14. Ashanti Culture

15. Ashanti Culture The Ashanti live in central Ghana in western Africa approximately 300km. away from the coast. The Ashanti are a major ethnic group of the Akans in Ghana, a fairly new nation, barely more than 50 years old. Ghana, previously the Gold Coast, was a British colony until 1957. It is now politically separated into four main parts. Ashanti is in the center and Kumasi is the capital. To the Ashanti, the family and the mother’s clan are most important. A child is said to inherit the father’s soul or spirit (ntoro) and from the mother a child receives flesh and blood (mogya). This relates them more closely to the mother’s clan. The Ashanti live in an extended family. The family lives in various homes or huts that are set up around a courtyard. The head of the household is usually the oldest brother that lives there. He is chosen by the elders. He is called either Father or Housefather and is obeyed by everyone. Boys are trained by their fathers at the age of eight and nine. They are taught a skill of the fathers' choice. The father is also responsible for paying for school. Girls are taught cooking and housekeeping skills by their mothers. They also work the fields and bring in necessary items, such as water, for the group. Marriage is very important to Ashanti communal life and it can be polygamous . Men may want more than one wife to express their willingness to be generous and support a large family. Women in the Ashanti culture will not marry without the consent of their parents. Many women do not meet their husbands until they are married. Even so, divorce is very rare in the Ashanti culture and it is a duty of parents on both sides to keep a marriage going.

16. Aerial shot of the Israeli Kibbutz

17. The commitment to the ideal of communal work and ownership extended to communal upbringing of the children . It was strongly believed that the bourgeois family was at the root of individualistic impulses and that communal child rearing would inculcate cooperative ones. Children were brought up in the children's house, living and sleeping and being educated there. They stayed with a “cohort” of their own age group, moving with them as they grew older from each age-graded section of the children's house. Children would spend a couple of hours each evening with their parents in their simple, compact accommodation. Breast feeding mothers would leave their work periodically to feed their infants. The bond with parents was strong, but that with their own age group was almost equally so. Members of the kibbutz had the job of caring for them ‘caretakers’, working in shifts around the clock. The carers, were almost always women -- sex roles on the kibbutz were resistant to change. Kibbutz

18. “ A husband visited his wife after supper at night and left before breakfast next morning. He placed his weapons at the door of his wifes room, and if others came later they were free to sleep on the verandah… A passing guest recompensed a woman with a small cash gift at each visit. But a more regular husband from within the neighbourhood had certain customary obligations. Nayar of Sudan Nayar men spent part of each year away from their villages. Every few years a grand ceremony was held, at which girls aged from 7 – 12 years were ritually married to local men. The ‘Tali- husband’ spent 3 days secluded with her, and then she had no further obligations to him, except to observe death rituals for him. After the marriage she was publicly regarded as an adult woman. Shortly before or after puberty, she could accept sexually motivated visits from an indefinite number of Nayar men.

19. When a woman became pregnant, it was essential for one or more men of appropriate subcaste to acknowledge probable paternity. This they did by providing a fee of a cloth and some vegetables to the lower caste midwife who attended the woman in childbirth. If no man of suitable caste would consent to this gift, it was assumed that the woman had relations with a man of lower caste or with a Christian or a Muslim. She must then be either expelled from her lineage and caste or killed by her matrilineal kinsmen. Gough, 1968

21. Are friends the new family? In pairs, using the information provided. Write down arguments for and against the view that the family is in decline and friends are taking over.