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Women on the market: Marriage, consumption, and the Internet in urban Cameroon
Author(s) -
JOHNSONHANKS JENNIFER
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.2007.34.4.642
Subject(s) - marriage market , elite , consumption (sociology) , context (archaeology) , falling (accident) , product (mathematics) , politics , sociology , gender studies , demographic economics , political science , economics , geography , social science , law , psychology , geometry , mathematics , archaeology , psychiatry
In this article, I show how dramatic social changes in Yaoundé, Cameroon, are the product of women applying long‐standing cultural schemata in a changed economic context. Marriage rates are falling precipitously, and growing numbers of relatively elite women are looking beyond the nation's borders for husbands. Yet, as these women seek foreign husbands, their models of marriage are largely transposed out of older forms of bridewealth: E‐mail‐mediated marriage draws as much on local history as on global politics.