Cecile Jackson

This study analyzes research results from experimental games played in the predominantly Bagisu area of Uganda in 2005. The games were designed to understand how husbands and wives manage household funds in relation to Amartya Sen's model of cooperative conflicts, which is widely used as a heuristic device for understanding intrahousehold bargaining. This study questions Sen's emphasis on the lower self-perceptions of personal welfare among women and on the role of cash contributions to the household as the basis of bargaining power, and it argues for a broader characterization of breakdown positions.

This article aims to unsettle some taken‐for‐granted ideas about speech and power, to argue against taking testimony ‘at face value’ without reflecting also on silence, on the forms and techniques of talk, on embodied communication, and on the complex ways in which interests are expressed and animated. It argues that treating direct testimony in public political institutions as a metric of gender inequality may be another example of the distortions that follow from an uncritical adoption of an unmarked male template of speech as universal standard. The article aims thereby to improve the way development researchers ‘hear’, and how practitioners think about ‘participation’.

This symposium of articles argue that marriage does not have a fixed relationship to gender inequality, nor does it simply reflect gender relations external to households, but is better seen as an institution which mediates social change and gender inequality. The collection of articles here show this symposium through empirical case studies of marriage, gender and wellbeing in contexts of social change. Together they problematise the connections between intra and extra household gender relations, analyse changing masculinities and marriage, consider how women's agency is deployed in reshaping marriage, and indicate a richer approach to understanding intrahousehold relations within particular contexts and temporal frames, and with fuller conceptions of breakdown positions and conjugal interdependencies.

Understanding intrahousehold relations between spouses is central to understanding gendered wellbeing in developing countries, and therefore has engaged the attentions of economists, anthropologists, political theorists and interdisciplinary development studies. In all these fields contractualism in conceptualising conjugality and intrahousehold relations is ubiquitous, yet it implies an overly static and compelling structuralist logic, which this article questions. A better understanding of agency and change, in relation to marriage, matters for both the conceptualisation of intrahousehold relations, and for a range of policy initiatives, for example gender equity, or indeed HIV/AIDS, where the ability of women to instigate change in conjugality and sexual cultures is significant. This article makes no claim to represent contemporary Shona gender relations in Zimbabwe, but offers a temporal analysis of changing conjugality in south-central Zimbabwe from the colonial period into the late 1980s 1 1. Fieldwork was conducted in two areas of Chivi Communal Area in southern Zimbabwe over 18 months in 1988 and 1989, and consisted of repeated interviews and observations with husbands and wives in 60 households in each site, group interviews and additional interviews with sex workers and many other informants. I am grateful to Ester Tagarira, Beauty Musavengana and Vhenekai Man'ozhe for their help. View all notes to critique the theoretical stance of contractual approaches, through revealing the ways in which marriage has been reformulated through women's agency.

Gender analysts of development have worked on land and property relations in poor rural areas for over two decades and the JAC 2003 special issue carried a range of work reflecting some of these research trajectories. This article is both a response to Bina Agarwal's paper on ‘Gender and Land Rights Revisited’, in which she reiterates her advocacy of land rights, and also an argument for why we should temper her transformatory expectations, recognize the complexity of what she sees as ‘social obstacles’ to women claiming land, and not rush to policy closure on land rights in all circumstances, or to blanket prescriptions. It argues for a renewed emphasis on reflexive ethnographic research with a focus on gender as social relations, on subject positions and subjectivities, on the meshing of shared and separate interests within households and on power residing in discourse as well as material assets.

The European Journal of Development Research is a multi-disciplinary journal that seeks to broaden our understanding of the processes that advance or impede human development, whether from a political, economic, sociological or anthropological perspective. It is the official journal of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI).

The European Journal of Development Research is a multi-disciplinary journal that seeks to broaden our understanding of the processes that advance or impede human development, whether from a political, economic, sociological or anthropological perspective. It is the official journal of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI).