"Many divorces and many spinsters": Marriage as an invented tradition in Southern Malawi, 1946-1999

Journal of Family History

Volumn 26, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 529-556

  Kaler, Amy ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY; DIVORCE; ECONOMICS; EDUCATION; ETHNOLOGY; FAMILY SIZE; FEMALE; HISTORY; HUMAN RELATION; INFORMATION PROCESSING; JURISPRUDENCE; LEGAL ASPECT; MALAWI; MARRIAGE; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR; SOCIAL CHANGE; SOCIAL PROBLEM; SPOUSE; WOMEN'S HEALTH; WOMEN'S RIGHTS;

ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURAL; DATA COLLECTION; DIVORCE; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS; JURISPRUDENCE; MALAWI; MARRIAGE; SINGLE PERSON; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR; SOCIAL CHANGE; SOCIAL PROBLEMS; SPOUSES; WOMEN'S HEALTH; WOMEN'S RIGHTS; WOMEN, WORKING;

EID: 0039782420     PISSN: 03631990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/036319900102600405     Document Type: Article

References (93)

1. L. P. Hartley, The Go-between (London: Hamish and Hamilton, 1953).
2. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
3. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
4. It is difficult to know exactly what to call the geographic area with which I am concerned. Over the past sixty years, the same area has been designated Kasupe, Mangochi, Machinga, and Balaka according to different political and administrative regimes. For the sake of consistency, I have chosen to refer to the area in which both J. Clyde Mitchell (see below) and I did fieldwork as "upper west Shire," referring to its location relative to the Shire river. This designation is perhaps vague, but I believe it is the least cumbersome way of designating this particular area (see the map in the appendix).
5. Lucy Mair "African Marriage and Social Change," in Survey of African Marriage and Family Life, ed. Arthur Phillips (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 99; J. Clyde Mitchell, The Yao Village: A Study in the Social Structure of a Nyasaland Tribe (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1956), 186; Brian Morris, The Power of Animals: An Ethnography (New York: Berg, 1998), 39; Paula Tavrow, The Relationship between Couple Communication and Family Planning Practices and Intentions in Rural Malawi (Zomba, Malawi: Center for Social Research University of Malawi, 1996), 3; Megan Vaughan, The Story of an African Famine: Gender and Famine in Twentieth Century Malawi (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 137.
6. Lucy Mair "African Marriage and Social Change," in Survey of African Marriage and Family Life, ed. Arthur Phillips (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 99; J. Clyde Mitchell, The Yao Village: A Study in the Social Structure of a Nyasaland Tribe (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1956), 186; Brian Morris, The Power of Animals: An Ethnography (New York: Berg, 1998), 39; Paula Tavrow, The Relationship between Couple Communication and Family Planning Practices and Intentions in Rural Malawi (Zomba, Malawi: Center for Social Research University of Malawi, 1996), 3; Megan Vaughan, The Story of an African Famine: Gender and Famine in Twentieth Century Malawi (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 137.
7. Lucy Mair "African Marriage and Social Change," in Survey of African Marriage and Family Life, ed. Arthur Phillips (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 99; J. Clyde Mitchell, The Yao Village: A Study in the Social Structure of a Nyasaland Tribe (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1956), 186; Brian Morris, The Power of Animals: An Ethnography (New York: Berg, 1998), 39; Paula Tavrow, The Relationship between Couple Communication and Family Planning Practices and Intentions in Rural Malawi (Zomba, Malawi: Center for Social Research University of Malawi, 1996), 3; Megan Vaughan, The Story of an African Famine: Gender and Famine in Twentieth Century Malawi (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 137.
8. Lucy Mair "African Marriage and Social Change," in Survey of African Marriage and Family Life, ed. Arthur Phillips (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 99; J. Clyde Mitchell, The Yao Village: A Study in the Social Structure of a Nyasaland Tribe (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1956), 186; Brian Morris, The Power of Animals: An Ethnography (New York: Berg, 1998), 39; Paula Tavrow, The Relationship between Couple Communication and Family Planning Practices and Intentions in Rural Malawi (Zomba, Malawi: Center for Social Research University of Malawi, 1996), 3; Megan Vaughan, The Story of an African Famine: Gender and Famine in Twentieth Century Malawi (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 137.
9. Lucy Mair "African Marriage and Social Change," in Survey of African Marriage and Family Life, ed. Arthur Phillips (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 99; J. Clyde Mitchell, The Yao Village: A Study in the Social Structure of a Nyasaland Tribe (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1956), 186; Brian Morris, The Power of Animals: An Ethnography (New York: Berg, 1998), 39; Paula Tavrow, The Relationship between Couple Communication and Family Planning Practices and Intentions in Rural Malawi (Zomba, Malawi: Center for Social Research University of Malawi, 1996), 3; Megan Vaughan, The Story of an African Famine: Gender and Famine in Twentieth Century Malawi (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 137.
10. Morris, Animals, 38-39.
11. Tavrow, Couple Communication, 3.
12. Three of these women had been deliberately included in the sample because of their divorced status, so a truer and more representative figure might be twenty-four out of forty-one, or 59 percent.
13. Enid Schatz, personal communication, 2000.
14. Eliya Msiyaphazi Zulu, "Social and Cultural Factors Affecting Reproductive Behavior in Malawi" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1996).
15. J. Clyde Mitchell, "The Yao of Southern Nyasaland," in Seven Tribes of Central Africa, ed. Elizabeth Colson and Max Gluckman (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1951), 298.
16. Ibid., 298.
17. Ibid., 328.
18. Vaughan, African Famine, 139.
19. Colonial official quoted in Martin Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order: The Colonial Experiences in Malawi and Zambia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 145.
20. Ibid.
21. Mair, "African Marriage," 99.
22. Audrey Richards, "Variations in Family Structure among the Central Bantu," in African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, ed. A. R. Radcliffe-Browne and C. D. Forde (London: Oxford University Press, 1950).
23. For example, Kings Phiri, "Some Changes in the Matrilineal Family System Among the Chewa of Malawi Since the Nineteenth Century," Journal of African History 24 (1983): 257-74.
24. For example, Caroline Bledsoe, "Transformations in Sub-Saharan Marriage and Fertility," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 510 (1990): 115-25; Dominique Meekers, "Process of Marriage in African Societies: A Multiple Indicator Approach," Population and Development Review 18, no. 1 (1992): 61-78.
25. For example, Caroline Bledsoe, "Transformations in Sub-Saharan Marriage and Fertility," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 510 (1990): 115-25; Dominique Meekers, "Process of Marriage in African Societies: A Multiple Indicator Approach," Population and Development Review 18, no. 1 (1992): 61-78.
26. See Megan Vaughan, "Reported Speech and Other Kinds of Testimony," Journal of Historical Sociology 13, no. 3 (2000): 237-63, on the question of lost opportunities in Malawian oral history recording.
27. The area I refer to as upper west Shire is on the west side of the Shire River and south of Lake Malombe and was the focus of the Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change (MDIC) project in southern Malawi. The MDIC study area district overlaps with the tribal authority areas in which Mitchell did fieldwork in the 1940s, particularly in the area known as Kalembo. While these two areas do not map perfectly onto each other due to shifting administrative boundaries, the overlap is significant enough that I believe it is reasonable to look for patterns between them (see the map in the appendix).
28. Enid Schatz, "Does Women's Position Matter? An Analysis of Contraceptive Use in Rural Malawi" (unpublished paper, Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania, 1999).
29. This must be viewed in the light of overall conditions in Malawi, which is one of the ten poorest countries in the world.
30. Alex Weinreb, "Was Goode Right? New Data on the Nucleation of Family Ties in Malawi" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America, Los Angeles, March 2000).
31. Mike Mathambo Mtika, "Habits of the Heart and the Age-Sex Distribution of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in Malawi" (unpublished paper, Department of Sociology, University of Alaska, 2000).
32. Ibid., 13.
33. The HIV prevalence rate for Malawi as a whole is estimated at approximately 13 percent, placing it in the middle rank of countries threatened by AIDS (as compared with estimated rates of 20-25 percent in neighboring countries such as Zimbabwe). In Machinga, a district in upper west Shire, 14.9 percent of women attending rural antenatal clinics tested positive for HIV (U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Division International Programs Center, HIV/AIDS Surveillance Data Base, 1999). While very few MDIC informants would acknowledge knowing someone with AIDS, our fieldwork was frequently halted by funerals, as often as two or three a week, of young people in their prime, who were whispered to have died from AIDS-related diseases. In a survey of the area in 1998, 81 percent of men and 74 percent of women knew someone who had died of AIDS-related illnesses, although only 16 percent and 14 percent, respectively, currently knew a person living with HIV. Erin Eckert, Veronica Arroyave, and Gertrude Masautso Kara, "Knowledge, Attitude and Practice Survey for District Health Services: Machinga and Zomba, Malawi 1998" (unpublished manuscript, Tulane University School of Public Health, 1998).
