The Organization of Households in Adabraka: Toward a Wider Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Households everywhere are staging areas for social life: places where individuals sleep, store personal belongings, and refurbish themselves, physically and psychologically, for the day ahead. The fire and simple shelter of the Australian Mardudjara (Tonkinson 1978), the sections within farming compounds of the Ghanaian Tallensi (Fortes 1949a), and the rooms in Manhattan hotels rented by poor, elderly, or mentally disturbed men and women (Sokolovskyet al.1978) are each examples of this basic aspect of household life. How then should households be compared in order to understand the ways in which ethnographic cases differ?