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Marrying Wealth, Marrying Poverty: Gender and Bridewealth Power in a Changing African Society

by Patrick E. Iroegbu

255 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #05-3097; ISBN 1-4120-8100-9; US$20.00, C$23.00, EUR16.43, £11.50

Marrying Wealth, Marrying Poverty deftly explores the implications, complexities, and paradoxes of Nigerian Igbo traditions and provides rich, innovative ethnographic insight into the 'making and unmaking' of gender in a challenged society.

About the Book

Marrying Wealth, Marrying Poverty is a fascinating glimpse of study into the lives of the Igbo of Southeast Nigeria. This book deftly explores the implications, complexities, and paradoxes of Igbo bridewealth traditions and provides groundbreaking insights gained through case studies on bridewealth and marriage, culture, gender, and feminist senses, which illustrate a carnival of power relations after marriage, and have been ignored for far too long in scholarly discourse. The author, Dr. Patrick Iroegbu, demonstrates that bridewealth remains a strong tradition among the Igbo of Nigeria, encompassing cultural notions of kinship, social organization, and gender.

Originally aimed at ensuring the stability of families and communities, the traditions and devices of bridewealth have come under ever-increasing pressure from the external and internal influences of colonialism. Christianity, poverty, globalization, politics, health issues, and feminism. In response to these pressures, bridewealth - and marriage - as it is experienced in the Igbo world today, is ever evolving and changing- sometimes for the better, and sometimes to the detriment of the society as a whole. As the society struggles to protect the patriarchal ideologies that constitute bridewealth, men become trapped by the pressures and demands of paying bridewealth, and women face increasing denigration in the endogenous or traditional enactments of that. Women, often unconsciously, collude in their own subjugation through their adherence to the civic norms.

Examining and understanding the implications, complexities and paradoxes of bridewealth in the context of the society itself is but the first step in equipping Igbo men and women with the tools they need to effectively cope, and thrive, in an ever-changing and challenging world. This is a unique and timely ethnographic piece of work for students, instructors and researchers, and also a vital resource for social policy makers and the reading public.

About the Author

Dr. Patrick E. Iroegbu is a social and cultural anthropologist and lectures anthropology at Grant MacEwan College, University Studies. He authored the ongoing Introduction to Igbo Medicine Series and has equally contributed researched articles such as Harvesting Herbal Resources and Development of Practitioners in Nigeria, Migration and Diaspora: Origin, Significance and Challenges for Development at Home. His forthcoming book is Healing Insanity: A Study of Igbo Medicine in Southeastern Nigeria. His research interests cut across anthropological approaches to cultures and healing, gender, development, migration, race and multiculturalism in global centers.

Contact: patrickiroegbu@yahoo.com

Excerpts