Love, Courtship, and Marriage in Africa: The Anthropologies of Intimacy and Conjugality

3 units

This course is an exploration of past and present anthropological inquiry into love, courtship, and marriage across the African continent. The course explores various reasons love on the continent has been of great interest to social scientists in certain historical moments, while completely ignored in others. Other key questions in this course revolve around making connections between love and political economies, kinship, gender, health, labor migration, colonialism, and the law, among other key topics. The course will begin by introducing students to earlier anthropological assumptions, which presumed that intimacies in African contexts were tied to urbanization or development theory. Early anthropological works often ignored long histories of companionate relationships and love, setting them at odds with kinship involvement. Only since the 1990s has anthropological inquiry began to consider intimacy and affect in Africa more fully. The bulk of the semester will be spent exploring these recent contributions. Course goals include tracing the history of scholarship on love in Africa, exploring contemporary ethnographies in local and global context, and thinking critically through anthropological inquiry and methodologies. Course readings will be a mix of ethnography, scholarly journal articles, and popular news clips, as well as films and novels by African scholars and artists.