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Men Own The Fields, Women Own The Crops: Gender And Power In The Cameroon Grassfields

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Miriam Goheen traveled to the grassfields of Cameroon intending to study "the relationship between local and national politics within the postcolonial state" (3). There, she was struck by how, amidst a culture experiencing the changes associated with "the commodification of almost everything" and the "increasing internationalization of culture," it is gender relations that are most relevant to "an understanding of the complicated interconnections between Nso' and the national state today" (4). Goheen's ethnography focuses on the "internal power relations" of the Nso', and then explores how these power relations "articulate with national power" (4). These internal power relations are defined and supported by the relationships between men, women, and production: "Women play a key role in this study because control of their productive and reproductive labor in Nso has always been central to maintaining the hierarchies of male power and status" (8). Goheen explores in her work how women have become the source of "male power, status, and accumulation," how "national-local practices, legal systems, and cultural institutions within the postcolonial state have served to articulate male power in the local arena with power at the national level," and processes that are counter to the male hegemony that has come to define the state and experience of Nso' society (10).

Throughout her study, Goheen draws attention to how "the meaning of power relations" among the Nso changes due to historical processes and changing conceptions of the material (10). Thus, she explains, two central analytical issues of her study are: "the integral interdependence between anthropology and history," and "the relationship between practice and discourse, between the material and the ideological, between base and superstructure in the ways that these are articulated and reproduced in and by the contours of history" (11). It is through Goheen's attention to the political economy of gender and the influence of historical processes on Nso' identity that she is able to identify the counterhegemonies that challenge customary hegemony yet strengthen the structure of gender roles as opposed to a counterhegemony that challenges the gender roles solidified by the postcolonial national state.

Goheen's overarching thesis is that the structures of Nso' society have produced a "gendered hierarchy" that assigns women the role of provisioning the household and producing children (16). In so doing, men are afforded the time, status, through high numbers of children and dependents, and personal money to seek political power and maintain customary power. Such a structure of domination stems from the precolonial past, and was expanded and reinforced through colonial and postcolonial rule. She establishes this thesis through the five chapters that follow a largely theoretical introduction. In the final two chapters, Goheen explores two distinct counterhegemonies to the hegemony of male domination established through precolonial customs and reinforced through the colonial and postcolonial states. First, she explores a dispute between the chief of a larger village within Nso', the Fon Nse', and the Fon Nso', the leader of all of Nso'. For Goheen, this counterhegemony serves as an example of how resistance to hegemony can be "absorbed into the larger hegemonic project of the postcolonial state; ultimately this resolution does not serve to reproduce the dominance of the paramount fon, but instead reinforces the power of the state and the new elite" (178). In contrast, Goheen argues, there is a second counterhegemonic discourse in the rejection of marriage by the elite women of today and in marriages of elites that reject the traditional separation of men's and women's roles and share money equally between partners. And, "the political and potentially transformative aspect of struggles over the cultural meaning of gender cannot be ignored" (196).

In the course of her argument, Goheen is very successful in her discussion of the structure of Nso' society, the ways in which material and historical processes have worked to mold the structure of this society, and how structural changes have influenced power relations, particularly between men and women. She begins her study outlining the structure of society. In chapter two, Goheen documents the geography and social setting of Nso', revealing that the "Nso' physical and social worlds are inextricably interconnected" (24). We learn that the Fon is the customary leader of the Nso', acting as "the intermediary between the living and the ancestors, and is responsible for negotiating and ensuring the health and well-being of the Nso' people"(27). Importantly, "there have always existed a number of checks and balances on the power of these rulers" (27). First, the mtaar people, free commoners, act as a check upon the authority of the Nso' because the "Fon Nso' must have a mother who is a mtaar woman... [the Fon Nso'] is in a sense both the son and the son in-law of the mtaar lineage heads and must take their advice seriously" (28). Second, in precolonial times, the secret societies of both men and women were able to successfully voice their protests to the Fon. Finally, men and women of high rank, i.e. male title-holders and female members of the Fon's family were afforded particular powers within the Fon's household and family. Later, Goheen reveals the ways in which the colonial and postcolonial states have strengthened the power of the male elite and eroded the powers associated with the female elite. Goheen's primary concern here is the fluidity of these categories as Nso' is influenced by the national state particularly so that she can explore the complex relationship between hegemonic and counterhegemonic processes. "What appears as hegemony from one vantage point," she puts forth, "appears as counterhegemony from another" (46).

