Controlling Consumption: The Illusiveness and Pervasiveness of Gender Stratifications in the Ugandan Marketplace (original) (raw)

Logics of affordability and worth: Gendered consumption in rural Uganda

Economic Anthropology, 2020

This article explores logics of affordability and worth within rural Ugandan households. Through an analysis of how worth is ascribed to certain goods, from the morally ambiguous personal consumption of alcohol and beauty products to the "responsible" category of educational spending and sanitary pads, the article demonstrates how gender norms and anxieties are marked and sustained in the consumption practices of the household, constituting what is deemed necessary, affordable, and responsible. Moral obligation is differentially distributed between genders: women are deemed responsible for household expenditure, their personal consumption preferences constrained, whereas men are able to delimit a sphere of personal consumption separate from the household, with limited accountability to its moral requirements. The gendered nature of power relations is thus revealed both in the apportioning of moral duty and in the construction of affordability through which consumption is enabled.

Household Decisions, Gender and Development: A Synthesis of Recent Research:Household Decisions, Gender and Development: A Synthesis of Recent Research

American Anthropologist, 2005

The paradigm shift indicated in the volume's title is the dramatic transformation of museums from collectionsbased, object-displaying, elite institutions to a wide range of visitor-centered museums that are "more socially responsive cultural institution[s] in service to the public" (p. 1). To illustrate this paradigm shift, Gail Anderson has compiled 34 essays, 30 of which were published between 1990-2002. The reinvention of the museum, as the editor terms it, is predicated on change in five key areas, which constitute the organizing framework for the volume: (1) the role of the museum as it struggles to remain relevant; (2) the role of the public as central to the survival of the museum; (3) the evolution of exhibitions and programs as the primary vehicles serving the public; (4) the role of the object in the sense of collections cared for by museums and implicating issues of stewardship and cultural responsibility; and (5) the role of leadership for enabling museums to reach their greatest potential. As explicitly stated by its editor (p. xi), Reinventing the Museum provides an informed basis for discussion and action among staff members, trustees, museum students, and professionals, and a good overview of incisive thinking about museums in recent years. With only four chapters written before 1990, however, it does not "outline the historical evolution and dialogue about the museum" (p. 1) in the 20th century as contended by Anderson, although the inclusion of John Cotton Dana's seminal 1917 article, "The Gloom of the Museum," is a necessary starting point for such an analysis. Although anthropologists are not the primary audience for the volume, they will find many chapters of interest. One issue of anthropological salience is the treatment of cultural property. Among the several chapters treating aspects of this theme, Karen J. Warren's philosophical perspective is particularly useful. She argues that in addressing cultural property issues we need to consider our conceptual frameworks, the language used in discussions, ways of correcting bias, and alternative models of conflict resolution. She identifies and rejects a dominant Western model for dealing with cultural property, which is characterized by a "near exclusive reliance on a value-hierarchical, value-dualistic, and rights/rules ethic, which subordinates the interests or claims of those in subordinate positions

GENDER AND SAY: A MODEL OF HOUSEHOLD BEHAVIOUR WITH ENDOGENOUSLY DETERMINED BALANCE OF POWER*

The evidence that the same income can lead to different household decisions, depending on who the earner is, has led to an effort to replace the standard household model with the Ôcollective modelÕ, which recognises that a household's decisions depend on the power balance between the husband and the wife. This article recognises that the power balance can, in turn, depend on the decisions made. A new Ôhousehold equilibriumÕ and its dynamics are described and it is shown that there can be multiple equilibria in female labour-supply, and that child labour can decline and rise as the wife's power increases.

Egalitarianism to gender inequality: Cross-cultural exploration of gender relations, in economic systems

International Journal of Modern Anthropology, 2021

Gender inequality has generated a lot of debates among scholars across disciplines. Much of these studies have not explored a robust scholarship on the historical development of gender inequality by comparing different human societies and their subsistence strategies. This review study is designed to fill this gap, thereby contributing to corpus of literature on gender inequality in economic relations. As a historical research, the study uses secondary materials. These materials are mainly ethnographies of the societies under comparison. The study compares the roles of each of the gender categories in subsistence activities, in economic systems, to trace the sources of gender inequality in economic relations. Data available suggest egalitarian gender and economic relations. However, as societies evolved, there became a gradual decline in egalitarianism, leading to marked inequality. The inequality is relative to the complexity of social structure peculiar to the societies under review.