34. Mtika, "Habits of the Heart," 14.
35. Enid Schatz, personal communication/unpublished data, 1999.
36. Agnes Kavinya, personal communication/unpublished data, 1999.
37. These two parameters, ephemerality and atomization, were highly correlated. Ephemerality was often explained in terms of atomization; for instance, elders made the argument that marriages are short lived and divorce happens easily (atomization) because young people try to handle their marital disputes by themselves and do not seek the counsel of their elders (ephemerality). Similarly, atomization could be explained as a consequence of ephemerality - because young people move in and out of marriages quickly and casually, they do not bother to invest time and energy in getting the support of their elders.
38. I do not claim that the elders' perceptions were accurate (or inaccurate) or that what they told my interviewers actually reflects objective changes in marriage patterns. Instead, I am trying to establish the existence of a folk history of generational change in marriage patterns, a set of shared beliefs about how marriages have changed for the worse.
39. Their criticism contrasts with anthropological literature on African marriage, which stresses the processual character of marriage, in that there is rarely a sharp distinction between being unmarried and being married (e.g., Bledsoe, "Transformations," and Meekers, "Process of Marriage").
40. This percentage may seem small, but its significance lies in the fact that elders in the interviews were not asked directly whether they thought marriages were ephemeral or atomized compared with marriages in the past. Instead, they were given the opportunity to talk about what they thought were the differences between their own marriages and the marriages they saw among their sons-and daughters-in-law or their grandchildren. Thus, their comments on atomization or ephemerality arose spontaneously.
41. Interestingly, women among the elders were more likely than men to stress their own fidelity and constancy. While both men and women deprecated the ephemerality of modern marriages, all the personal accounts of long-standing, nonephemeral marriages were told by women, while several men told their own marital histories as a sequence of marriages. For example, the head of one of the villages in the study said, 1951, it's when I started to learn about marriage. Then I stayed for about two years there [in his first marriage]. I had two children, but they died, then I left the woman and went to marry another woman here at home, and then I left because the woman was disobedient and stubborn, and she was drinking beer and I didn't like that. Then I went to marry a third wife…. then in 1958 I married this family [his present wife].
42. Ankhoswe, variously translated as "marriage-witness," "marriage surety," or "marriage counselor." These were people, usually older blood relatives, chosen at the time of marriage to act as advisers and counselors for the husband and wife and to mediate in marital disputes. Elders whom I interviewed claimed that the ankhoswe were not respected as they used to be, but as we see below, young people today said that the ankhoswe still played an important role in marriages.
43. See note 35.
44. Conducted by Enid Schatz in June 1999, the same time period as the interviews with elderly people.
45. In this context, "spinsters" probably also refers to divorced women. It is interesting that this woman identified the proliferation of unmarried women as a social problem, while her elders were equally concerned about the misbehavior of unmarried women and unmarried men.
46. However, younger interviewees differed slightly from their elders in their view of the modern malaise of marriage. While the younger interviewees all mentioned the ephemerality of modern marriage, they did not identify atomization as a major problem. In fact, when asked to tell a story about a marriage breakdown that they had heard of, half of them included the role of the ankhoswe in their stories, mentioning that the couple in the story had sought the assistance of their counselors. This is in marked contrast to the views of the elders, who claimed that counselors were completely disregarded and disempowered nowadays.
47. Mitchell, "Yao of Southern Nyasaland," 302.
48. Ibid., 295, 301. See also Mitchell, Yao Village.
49. Ibid., 295, 301. See also Mitchell, Yao Village.
50. Mitchell found records of labor migration from southern Malawi to the Transvaal in South Africa as early as 1903, and the flow of male labor south and westward had been steadily increasing since then. Mitchell, "Yao of Southern Nyasaland," 305.
51. Ibid., 303
52. Papers of J. Clyde Mitchell, Rhodes House Library, Oxford University, MSS Afr S 1998, box 19, file 3.
53. Mitchell, "Yao of Southern Nyasaland," 312.
54. Colin Murray, "The Work of Men, Women and the Ancestors: Social Reproduction on the Periphery of Southern Africa," in Social Anthropology of Work, ed. Sandra Wallman (London: Academic Press, 1979), 337-63; Harriet Ngubane, "How African Women Cope with Migrant Labour in South Africa," in Women and National Development, ed. Harriet Sibisi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, "The Madman and the Migrant: Work and Labor in the Historical Consciousness of a South African People," American Ethnologist 14, no. 2 (1987): 191-209; James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Henrietta Moore and Megan Vaughan, Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia 1890-1990 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1990).