The arrival of colonial powers are, for Goheen, an example of the historical processes that shaped the structure of Nso' society, and certainly brought changes in material processes that were directly relevant to power relationships. The arrival of the Germans served to "strengthen the executive [the Fon] at the expense of the consultative institutions centered on the palace," such as the Mtaar people and women (52). Chapters three, four, five, and six explore the means through which male hegemony was established in Nso' and how changing material conditions, particularly the growing prominence of a cash economy, influenced male power and excluded women from power.

Goheen points out that "hegemony requires consent and consensus about the legitimacy of the dominant discourse" (56). This consensus was accomplished through the diffusion of symbolic power throughout the Nso' empire. This symbolic power is acquired through the accumulation of children and dependents who can serve as a work force, increase the status of male household leaders, and provide men with greater access to cash. As a hold over from the time of the Nso' empire, men are identified as warriors, while women are responsible for maintaining the household: "These gender identifications, negotiated in the distant past when warriors were essential to establishing regional hegemony, have worked to free men from the primary responsibility of provisioning the household" (74). Today, "by assuming responsibility for provisioning the household, women free men's incomes for extrahousehold investment in entrepreneurial ventures, social networks, and status," and consequently, women are at a disadvantage to acquire these public powers (92). Thus, with the introduction of a cash economy as a consequence of colonialism, women's labor was relegated to the private sphere, and men, who participated in the cash economy, were associated with the public sphere. Importantly, "the boundaries between public and private domains, always shifting and contested in precolonial Nso', became more static and rigid within the colonial (and later that national) state" (66). Additionally, the cash economy, leading to the commoditization of land, and increased government control over the distribution of land, particularly through the government's positive relationship with customary land tenure, has "reinforced" men's control over the land worked by women, and "although it may not go unchallenged, male hegemony is ultimately strengthened by this relationship" (140). As a final example of how changes in conceptions of the material have reshaped and reinforced male-female power relations, Goheen describes how the postcolonial state has used male secret societies as important political institutions while ignoring female secret societies. The postcolonial state, realizing the importance of Fon's hegemonic power, uses traditional hegemony to establish its own power, particularly through a new educated male elite. Goheen asserts, "When local politics is carried out in this idom and national and local politics are articulated through secret societies, women are excluded from participation. The ability of the new elite men to use traditional institutions and the traditional title system to graft new forms of power onto the existing status hierarchy in Nso' articulates local and national male control, and contributes to the dominant discourse of male hegemony" (162).

While her articulation of how historical and material processes shape the structures of gender hierarchy in Nso' is comprehensive, if not repetitive at times, Goheen's study begs the reader to ask if one can adequately document oppression and resistance to oppression without accounts of individual experience and women's own interpretations of their place in society? Goheen's fully structural analysis of the gender hierarchy in Nso' society feels impersonal and not successfully supported with evidence because a reader engages only with Goheen and not with any actual members of Nso' society. The ethnography would greatly benefit from some incorporation of Nso' women's own reflections on their role as provisioners of the household and on their conception of reproduction in the context of male dominance.

Goheen does present some individuals in her conclusion, during which she outlines her conception of a women's counterhegemony that she contends successfully challenges male power. Here, however, she is concerned entirely with elite women and their means of entering the public sphere. In her introduction, Goheen asserts, "this study argues that it is in this process and ultimately in the articulation between gender and class, the role of gender in the relationship between what Bayart has termed the dominants and the domines, that we can locate a counterhegemony which is likely to be truly transformative of the structures of the postcolonial state" (17). Yet in reality, the only classes with which Goheen is concerned are those of men and women. By describing these new trends of elite women as counterhegemonic, and by not examining the effects on or including the voices of non-elite women, Goheen both excludes the poor from the liberation of this resistance and does not explore the new hegemony that could be created to subvert the poor to the elite.

