changes. That actually isn’t so unique to the “African” family when you think about it. Anyway, all this unit of analysis business highlights the value of good ethnographic research over survey data. The survey data is interesting, and useful…  but I’ve had to accept that a lot of the data we are interested in gathering on resource use, land use, and demographics will just have to come from good old participant observation and in depth interviews, which at this point sounds a lot less tedious.

I’ll end this post by presenting one particularly puzzling family I encountered. The husband had four wives. Generally we interview male household heads, which has pros and cons. While it would be nice to have more mixed informants, it is culturally impossible not to interview the household head if he (and sometimes she) is present. And, given how differently different people think about land ownership and family, perhaps it gives the data more consistency to talk to the same kind of person. However, talking primarily to the household head certainly gives the data a bias – and this is a problem that I will have to remedy in the future. Anyway, back to my point. This particular household head was in his 40s. His youngest wife was 28. He informed me she had 12 children. I blinked. “12?” “Yes, 12.” “And she is 28?” “Yes.” I’m trying not to sound or look judgmental, because I am honestly just confused, and am assuming that something has been lost in translation… but I want to figure this out. Is it really possible that he married his fourth wife at the age of 16, and that she has been pregnant every year since then? Women marry young, but that is exceptionally young… and women have a lot of children, but 12 is quite a few for a 28 year old woman. Perhaps she has “adopted” children from other family members? Perhaps he has 12 children total? So I go through all the wives and children again, same thing. At this point, I am obviously confused, and people find it hilarious. So they finally throw me a bone, and explain that this woman has had twins three times, plus been pregnant 6 additional times, for a total of 9 pregnancies and 12 children.

Generally, like a good anthropologist in the field, I try to suspend judgment, and try to think and analyze in the context where I am working… but in this case, I have a hard time. I am 28 (turning 29 on the 19^th!) and I cannot imagine what my life would be like with 12 children. I cannot imagine what my body would be like having already endured 9 pregnancies. For the rest of the interview, I couldn't stop wondering what kind of thoughts and feelings this young woman, and mother of 12, must have. Does she feel at all how I would feel if I woke up tomorrow and had 12 children? Thinking of myself in her shoes, I couldn't help but feel incredibly fortunate with my position in this world. This is not to say that I feel pity or scorn for a culture outside of my own. But I recognize the difficulties that 12 children impose on a young woman (and her figure), and I am grateful for the life and the marriage that I have… and I’m excited to return to it in 2 weeks!