55. Colin Murray, "The Work of Men, Women and the Ancestors: Social Reproduction on the Periphery of Southern Africa," in Social Anthropology of Work, ed. Sandra Wallman (London: Academic Press, 1979), 337-63; Harriet Ngubane, "How African Women Cope with Migrant Labour in South Africa," in Women and National Development, ed. Harriet Sibisi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, "The Madman and the Migrant: Work and Labor in the Historical Consciousness of a South African People," American Ethnologist 14, no. 2 (1987): 191-209; James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Henrietta Moore and Megan Vaughan, Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia 1890-1990 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1990).
56. Colin Murray, "The Work of Men, Women and the Ancestors: Social Reproduction on the Periphery of Southern Africa," in Social Anthropology of Work, ed. Sandra Wallman (London: Academic Press, 1979), 337-63; Harriet Ngubane, "How African Women Cope with Migrant Labour in South Africa," in Women and National Development, ed. Harriet Sibisi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, "The Madman and the Migrant: Work and Labor in the Historical Consciousness of a South African People," American Ethnologist 14, no. 2 (1987): 191-209; James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Henrietta Moore and Megan Vaughan, Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia 1890-1990 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1990).
57. Colin Murray, "The Work of Men, Women and the Ancestors: Social Reproduction on the Periphery of Southern Africa," in Social Anthropology of Work, ed. Sandra Wallman (London: Academic Press, 1979), 337-63; Harriet Ngubane, "How African Women Cope with Migrant Labour in South Africa," in Women and National Development, ed. Harriet Sibisi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, "The Madman and the Migrant: Work and Labor in the Historical Consciousness of a South African People," American Ethnologist 14, no. 2 (1987): 191-209; James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Henrietta Moore and Megan Vaughan, Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia 1890-1990 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1990).
58. Colin Murray, "The Work of Men, Women and the Ancestors: Social Reproduction on the Periphery of Southern Africa," in Social Anthropology of Work, ed. Sandra Wallman (London: Academic Press, 1979), 337-63; Harriet Ngubane, "How African Women Cope with Migrant Labour in South Africa," in Women and National Development, ed. Harriet Sibisi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, "The Madman and the Migrant: Work and Labor in the Historical Consciousness of a South African People," American Ethnologist 14, no. 2 (1987): 191-209; James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Henrietta Moore and Megan Vaughan, Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia 1890-1990 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1990).
59. Jean Davison, "Tenacious Women: Clinging to Banja Household Production in the Face of Changing Gender Relations in Malawi," Journal of Southern African Studies 19, no. 3 (1993): 405-22.
60. Papers of J. Clyde Mitchell, Rhodes House Library, Oxford University, MSS Afr S 1998, box 20.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., box 17.
63. Ibid., box 20, file 1.
64. My interviewees remembered the 1949 famine well and often used it (as well as a contemporaneous infestation of locusts) as a way of gauging their ages (e.g., "At the time of the locusts, my first child was just born").
65. Vaughan, African Famine.
66. Ibid., 119.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid., 34.
69. Ibid., 123.
70. Ibid., 133.
71. Ibid., 121.
72. Chiwalo was a district neighboring Kalembo.
73. It is possible that the number of divorce cases heard by the chief's court is actually an underestimate of marriage breakdown, as cases may have been resolved informally between the families concerned. However, Mitchell's notes provide no way to check this hypothesis.
74. Mitchell's observations are consistent with Mandala's accounting of divorce cases heard in chiefs' courts in lower Shire in the mid-1940s. Elias Mandala, Work and Control in a Peasant Economy: A History of the Lower Tchiri Valley in Malawi, 1859-1960 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 266-67. Mandala found that the "overwhelming majority" of cases heard by chiefs' courts in Port Herald district were divorce suits based on troubles wrought by protracted male absence from the home for labor migration. The local Native Association, an organization of traditional leaders under the jurisdiction of the colonial government, expressed its concerns over marital breakdowns occasioned by men leaving the district for work and not providing for their wives.
75. Papers of J. Clyde Mitchell, Rhodes House Library, Oxford University, MSS Afr S 1998, box 17. The teacher from whom this story was obtained identifies himself as Lomwe, rather than Yao (the dominant ethnic group in the area). However, Mitchell makes a point of saying that the Lomwe and the Yao were so similar in culture and custom that what is true of one group is likely true of the other.