Miriam Goheen provides valuable insight into Cameroonian gender and power structures in her examination of Nso life, Men Own the Fields, Women Own the Crops. The text centers on a discussion of hegemony in Cameroonian society, but uses lens of land, gender, and modernity to reveal deeper nuances of its role. Goheen effectively details the power dynamics resulting from cultural practices surrounding production and reproduction, allocation and ownership of resources, local and national male power structures, and social hierarchy. Ultimately, Goheen successfully establishes that earlier practices of male domination (especially in relation to land) determined women's roles as largely subservient to men. It is only in the more contemporary period that gender constructions have come, however reluctantly, into the public arena for debate.

The frequent invocation of her title is a noteworthy repetition in Goheen's work, and is the clearest way of communicating her overall point. Goheen cites this Nso phrase to summarize the relationship between gender, land, and power. "Men own the fields, women own the crops" describes men and women as "fathers" and "mothers" of the field, who have important duties to best use farmland. Women are expected to till the land, and through this work, as Goheen notes, women produce 90% of Cameroonian crops consumed. Men are the holders of the land, who allocate it as they see fit to female family members and dependents to farm. The balance of labor and gender was skewed, in part to keep women from "positions of power or public decision making," thus enabling traditional male hegemony. In this short phrase, Goheen encompasses the general representation of men as holders of power and women as support for that arrangement. But Goheen argues that this relationship was sensible in earlier times, because it resulted in "gender complementarity" rather than inherent inequality.

The advent of `modernity,' in terms of colonial and capitalist structures, significantly complicated this ages-old statement. Goheen details the changes to women's roles as their work in the fields is commoditized. Particularly in rural areas, Goheen notes, a woman's sales of excess crops supports the "welfare" of her family when she sells them in local marketplaces. Furthermore, the national food supply is largely constituted of this surplus. Yet current Cameroonian laws do not give women equal access to owning land as individuals or through development programs. Traditional methods of farming and subsistence, the main sources of women's social and economic influence, are at risk. New practices resulting from increasing commoditization of land also changed land use due to new inheritance patterns. Traditionally land remained in the possession of a farmer's titled lineage head; upon death, the land would return to the community. But notions of land ownership have become more "individualized," and land use if often passed to the previous farmer's sons. These changes have profound implications for both farmers and the titled men, because despite increased materialization of wealth, much power remains in land and labor.

This composition of power is repeatedly emphasized in another important phrase throughout Goheen's text: "the fon has everything, the fon is a poor man." This Nso saying reveals the social burden of being elite in this Cameroonian society. Although national government is present in northwest Cameroon, local leaders like the fon more established positions of authority that are linked with local traditions and rituals. Fons are expected to redistribute their wealth freely to their dependants, and to support them in times of hardship. These dependants are especially numerous because fons often take wives for political purposes, thus becoming centers of extensive lineage and kinship networks. This pattern is replicated by other important figures in Nso life, specifically the sheey, faay and shuufaay who often use their assets to support extended families and pay school fees for young relatives. In repeating this statement several times throughout the text, Goheen communicates to her audience the mutually exclusive relationship between "material riches" and "renown" in Nso society, and makes an important point about nonwestern conceptions of wealth more generally.

Despite the insight Goheen's work sheds on modernity and African life, there are several important points of criticism. Goheen's treatment of gender lacks a complete examination; throughout her work, she focuses on the interaction between the genders, instead of presenting a complete picture of the context from which each group was coming from. If anything, Goheen seems to focus on men's roles in Cameroon, even writing that "women's political power" is "virtually ignored" and "almost nonexistent." Though she treats these descriptions as negative, in her work she makes little effort to challenge or even exhaustively examine this reality, instead focusing on men and their roles as elites and landowners in social hegemony. It is only in the final concluding chapter that Goheen focuses largely on women's attempts to take their lives into their own hands. Goheen does not necessarily fall into the academic gap of using masculinity as a primary tool of examining women and women's agency, but she trips heavily into it.

Additionally, Goheen focuses largely on the fons and their various family members (the wirfon), without giving a clear voice to non-royal members of society (the mtaar). Perhaps this weakness results more from Goheen's research capabilities after her installation within the fon's family. She described elites (many of whom have advanced education) but does not contextualize who they are elite to. It may be that so-called `class' distinctions are subtler than those in Western environments, or "not...hierarchical in any measurable sense." Yet even when describing tenant/landholder relations, it is unclear how life differs based on their differing amounts of wealth and power, or, conversely, if it does not. Her picture of the hegemony in Cameroon is imprecise and would benefit from a more balanced description of elite and non-elite groups.

A final problematic aspect of Men Own the Fields, Women Own the Crops is Goheen's tone. Although she largely writes to make valuable academic contributions, Goheen at times references irrelevant or inappropriate experiences. For example, when writing of possible exploitation of Nweron authority, she characterizes some as "easy opportunities for one's enemies to make accusations, much like the marijuana laws in United States today." Earlier in the text, Goheen also recounts an experience of drinking too much with fon, in a joking manner. These stylistic choices may not discredit Goheen's work as a whole, but they do call her positionality into question. It is difficult to separate her academic intentions from her personal attitudes, and these minor transgressions disrupt the otherwise cohesive flow of her writing.

Overall, Men Own the Fields, Women Own the Crops effectively illuminates many aspects of Nso life in northwestern Cameroon. Goheen fills several gaps in Western academic research, and updates earlier observations, both of which are noble endeavors. Her strong theoretical framework combined with first person accounts and anecdotal research presents a rich tapestry of information. Goheen argues especially persuasively the role of land in greater Cameroonian hegemony, and its associations with gender and modernity. This dialogue is one that most likely plays a more significant role in other African women's lives than I had previously thought. Her text is very accessible, making it an especially useful text for a less specialized audience. However, her work also has a few serious shortcomings in areas of contextualization and style. This criticism does not negate her contributions to Cameroonian research and academic analysis, but it is important when assessing her work as a whole. In a society where African women are often described by foreign media, and even by scholars, as "victims" and African men as "chauvinistic...drunkards," Goheen's mostly well-articulated work has an important place.

Miriam Goheen's 1996 work, Men Own The Fields, Women Own the Crops: Gender and Power in the Cameroon Grassfields, examines the intersections of gender, cultural flux, contestations of power, and political plurality in Cameroon's Nso' chiefdom. In her analysis, Goheen pays special attention to the position of women and their avenues of power in the male-dominated Nso' political system. With a focus on the Nso' chiefdom's complex relationship with the centralized government, Goheen explores several realms of Nso' politics in which the role of women is in flux, these include; the restructuring of the fon chiefdom system, the allocation and the commoditization of arable land, attitudes concerning marriage.
The book is organized around eight chapters with a brief prologue that orients readers with a brief introduction of the effects of globalization, education, and political reordering in roughly the past twenty years (considering the 1996 publishing date).A recurrent theme in the text is Goheen's reference of Phyllis Kaberry's research with the Nso' nearly forty years earlier. In her introduction, Goheen identifies Kaberry's work as a catalyst for her own research. For the reader who is not familiar with Kaberry's work, the consistent thread of conversation between Goheen's experience and Kaberry's work can be somewhat alienating. In addition, while highly readable, Goheen's analysis tends to be somewhat dense. Some chapters, for example "The Forging of Hegemony", which examines Nso' reliance on women's reproductive and productive capacities as well as conceptions of Nso' female identity, may have benefited from being organized in to more than one chapter. These stumbling blocks aside, Goheen's work appeals to any reader concerned with the effects of political plurality, the construction of identity between the tensions of tradition and modernity, as well as women's right to self-determination.

Ms. Goheen adroitly locates her work in the grassfields of Cameroon within a rich theoretical framework. Fascinating reading for the anthropologist and layman alike.

In Men Own the Fields, Women Own the Crops, Miriam Goheen analyzes Nso' gender relationships using economic, political, and historical contexts. Goheen writes her ethnography after nearly two decades of field research in northwestern Cameroon. Her work is thorough and multifaceted, yet assessable and clear. Throughout the book, she engages in critical discussion about hegemony, power, gender, and economics. As she explains, the Nso' people maintain a traditional hegemonic system of male dominance that divides public and private spheres of life. She writes, "women...support men's investments by assuming responsibility for food production, provisioning the household, and producing children, who form the basis of symbolic and material wealth [for men]" (8), while men are free to pursue interests outside of the home. Goheen applies this gendered dichotomy to the intersectionality of indigenous cultural belief systems and modern national government. She argues that although the indigenous and modern governments seem to have conflicting interests, their interaction actually strengthens a patriarchal system. Nonetheless, a more modern education and media system has opened spaces of possibility for Nso' women to form counterhegemony against male political and economic dominance.

Goheen structures her ethnography with several analytic focuses. She first discusses how the Nso' traditionally structure their society to support a distinctive hegemonic discourse of male dominance. She argues that hegemony is a product of "double structuring" (16); people both practice and perceive their social position. Using historical context, she examines how secret societies, rank, title, and the patrilineal system have helped to reinforce Nso' patriarchy. After thoroughly dissecting the "traditional" (in reality post-colonial) Nso' system of male dominance, Goheen discusses the role of the modern state in strengthening the hegemony. She explains how men take advantage of the modern systems of capital investment and land ownership to further limit women's agency. She argues that customary attitudes toward women have restricted women's access to new forms of land ownership. To prove this point, Goheen relies on convincing quantitative data that shows the inequality of land distribution by the modern state. Finally, in her conclusion, Goheen examines how women resist institutionalized patriarchy and discusses the implications of their resistance. Because men derive much of their status and power from women's farm labor, women who refuse marriage or choose not to farm create a counterhegemony at odds with the male hegemony. Many women, poor and elite, refuse to marry at all - despite the growing hardships they face under the strengthened hegemonic system. Although the majority of women do continue to farm under the traditional system, Goheen's arguments about the hegemonic system are valid and important. That is, women's refusal to farm is a counterhegemony: consciously collective (women explain that they do not marry because they do not want to farm) and potentially transformative of class systems in the future.

Goheen's argument is intricate yet holistic in approach. She uses historical evidence combined with both qualitative and quantitative data to analyze the Nso' hegemony and build a convincing argument. Her nineteen years of fieldwork manifest in personal anecdotes and references to Nso' people whom she interviews, including Fon Nso' (roughly equivalent to king/clans leader). Nonetheless, she writes Men Own the Fields, Women Own the Crops in her own words and places emphasis on collective transformation rather than any single personal narrative. In her introduction, Goheen states her bias against individual narratives in ethnographic writing:

There has recently been a shift in scholarly attention from collective efforts to change economic, political, and cultural conditions of oppression to a focus on popular culture and individual words and actions...This shift...can be problematic if such cultural and individual response is not linked to a material reality and looked at dialectically as a response to oppressive and often-changing material conditions. I argue here that for "resistance" to be indeed truly resistant in the sense that it creates a transformative power shift, it need not be consciously collective, but must ultimately be collectively transformative. (7)

I understand Goheen's frustration with labeling individual response as "resistance;" placing too much emphasis on any one individual's experiences may cloud true social trend. However, I believe that more personal narrative would actually strengthen her argument and better engage the reader with women's day-to-day experiences. Personal narratives would also help focus the ethnography more on the women themselves (since women are supposedly at the center of this work). It is especially problematic when Goheen tersely summarizes the counterhegemonic views of several young non-married elite Nso' women including "Maggie," "Presca," and "Helene." These paragraph-long descriptions undercut and devalue the complex experiences of individual Nso' women. Throughout the ethnography, Nso' women never get a voice of their own, which makes it more difficult to conceptualize individual experiences - how women view the male-dominated hegemony or if they even see it around them. Goheen may have better developed these points in order to highlight her claim of waning/transforming hegemony. Specific, extensive discourse from both unwed and wed mothers would have improved the credibility of her arguments.

Indeed, because Goheen does not utilize personal narrative, she risks making generalizations that do not fully represent women's experiences with the hegemony. The most striking example of this occurs at the beginning of chapter four, when Goheen juxtaposes how Nso' men and women view each other. Based on the narrative, it appears as though most wed women see themselves as in charge, intelligent, and powerful controllers of the household. Goheen quotes the women (in a group), "Women are indeed God. Men are nothing. Have you not seen?" (71). Perhaps complaining about men is a coping mechanism for the true hardships the women face in marriage; yet it seems as though women see themselves as superior beings. It would be helpful to hear what these women think in private interviews: Do they resent their farming/household responsibilities because of this assumed superiority? Or do they take pride in their work and enjoy being the more productive societal members? Do they regret having no other choice but to farm? Again, it seems like Goheen could have explored women's feelings and experiences in greater depth. Instead, she cuts the narrative short and returns to objective writing about the distribution of labor and social responsibilities. Clearly, the objective facts are absolutely necessary in exploring gendered hegemony, politics, farming, and resistance. She does an excellent job buttressing her claims about gender and hegemony by considering cultural and historical analysis. Still, I worry that Goheen often ignores the feelings of the Nso' people and how those feelings shape their interactions with the world. It is one thing to state that a greater number of women are refusing marriage; it is another thing to delve into their personal experiences and attitudes toward that institution in a meaningful way.

