African bridewealth and women's status

I discuss two related phenomena in this paper': the functions of African bridewealth and the relation of bridewealth payment to the status of women. The etic approach that has dominated the analysis of African bridewealth often sees it and the related practices of divorce, rights in children, conjugal rights, marriage stability and so on as functionally related in some logical but variable way in different societies. For example, high bridewealth payment is said to result in marriage stability because kinsmen find it difficult to return it and so put pressure on the woman to remain in the marriage. Although such etic models can be constructed, as they usually have been, they do not adequately account for what goes on in many of the sixty societies in my sample. My data do not support the assumption that an orderly working principle lies beneath the ethnographic chaos; rather, bridewealth payments seem to be more or less "on their own" in various forms, without being associated with regular changes in other social institutions. Another problem with the etic models is the tendency to confuse causes or outcomes of marriage with the process of marriage. For example, people in a patrilineal society probably marry in order to affiliate children with the man's group, whereas people in a matrilineal society probably marry in order to affiliate children with the woman's group; yet both types of society employ the same marriage process, namely, the payment of bridewealth. The etic approach also discusses the functions of bridewealth payment primarily from the male point of view; that is, in terms of interests of the male in African societies. It is probably for this reason that in contemporary anthropological analysis of marriage and bridewealth women figure mainly as one of the commodities of exchange (H. K. Schneider 1964). I shall depart from this traditional approach by looking at the functions of bridewealth from the point of view of both sexes. In so doing I hope to show that the primary function of bridewealth is the legitimation of marriage and that by legitimating marriage bridewealth payment functions to enhance, not to diminish, the status of African women. Three shortcomings of previous studies of African bridewealth and its relation to the status of African women are: they are based on a limited number of societies, they usually consider bridewealth mainly in terms of the interests of the male members of African societies, and they are essentially etic models that cannot adequately account for many important features of bridewealth payment. These inadequacies have led to conflicting results and ungeneralizable conclusions. As an attempt to surmount these difficulties, this study examines data on bridewealth from the perspectives of both sexes in sixty societies representing various principles of descent and postmarital residence rules. The study finds little evidence to support previous conclusions about the functions of bridewealth and women's status in Africa. It suggests that the one function of bridewealth common to African societies is the legitimation of marriage, a function that enhances rather than diminishes the status of women in the African context.