76. As in the 1990s, the influences of modern life were blamed for the breakdown of the institution of marriage and for young people's unwillingness to submit to their parents' approval and guidance in marriage matters. Many respondents blamed the rise of new forms of entertainment, such as "English-style" dancing and music performances, in which "the bass player is always called Roger." The English dance has spread all over the country and people do not want other dances…. There are some young men when they start marriage they begin their marriage at a dance. Then their marriage does not stand for a long time. The marriage finished in a few days and it [the end of the marriage] started when they have quarreled…. If you marry a woman at a dance you have married a stupid woman of the crossroads, i.e. women who are going this way and that without knowing their character. It means prostitutes who do not like marriage. (Papers of J. Clyde Mitchell, Rhodes House Library, Oxford University, MSS Afr S 1998, box 17, file 1)
77. Ibid.
78. Other interviews, ibid.
79. Ibid.
80. We should not assume that these remittances led to a life of unprecedented luxury for people in upper west Shire. Mandala points out that many men remitted almost nothing to their families, and others returned home with only lice and sexually transmitted diseases to show for their time working abroad. See also Wiseman Chirwa, "Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Colonial Malawi," in Histories of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and HIV-AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, ed. Philip Setel, Milton Lewis, and Maryinez Lyons (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999), 143-66. Upper west Shire appears to have been somewhat better off than lower Shire, where Mandala worked, particularly because upper west Shire had very high recruitment rates into the King's African Rifles. Nonetheless, the very scarcity of remitted money and goods may account for the vehemence of the conflicts surrounding these goods and money.
81. Writing in 1953, Mair claimed that among matrilineal populations in Nyasaland "today young husbands are impatient to be free from the authority of their parents-in-law and are apt to request this permission much earlier than they would do so in the past." Among the Yao in particular, "it seems to be more common for a woman to follow her husband if he leaves [her matrilineal village] without [her relatives'] consent," even though "a woman's relatives do not willingly agree to let her leave the village until she is past child-bearing." Mair, "African Marriage," 101.
82. William Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns (New York: Free Press, 1963, 1970).
83. "I see in [the family] and in the industrial system that accompanies it the hope of greater freedom: from the domination of elders, from caste and racial restrictions, from class rigidities. Freedom is for something as well: the unleashing of personal potentials, the right to love, to equality within the family, to the establishment of a new marriage when the old has failed. I see the world revolution in family patterns as part of a still more important revolution that is sweeping the world in our time, the aspiration on the part of billions of people to have the right for the first time to choose for themselves - an aspiration that has toppled governments both old and new, and created new societies and social movements." Ibid., 55.
84. See also Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity.
85. See also Amy Kaler. "'They See Money and Think That It's Life': Elders' Philosophy of Money in Rural Malawi" (Unpublished paper, Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania, 2000).
86. Eric Hobsbawm, introduction to Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, 1.
87. Ibid., 2.
88. Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order, 11.
89. Ibid., chap. 10.
90. Jane Parpart, review of Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia, American Historical Review 92, no. 5 (1987): 1247-48.
91. Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order, 226.
92. The same is true for uses of the concept of a "usable past" (coined by historian Van Wyck Brooks), a cognate concept to invented tradition. An Internet search for instance of this term being used turned up references to the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, Philippine architecture, Renaissance humanism, and the character of Daniel Boone, to name only a few examples. Two full-length books have been titled A [or The] Usable Past: one, by William Bouwsma, deals with "such topics as political thought and historiography, metaphysical and practical conceptions of order, the relevance of Renaissance humanism to Protestant thought, the secularization of European culture [and] the contributions of particular professional groups to European civilization." The second, edited by Lois Zamora, deals with "colonization and independence, mestizaje and melting pot, domination and self-determination, and the ambivalence of history in a new world" (both book descriptions from the Amazon.com Web site). These two titles show how thoroughly the concept of a usable past has been entwined with national politics and nation-state relations. Although, as I establish here, the domestic sphere is replete with reconstruction and re-creation of the past, this sphere appears to have been undertheorized by sociologists in particular.
93. Interviews were all conducted in respondents' homes, a setting that falls on the private side of the public-private spectrum. Yet one should not assume that a household setting a priori qualifies as a private setting. Respondents' accounts of this tradition were still something of a public performance for the benefit of the interviewers (who were young people from the community) or for any onlookers who happened to be there. In one typical instance, an elderly woman was complaining about the flightiness of young wives today when her granddaughters, who were in their mid-teens and who were preparing food nearby, began to laugh and tell each other, "Listen, Granny is summoning us." I asked the interviewer what "summoning" meant in that context and was told that it derived from the idea of "serving a summons," bidding someone to appear and answer charges in the chief's court - in other words, accusing someone of bad behavior. The fact that the old woman's account of young people's badness was interpreted as an accusation suggests that, in telling these stories, elders were not merely recounting what they believed to be true about the past. They were also engaged in building the social reality of the present, creating a standard of behavior and assuming for themselves a moral high ground in chastising others for not meeting it.