Nonetheless, it is always difficult to balance personal narratives with holistic social commentary. On the reverse side of my critique, Goheen does a good job supporting her claims by using "holistic" historical and cultural analyses to contextualize present-day gender dynamics. She describes pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial hegemonic formation in depth, which allows us to critique and analyze "contradiction and struggles over power and meaning" (11). It would be problematic to discuss male hegemony without cultural or historical context; without understanding historical processes and social constructions of gender, we would cast both African men and women in a bad light. In her ethnography, Goheen criticizes two feminist articles for not taking indigenous gender roles into consideration. She writes, "Both of these articles deal harshly with African men, calling them chauvinistic, drunkards, and womanizers, without any real contextual analysis and certainly no systemic or cultural analysis" (183, emphasis added). Likewise, women have been characterized as self-subjugating. Another article wrote that women "have allowed themselves to be used and abused, relying on their `bottom power' for success and survival" (181). Goheen avoids this kind of unproductive rhetoric by emphasizing the changing conceptions of hegemony, government, and gender in a historical context.

However, Goheen explains cultural and historical context in such depth that it may hurt the focus of the ethnography. I am concerned that the true purpose of the ethnography - to demonstrate gendered experiences with hegemony and counterhegemony - is sometimes lost in tangential analytic or historical discussion. Goheen's project is complex and encapsulates topics ranging from economics, politics, national government, local government, hegemony, power, and gender. By trying to connect these points together into a coherent ethnography, Goheen sometimes gets lost in repetition or unnecessary detail. I was particularly uninspired by her discussion of counterhegemony in chapter seven. Here she discusses the rivalry between Nso' and Nse' and argues that forms of hegemony will always be met with forms of counterhegemony. In this case, the Nse' resistance to Nso' dominance is a form of counterhegemony, which ultimately helps strengthen the power of the "new elite." I am still unclear why Goheen included this chapter in the ethnography; perhaps she is trying to give an expansive view of various counterhegemonic forces. The rise of a "new elite" system of capital-based wealth affects women's agency, thus tying in with the larger narrative. Still, the connection seems unnecessary and tangential. Instead, it seems that the conclusion, which most directly tackles the hegemony-women relationship, best explains why this ethnography is an important text.

Indeed Goheen's ethnography is an important piece of work that may provide clues to hegemonic changes in other African communities. As Goheen explains in her conclusion, it is becoming more common for both elite and poor women to refuse marriage and assimilation into traditional Nso' structure. She writes, "Poor and elite women alike see no real advantage to marriage, which they frequently view as a drain on their resources and often as an unacceptable constraint on their lives" (183). Although the modern state and traditional Nso' social structures have combined to form an even stronger male hegemony, the introduction of educational systems and non-farming job markets have also created more agency for unwed women. The availability non-farming jobs means that women do not have to integrate into traditional gender roles that propel male wealth and power. This argument proves convincing since about one third of all Nso' households include unwed mothers. With such a high fraction, the counterhegemonic process must be significant process. Therefore, Goheen's ethnography is an important look into changing hegemony, though the hegemonic system is still in tact and women continue to "own the crops" of their men's fields. However, women's refusal of marriage is significant because it does challenge a male hegemonic system in a conscious and potentially transformative way. Even more significantly, it may predict how other African male hegemonies may change in the future. Goheen writes, "I have argued that men's status and power in Nso', as in much of Africa, have derived substantially from their control over women's productive and reproductive labor" (196, emphasis added). If this is true and other African societies run on a male hegemony, then capitalism and the introduction of alternative, non-farm based careers will transform those communities as well.

Overall, Men Own the Fields, Women Own the Crops provides a critical analysis that examines several key themes in thinking about women and their struggles in Africa. To me, it is most interesting that women are gaining agency not by working within the traditional Nso' farming system but rather by alienating themselves from that system altogether. In many African ethnographies, women are incorporated into an oppressive system and gain agency by manipulating the system from within. In this text, Goheen presents few examples of this type of manipulation. Perhaps this shows us that women can create agency from in and out of an oppressive system. Beyond this theme, gender relations between men and women in a historical, cultural context are central to the ethnography, and we see once again that it is impossible to discuss women in Africa without having a thorough understanding of gender. Additionally, we must combine holistic approaches to ethnography with individual narratives that provide deep insight into these gender systems.

Miriam Goheen's Women Own the Fields, Women Own the Crops: Gender and Power in the Cameroon Grassfield is an ethnographically- and historically-based analysis of gender relations in the political economy of the Nso' chiefdom in the Northwest Grassfield province of Cameroon. Using a Marxist focus on labor, production and ownership, and employing Gramsci's notion of hegemony, Goheen explores male/female divisions of labor and political power in 1980s Nso' society. She seeks to explain how a male hegemony among the Nso' developed from political and material changes during the shifts from pre-colonial to colonial to postcolonial forms of governance, and looks at new ways in which elite females in their personal life choices are beginning to "resist" and may eventually transform the male hegemony.

Goheen's central argument is that the Nso' hegemony of the gendered identification of women with farm production, reproduction and childrearing, and household management, and of men with hunting and war, has collaborated in postcolonial Cameroon with the state hegemony of power of elite men, to produce an ideology of a stricter boundary between male (public) and female (private) activity and to create a political and material reality that excludes preexisting forms of power held by women in politics and in everyday economic activity. She demonstrates through historical analysis how the central Cameroonian national hegemony of dominance and power of an elite class was established in the postcolonial state to work together with local elites such as the elites of the Nso' people (Goheen 1996:15), whose hegemony of gender relations has been both reinforced and transformed over time to result in a hegemonic social structure in the 1980s that restricts women to an economic domain of farming and household management that is no longer politically visible.

The concept of hegemony proves useful to understanding how political power of elites is consolidated and reproduced through forms of dominance over everyday activities, and how the everyday economy and division of labor in which Nso' women participate is dominated by both the local and national power structures that create a unified hegemony of gender relations. Goheen's thorough historical analysis of the development of these hegemonies of power and their collaboration in dominating women's participation in the economy is one of the strongest points of her book, which makes her argument convincing in many ways. Unlike ethnographies that are based mainly on interviews and observation of everyday activities, Goheen's study is both a detailed analysis of structural changes over time, and of the everyday manifestations of hegemonic power structures in people's actions and experiences, thoughts expressed through interviews, and material conditions, documented by surveys of household incomes, expenses, and divisions of labor. The Marxist focus on material relations provides a strong argument backed up by this impressive triangulation of evidence.

There is one piece of the analysis of hegemonies of power and gender that seems to be missing from this book. In her introduction to the theoretical background of the book, Goheen discusses the importance of Bourdieu's concept of "habitus" to understanding how a hegemony "legitimate[s]...forms of domination" in everyday life (Goheen 1996:12). Habitus refers to the "infusion and internalization in individuals of a set of enduring ideals or dispositions which generate particular practices," ideals or dispositions through which the hegemonic domination is "naturalized" and "internalized" (Goheen 1996:12). Goheen provides examples of how the identification of men with public and political activity and of women with private home and farming activity is naturalized in Nso' discourse and consciousness - for example, in the surprised reaction of a government official to Goheen's assertion that the difficulty of women's access to land was discriminatory ((Goheen 1996:139). However, she does not analyze how the hegemony of gender inequality is internalized not only by men who have control in the power structure, but by the women who participate in the structure, especially those who choose to marry. Further ethnographic examples and theoretical analysis of the way in which the hegemony is internalized and acted by subordinate members would have added to the reader's understanding of Nso' women's experiences, and would have helped to clarify whether participation in the structure is really a choice or an economic obligation for most women, especially in light of Goheen's focus in her conclusion on women who have chosen not to participate in the structure of marriage.

This description of women who have chosen to participate in the Nso' economy without marrying is effective in pointing to the possibility that postcolonial structures of gender equality in access to education and in some international development projects may again change the balance of power and access of women to different categories of power, perhaps in land ownership or national politics that used to be open almost only to men. The possibility of changing structures of gender relations in response to changing material opportunities, and perhaps in response to the growth of newer hegemonic structures (such as international aid structures), is important to examine because it has implications for women's experiences in many parts of the Africa.