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  • Title: [Familial modernity and plurality in West Africa].
    Author: Vimard P.
    Journal: Tiers Monde; 1993; 34(133):89-115. PubMed ID: 12318120.
    Abstract:
    Changes in the family system of West Africa have accompanied the numerous economic, demographic, and social changes occurring after colonization and especially since independence. This work uses monographic data from Togo and the Ivory Coast to examine to what degree lineage structures have been supplanted by autonomy of domestic groups and the emergence of new forms of family organization, to what extent intrafamilial social relations and behavior have been affected by the market economy, and whether the spread of western culture has led to a plurality of family models. The integration of rural African societies into market economies has been achieved primarily through their progressive absorption into plantation economic systems. Appropriation of manpower by plantation economies has largely removed control over the reproduction and use of the labor force from the lineage to a smaller family group. Individual relationships are undergoing redefinition within the new structures of socially and economically autonomous domestic groups. Lineages have lost control over matrimonial alliances; marriage has ceased to represent an exchange between social groups and has become an alliance between individuals. The weakened integration of couples into traditional family structures has increased the instability of unions. The emergence of the domestic group as an autonomous institution has engendered a redefinition of roles and practices within families, and new forms of social relations between the husbands, wives, and their children. Economic and social roles today depend less on belonging to extended structures such as lineages or age classes and more on nonpredetermined factors susceptible to change that characterize the family and economic position, such as educational level, marital status, and occupation. Changes in power relations between spouses have led to greater independence but also greater precariousness in women;s positions. The status of children has undergone a diversification as well. It no longer is defined solely by their role in agricultural production, but now depends equally on school attendance and activity in the modern sector. In certain social groups, changes in the role and status of children in combination with the continuing economic crisis are slowly causing a reexamination and modification of traditional fertility norms. Migration, urbanization, marital instability, the trend to nuclear households, and the custom of sending children to live with relatives in other households have been factors leading to an increasingly wide array of family and household forms. The entry of African societies into the world economic system has not led to adoption of the nuclear family as the single model. Family forms are diverse and unstable.
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