Reassessing Models in Gender and Domestic S

in S. L. Budin, M. Cifarelli, A. Garcia-Ventura, A. M. Albà (eds) Gender and Methodology in the Ancient Near East. Proceedings of the Second Workshop held at the Universitat de Barcelona, February 1-3, 2017. Barcelona: Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona., 2018

Control over resources: A Gender Perspective

Journal of Global Economy, 2009

This paper attempts to test gender differentials in order to ascertain whether access to economic resources makes any difference to the deprivation levels of the households headed by males and by females. The deprivation levels are based on the possessions at the household level of some basic social and physical amenities of life as used in the study conducted by K. Srinivasan and S. K. Mohanty (2004). The data used is Secondary data taken from the NFHS-2. The regression model applied in this paper explicitly controls the deprivation levels. The results show that there is no significant difference in male-headed families and female-headed families due to control over resources.Â

Feminist Development Economics: An Institutional Approach to Household Analysis

In this chapter, we argue that an institutional approach to feminist development economics provides deeper understandings to how gender inequalities function in economic processes in developing countries. We do this in three ways. First, we distinguish between symmetric and asymmetric gender institutions. Second, we distinguish gendered institutions between formal (laws and regulations) and informal ones (social norms and cultural practices). Third, we develop an empowerment model in which both resources and gendered institutions affect women's wellbeing achievements, allowing for situations in which the positive effect of women's access to resources is overruled by the negative effect of gendered laws or social norms. We illustrate our argument with a case study on the livelihoods of Yoruba women in Nigeria. The case study shows how gender norms result in an asymmetric institutional setting for women and men, even when norms about women's labor force participation, individual control over income, and partners' contribution to the household budget are symmetric. The combination of our theoretical contribution and our case study findings and test of the empowerment model in previous research have an important implication for a particular approach in feminist development economics, namely the household bargaining approach. This approach is widely used as an explanatory framework for women's disadvantaged economic position in developing countries. We elaborate this approach with an institutional perspective and show how this helps to 2 explain the economic position of women who find themselves in the paradoxical situation of strong economic independence in a highly unequal legal, social, and cultural context. Introduction: the interrelatedness of gender inequality and economics Gender in economics is no longer analysed exclusively in terms of gender inequalities in economic variables, such as employment or wages and as the differential impacts of economic processes and policies on men and women. Gender is also understood as, first, shaping market processes in terms of access to and control over resources, such as education or incomes, second, as shaping people's choices, for example in segmented labour markets, and third, as being inherently part of macroeconomic trends, for example through fluctuations in the female labour force participation rate or in responses to crises though increases in the supply of unpaid labour. So, gender is increasingly understood not only as an exogenous variable (coming from outside the economic system, from culture, social relations, nature, or laws), but also as endogenousshaping and being shaped by particular economic processes, conditions, and outcomes. We propose an institutional economic approach to analyse gender in economics, in particular in development economics. The reason is that such an approach allows for a better understanding of the two-way relationship between gender and economics. We will argue that gendered institutions are the key to understand how the economy affects gender relations and how gender relations affect economic processes and outcomes. Before we will develop our theoretical framework of gendered institutions we will explain what institutions are in economics and how gender has been understood in institutional economics. We are aware that what we refer to as institutions, is recognized as social norms or culture in other domains of the social sciences. Economics uses the term institutions, to indicate that social norms and culture influence economic decisions, and that economic behaviour helps shaping social norms and cultural patterns. We will explain this in more detail in the next section. Gender Norms as Institutions Whereas a century ago, the founding father of institutional economics, Thorstein Veblen, recognized gender norms as exemplary for how historical and cultural patterns influence the economic process of provisioning, today, institutional economics seems to be less concerned with gendered institutions. Certainly, today, gender norms are recognized as influential institutions, but Veblen's deep concern with patriarchal institutions does not play a key role in institutional analysis anymore. Explicit concerns with gender norms seem to have become one specialized area among others. This was not so