Suchergebnisse

Anthropologists and demographers rely on distinctive methodologies and forms of evidence even while they share a common interest in explaining fertility change. This paper proposes a cultural anthropological approach that focuses on the process whereby meanings associated with practices and things are reinterpreted over time. Using the image of shifting boundaries of kinship relations, it examines changing interpretations of three fundamental aspects of social life—family land, marriage, and foster parenthood—in the Ekiti area of Southwestern Nigeria which suggest an attenuation of the mutual obligations of extended kin. While these reinterpretations have moral associations that legitimate practices supporting fertility decline, political and economic uncertainty may counter this process.

This article examines the place of religion in the process of 'becoming modern', associated with conversion to Christianity and with literacy, in one Ekiti Yoruba town in southwestern Nigeria. It questions theories of modernization that presume a shift from communal 'traditional' to private, secularized religious practice, focusing on beliefs about the genesis of life, specifically cosmology and fertility. This approach provides a means for examining assumptions about the separation of the secular and religious, evidenced through an examination of local interpretations of biblical texts associated with barrenness and extraordinary births. How these stories have been interpreted by Ekiti Yoruba women and men offers a perspective on the processes whereby forms of 'modern hybrids' are constructed, altered, and reconstructed, as well as on how the fundamental bases of fertility are understood in particular social contexts.

The increased acceptability and use of condoms by men in southwestern Nigeria is reflected in joking references to condoms in the comic-style popular press. Yet these references display an ambivalence about condoms that is mirrored in survey data and in interviews regarding condom use by rural Ekiti Yoruba men. This ambivalence, which is often couched in terms of health, has implications for the acceptance of government-sponsored HIV/AIDS-related educational programs. Because of the irreverence of comic-style newspapers and the 'unofficial' nature of their authority which coincides with popular attitudes about health programs, they have a credibility that could be useful in educating adolescents about sexually-transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS.