This article examines the workings of power and, specifically, agentic practices that, in some respects, differ from pervasive, overt forms of agency dominant in some feminist accounts.Footnote 1 I develop an account of agency in Dagaaba settings based on the complex ways in which this was exercised among my research participants during my residential ethnographic fieldwork in 2013 and 2014.Footnote 2 In recent times, academic discourse and theorizing on agency in the global South have tended to emphasize women as agents rather than as oppressed victims of various patriarchal and male-centric sociocultural and religious norms and practices.Footnote 3 This is not to suggest that the exercise of agency precludes marginalization, but rather to underscore the point that agentic practices are enmeshed with constraints: “agency is implicated in subordination,” as Judith Butler usefully observes (Butler Reference Butler1997, 17). Indeed, “the search for agency has reached almost epidemic proportions” (Madhok et al. Reference Madhok, Phillips, Wilson and Hemmings2013, 4), and this underscores the current obsession with, or rather romanticization of, locating/identifying agentic practices at sites previously considered as lacking it. My discussion resonates with Sumi Madhok's assertion that in (oppressive) contexts where background conditions required for negative freedom are lacking, some modifications in agency thinking is required if we are to avoid misrecognizing it. In addition to her suggestion, I extend the frame by drawing attention to the need to pay critical attention to the role of belief in supernatural power forms, which is prevalent in the extremely gendered context of the Dagaaba, in sculpting agentic practices and discourses.Footnote 4 Thus, I examine the exercise of agency that is filtered through pervasive belief in the prevalence of supernatural forces to demonstrate its dominant influence in both the quotidian and ritual lives of members in that context. This is achieved by drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork data collected in one Dagaaba settlement in rural northwestern Ghana, known as Serekpere. Inhabitants of Serekpere depend primarily on subsistence, hoe-based agricultural farming for sustenance. Crops cultivated by the residents include corn, millet, rice, beans, and peanuts/groundnuts. In most cases, farms are owned by families, and decision-making regarding the use of produce is often vested in male heads of the family. An exception is the case of widowed and single women, who make decisions regarding the appropriation of farm produce, which is kept mostly for food. As women do not customarily own land in the patrilineal settings of the Dagaaba people, their main sources of income include picking and processing of shea (a tropical tree) nuts into butter, harvesting and processing dawadawa (locust beans) into a soup ingredient of the same name, common to northern Ghana, and also brewing pito (locally brewed alcoholic beverage made from malt) for sale.
In Dagaaba settings in northern Ghana, daily and ritual lives are deeply structured by events believed to be occurring in the mystical realm. Despite the dominant influence of Christianity in Dagaaba settings since the arrival of missionaries in Africa in 1929, cultural norms and values hold sway in both quotidian and ritual practices in Serekpere and its environs (McCoy Reference McCoy1988; Behrends Reference Behrends2002).Footnote 5 All events, good or bad, are presumed to be influenced by supernatural forces. Notable among these forces are the perceived power of the gods and the ancestors, witchcraft, and magic.Footnote 6 All subjects, both male and female, who assert themselves publicly/openly are believed to be exposing themselves and their loved ones to harm by evil beings who are close by. The fear of these forces, which I refer to as mystical insecurities, sculpts daily life in Dagaaba settlements and authorizes certain forms of agentic practices and not others (I return to this later on).
This article differs from dominant and current discourses by paying critical attention to the role of the supposed supernatural power forms in dis/empowering certain forms of agentic acts.Footnote 7 This endeavor, my focus, is particularly imperative if we consider that in everyday discourse, the women I worked with represent themselves as powerless, slaves, and weak, purchased by men through the marriage payment.Footnote 8 These women often attributed this vulnerability to the specific arrangement of exogamous marriage, which requires that upon marriage a woman moves to live with her husband and his agnatic kin. A Dagao woman in marriage is seen, to some extent, as an outsider in the midst of people who may not necessarily be her advocates in times of need. In daily life, the woman in marriage has to be conscious of this vulnerability and act accordingly. Thus, if women's public narratives are taken uncritically, the women's agential acts might be missed outright. However, if women's gendered performances are analyzed within the context of dominant male and supernatural power forms, agency as it is practiced in this cultural setting, and similar ones across sub-Saharan Africa, can be better understood. This situation is consistent with feminist analysis of agency, autonomy, and coercion.Footnote 9 Based on my analysis, I propose that in order not to risk missing agency in the inherently mystical context of the Dagaaba and northern Ghana, the role of these power forms in structuring the form that agency assumes needs to be accorded critical recognition in feminist theorizing. Here attention is on the belief in supernatural power forms, and the risks of harm these forces present to nonconforming subjectivities, as determining factors of the form that agency and resistance practices assume in such a context.
Analysis in this article is informed by contemporary discourses on the subject matter in settings in the global South, including the works of Lila Abu-Lughod, Saba Mahmood, and Sumi Madhok, all of whom are feminist researchers based in North America or Europe who write about societies in northern Africa and India (Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod1990; Mahmood Reference Mahmood2005; and Madhok Reference Madhok, Madhok, Phillips, Wilson and Hemmings2013). Indeed, the conditions under which agency is performed in the context of Dagaaba—male dominance, normalized violence against women in marriage, and pervasive negative sociocultural practices that tend to dehumanize women—resonate profoundly with what Sumi Madhok, Anne Philips, and Kalpana Wilson have called “coercive conditions” (Madhok et al. Reference Madhok, Phillips, Wilson and Hemmings2013, 7). Thus, this article focuses on developing an account of agentic practices as they are performed within the context of the aforementioned constraints. I will draw attention to the fact that although mystical forces constitute one of the key factors that combines with male power to regulate women's exercise of agency, the role of the supernatural in discussions of power, women's subordination, and agency has rarely received academic attention. Nonetheless, the complex ways in which women exercise power and agency among Dagaaba can be effectively understood only if the mystical context within which they live is taken into consideration, so pervasive is it in daily life.Footnote 10 These forces combine with constraints associated with exogamy and the patrilocal residential system implicitly and explicitly to render ideas about agency in Dagaaba marriage as being much more complex. Dagaaba societies are exogamous, meaning that marriage between members of the same clan is prohibited. Exogamous marriage patterns also require that, upon marriage, women relocate to live in the husband's settlement. Thus, women find themselves within settings that, normatively, have provisions for protecting their interests in marriage but do not, in most cases, guarantee this protection.
This article is organized into three sections: first, I engage with pertinent discourses on power, drawing attention to the various forms that constrain women's agentic practices in the context of the Dagaaba; second, I turn my attention to how women's agency is performed in complex ways within the context of exogamous marriage, violence, and power—male and mystical. I do this by drawing on the experiences of some of the women I worked with in addition to observation during my ethnographic fieldwork. Finally, I conclude by exploring implications of the way in which agency is performed in this cultural milieu for transnational theorizing of power and women's agency. But first, I shall describe both the details of the study site I worked in and the methodology for gathering the data upon which this article draws.
The Research Context and Methodological Reflections
This article is based on data gathered during my ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a twelve-month period in Serekpere, a Dagaaba settlement located in the northwestern part of Ghana. During this period of research, I conducted participant observation that immersed me in both the everyday and ritual lives and practices of my research participants. I wrote detailed fieldnotes and also conducted about fifty-four in-depth, semi-structured interviews with women and men, boys and girls with varied socioeconomic and physical attributes. Serekpere is a small settlement situated on both sides of a trans-ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) main road that links Ghana to Burkina Faso. Serekpere is comprised of about 1,100 inhabitants. The settlement is about ten kilometers from Nadowli, the capital of the Nadowli-Kaleo District of the Upper West Region of Ghana. Hoe-based, subsistence, agricultural farming is the main source of income and food for the residents of Serekpere. On the outskirts of the settlement are a number of dispersed houses, interspersed with fields of crops. Toward the center of the settlement, the houses are much closer to one another. Customarily, families, often descendants of a common patrilineal ancestor, live together in large units within a house. Each house is subdivided into many units known as zaga (“compounds”) and these belong to brothers, fathers, sons, uncles, and nephews. The houses are built mostly of mud, with a few, particularly toward the center of the settlement and along the main road, constructed in modern Ghanaian architectural style and of cement blocks or mud bricks. Within a typical house, the overall head of the family, normally the oldest man, has his own zaga, which contains his wives and children and perhaps their children and wives too. There are also the zaga of his brothers and paternal cousins and nephews, who may also have their own families. Cooking and eating arrangements are organized along the lines of this living arrangement.
In the face of the increasingly erratic rainfall pattern in recent times, with attendant crop failure, poverty and vulnerability have increased, particularly for disadvantaged segments of the population such as older women and single and disabled persons. Animal husbandry, a major source of income for members of the settlement, is free-range, with the animals allowed to roam in every nook and cranny of the settlement. An exception is during the farming season, when the animals are kept under intense supervision to prevent the destruction of crops. Besides farming and animal husbandry, moonlighting activities in Serekpere include the sale of provisions. At the time of my fieldwork, there were about seven provision shops of different sizes in the settlement, where a wide range of items was sold, including fuel (lamp oil, gasoline, and diesel), batteries, prepaid mobile phone cards, footwear, canned food, confectioneries, toiletries, agricultural chemicals, fertilizers, and drugs. There were also five bars attached to shops, with another one that sold only hard liquor. An interesting feature of the shops, which are the biggest businesses in the settlement, is that they were all owned by men. By contrast, women dominate the sale of cooked food, such as kooko and kenkey (a Ghanaian porridge and a meal respectively), pito, and soup ingredients, mainly at the center and on market days.Footnote 11
Furthermore, the inhabitants of Serekpere are mainly followers of Dagaaba traditional religious beliefs. The second largest group are Christians, with only a few Muslim families. Daily and ritual lives in Serekpere and its environs are complexly intertwined with beliefs in the existence of mystical forces, namely, the power of the ancestor, juju or magic power, and witchcraft. As a result of the pervasiveness of the belief in the existence of supernatural power forms, daily conduct by both feminine and masculine subjects has to be sensitive to them; otherwise, the subjects risk being exposed to these forces for supposed mystical harm. Mystical power forms in the Dagaaba settlements and belief in them are extremely gendered. The ancestors whose guidance and protection are invoked at the beginning of the farm season when sacrifices are offered are all believed to be male spirits. Furthermore, the nonhuman agents whose blessings are invoked during ritual sacrifices performed prior to a marriage payment to dedicate it are all male. Related to the dedication of the marriage to the ancestors, any married Dagao woman who sleeps with another man is guilty of adultery and has to be “cleansed” of the “contagion”; otherwise, she risks attracting moↄrↄ, a supposed adultery-induced sickness, which can lead to death. Finally, witchcraft accusations are feminized, with a disproportionately large number of women stigmatized as witches. In relation to feminized witchcraft accusations in the settlement, a supposedly powerful and malevolent male witch explained to me in an interview that male witches are more powerful and baleful in their deeds. However, as privileged members of the settlement due to the exogamous marriage practice (which means that women have to join the men in the latter's settlement) and with the ancestors—their forefathers—on their side, it becomes difficult for male witches to be exposed. According to him, it is possible for a male witch who commits an act of witchery to blame it on an innocent woman in the mystical realm. In this case, any sacrifices performed to establish the cause of the misfortune may point to the woman as being responsible even if she is innocent. Any sanctions thereafter may be exacted on the woman. Thus, these perceived mystical forces are gendered in their workings, and they structure agentic practices in complex ways.
Feminist ethnography informed the methodology for collecting data for this article; this combines key elements of feminism and ethnography such as empathy, egalitarianism, and experience with participant observation to study issues concerning women (Clifford and Marcus Reference Clifford and Marcus1986; Stacey Reference Stacey1988; Skeggs Reference Skeggs, Atkinson, Amanda Coffey, Delamont and Lofland2001). Feminist ethnography offers prospects for nuanced, balanced, and experience-based research, as well as reciprocity and partnership between the researched and the researcher (Harding Reference Harding1987; Stacey Reference Stacey1988; Skeggs Reference Skeggs, Atkinson, Amanda Coffey, Delamont and Lofland2001). Feminist ethnography also permits collaboration with research participants. Inspired by these principles, the larger research from which data for this article was drawn offered voices to the marginalized women to tell stories about their life experiences. Specifically, I collected data for this article by accompanying women to remote farm locations to undertake farm work or to harvest farm produce and/or wild vegetables. In some instances, I traveled with individual women to funeral ceremonies in their natal settlements or other neighboring settlements.Footnote 12 Furthermore, I participated in processing local soup ingredients, such as dawadawa, and pito as and when it was possible. Finally, I spent time at the village's marketplace, particularly on market days when other sellers from Nadowli and Wa, the regional capital, brought goods to sell. This feminist ethnographic approach permitted me to gain an in-depth understanding of the lived experiences of my research participants as well as access to sensitive information that otherwise would have been difficult for me to get. I realized, for example, that the women disclosed sensitive information to me about themselves and other members of the settlement only when I was alone with one, either traveling to another settlement or on the farm.Footnote 13
Gendered and Mystical Power
Contemporary academic writing on power, agency, and resistance has demonstrated the imbrications among them at the same time as it has questioned the binary pairings of power and resistance and agency and resistance (Foucault Reference Michel and Hurley1978; Reference Michel, Gordon, Gordon, Marshall, Mepham and Soper1980; Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod1990; Butler Reference Butler1997; Mahmood Reference Mahmood2005; Madhok et al. Reference Madhok, Madhok, Phillips, Wilson and Hemmings2013). Michel Foucault is the key contemporary social theorist whose ideas have been influential in critical accounts of power; I explore some of his theoretical perspectives here. Conventionally, power has been thought of as that which institutions, individuals, or groups possess and deploy to repress and dominate other subjects in less powerful positions. In this way, power is seen as an external force that enables its holders (individuals or state institutions) to produce certain expected outcomes in other subjects (Babcock et al. Reference Babcock, Jennifer Waltz and Gottman1993; Mills Reference Mills2003). This unidimensional notion of power premised on repression fails to fully account for the workings of power, given that repression is not all that power does (Foucault Reference Michel and Hurley1978; Reference Michel1982; Butler Reference Butler1997). Indeed, this perspective is what Foucault terms “a wholly negative, narrow, skeletal conception of power” (Foucault Reference Michel, Gordon, Gordon, Marshall, Mepham and Soper1980, 119). Foucault challenges this received notion of power as negative in terms of repressing and prohibiting individuals’ acts and autonomy and instead develops a poststructuralist approach to understanding power, as unstable and contingent on discursive practices (Foucault Reference Michel and Hurley1978; Reference Michel, Gordon, Gordon, Marshall, Mepham and Soper1980). He sees power not simply as “an imposition of the will of one individual on another, or one group on another,” but rather “as a set of relations and strategies dispersed throughout a society and enacted at every moment of interaction” (Mills Reference Mills2003, 30). In Foucault's words, “Power is everywhere … because it comes from everywhere” (Foucault Reference Michel and Hurley1978, 93). In this regard, power is not only concentrated in people in authority, but circulates throughout networks of relations. It is engendered in these interrelations and derives its force from its reiteration, repeated deployment, and diffused character (Mills Reference Mills2003). Foucault also defines power as the exercise of “a set of actions upon other actions” (Foucault Reference Michel1982, 789). What he implies, it appears, is, first, that power does not act on individuals per se, but on their actions and, second, that the individual upon whose actions the power acts is agentic rather than a passive victim of power.
Butler conceptualizes power in a similar sense, as “the convergence or interarticulation of relations of regulations, domination, constitution”; furthermore, it is not unidirectional, but reiteratively constituted (Butler Reference Butler1993a/2011, 184). From this perspective, power is not an external force that represses the subject; rather, it forms the subject it appears to repress (Butler Reference Butler1997). In Foucault's terms, power as power has no ontological status; the exercise of power exists only when it is put to use (Foucault Reference Michel1982). As such, power is not only repressive but also productive—it authorizes certain forms of agency and resistance rather than “only curtailing freedom and constraining individuals” (Mills Reference Mills2003, 36). It is performative, in that the repetition or re-enactment of power in interactions is what gives rise to it, but also sustains it, like other performatives (Butler Reference Butler1990/1999; Reference Butler1993a/2011; Mills Reference Mills2003), that is to say, power is constituted in the process of its formation and is consolidated by its repeated invocation, rather than being a stable subject or force residing in the powerful and being used to press down the powerless.Footnote 14 Both Foucault's and Butler's views on power and agency have profound resonance with the workings of power as well with as the diffuse and complex forms of agency that I explore in this article. As I will show, both women and men exercise power in multifaceted ways within the marriage space, despite the fact that in public speech and actions, women often appeal to their powerless and vulnerable situation within Dagaaba marriage arrangements. This appeal to vulnerability may be seen as the women “bargaining with patriarchy,” that is, the women consider the merits and demerits of their actions and put up an appropriate performance, bargaining with the nonhuman agents (Narayan Reference Narayan, Antony and Witt2002, 420). We can also see how irony and subversion are expressed in the women's performative practices, that is, the women's utterances reflect the normative—women as oppressed—and yet their acts diverge significantly from this persona.
In relation to the formation of the subject, Butler has noted that power is the condition for the very existence of the gendered subject, that is to say, it produces and sustains the subject (Butler Reference Butler1993a/2011; Reference Butler1997). In this case, it makes sense not to see power as an external force that acts on the subject but rather as articulated in the process of interaction. Also, if agency is internal rather than external to power, then power, agency, and the subject are intricately linked. Thus it is useful to argue that power cannot be said to exist outside the subject it forms or the agency it authorizes. Bringing the notion of power and agency as performatively constituted to the context of Dagaaba marriage practices, it can be useful to think of power as not merely concentrated in or exercised by the male-centric institutions in order to repress and dominate women in marriage. Power pervades the network of relations that constitute the “marriage space” and is exercised by all the actors within it. The “marriage space” is my designation for the physical space of the home as well as the concatenation of relations that characterize a marriage union in the context of rural Dagaaba settings. The actors within the marriage space include the woman in marriage, parents-in-law, brothers- and sisters-in-law, as well as uncles and aunts and cousins of the husband (see Akurugu Reference Akurugu2017; Reference Akurugu2019 for a detailed account of this). As I show below, amid the constraints that weigh heavily on women in marriage, in addition to their appeal to a lack of power, they do exercise agency and power—even if it is not coterminous with male power—in complex ways.
Besides these physical and structural forms of power, crucial to Dagaaba life-worlds and to this article is the perceived existence of supernatural forces, which include the power of the ancestors, witchcraft, and juju—magic. These paranormal “entities” are perceived to be transcendental and also powerfully structure the daily life and comportment of Dagaaba people. In the context of the Dagaaba, these mystical power forms, to a large extent, are perceived as epistemological and ontological truths. This may not be comfortable for a non-Dagaaba, and indeed non-Ghanaian audience, but within a Dagaaba worldview they are matter-of-fact elements of everyday life. In this sense, to theorize power in Dagaaba contexts as productive is to argue that it may be exercised by both the women and men and the ancestors in complex ways. Yet the men and the ancestors appear to occupy privileged positions and hold sway over women even prior to entry into the interactional process that engenders power.Footnote 15 By this I am referring to, first, the difficulty of humans exercising power over supposed paranormal entities, because such acts—rebellion, for instance—can only invite punishment for the mortals. In other words, comportment in Dagaaba settings is scrutinized by mystical beings, and untoward behavior may be punished by illness or death. Related to this, Foucault contends that we can only construe a power relationship as such if the person acted upon reacts in a way that brings about transformation (Foucault Reference Michel1982). But if agentic practice by the subordinate in power relations is the condition for a power relationship to be recognized as such, I suggest that many power relations in the context of this study will go unrecognized. The peculiar situation of the Dagaaba cultural practices means that combining Foucauldian and Butlerian notions of power as fluid with conventional and transcendental notions of power as an abstract force is useful in understanding the specific form of gendered and supernatural power relations under consideration in this article. I now turn my attention to the manner in which agency is exercised by women in marriage in Dagaaba contexts.
Performing Agency in a Mystical Context
Contemporary theoretical discourses on agency—the capacity to make reflective choices and exercise in/action, individually or collectively—have sought to underscore the exercise of agency by feminine subjects in contexts across the developing world (Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod1990; Mahmood Reference Mahmood2005; Madhok Reference Madhok, Madhok, Phillips, Wilson and Hemmings2013; Madhok et al. Reference Madhok, Madhok, Phillips, Wilson and Hemmings2013). Hitherto, women were considered as lacking agency in these settings. It is not acceptable to perceive of women from settings in the global South as oppressed victims of patriarchy, male violence, and backward cultural norms whereas their northern counterparts are seen as liberated and agential (Mohanty Reference Mohanty1988; Butler Reference Butler1990/1999; Madhok et al. Reference Madhok, Madhok, Phillips, Wilson and Hemmings2013). Seeing these scholars’ works as cautionary tales, I demonstrate the complex ways in which power and agency are intertwined and are exercised by women in Dagaaba settlements. My analysis will demonstrate that “agency is always exercised within constraints” (Madhok et al. Reference Madhok, Madhok, Phillips, Wilson and Hemmings2013, 7; see also Foucault Reference Michel, Gordon, Gordon, Marshall, Mepham and Soper1980; Butler Reference Butler1997), but the reverse also holds (Butler Reference Butler1990/1999; Mahmood Reference Mahmood2005; Butler Reference Butler2011; Madhok et al. Reference Madhok, Phillips, Wilson and Hemmings2013). In this sense, the presence of power or agency does not preclude oppression and resistance.
Dagaaba contexts permit the exercise of agency in ways that are dissimilar to the conventional overt modes of agency that have preoccupied much feminist theorizing.Footnote 16 For instance, in relation to the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin among whom she studied, Lila Abu-Lughod, a sociocultural anthropologist, notes: “[m]others sometimes successfully block marriages their daughters do not want, even though fathers or other male guardians are supposed to have control” (Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod1990, 43). This is unlikely to occur in most Dagaaba settlements due to the mystical insecurities I mentioned earlier. Mystical insecurities, used interchangeably with “supernatural insecurities,” refer to the fear and uncertainties that characterize the belief in the presence of paranormal “entities” and their ability to cause harm to normatively nonconforming subjects. Indeed, it may take an “unwise” woman (because she disobeys the norms, knowing that the consequences can be dire), particularly a mother, to risk her life in the way that Abu-Lughod's subject purportedly did, as one of my research participants, Pogzie (aged about fifty-two), a widow and mother of five girls, shared with me in an interview. According to Pogzie, since her husband died in the early 1990s, she has single-handedly raised her daughters, but she has never been informed about the formal visits of any of the girls’ prospective suitors, nor has she been given any share of the bride wealth. But as someone who is culturally aware, she never questioned the male elders of her marital family about this. This is because, if she did, she might expose herself and her daughters to mystical harm by evil persons within the family. I argue that, within the context of the Dagaaba, and indeed in most parts of sub-Saharan Africa where the belief in supernatural power is pervasive, any discourse on women's agency that does not pay attention to supernatural powers’ role in determining the form that agency assumes runs the risk of misdescribing it (Madhok Reference Madhok, Madhok, Phillips, Wilson and Hemmings2013). This misdescription, Madhok explains, ranges from “an overemphasis of subordination and silencing of agency to the overplaying of episodes of resistance and hence overemphasis of autonomy” (Madhok Reference Madhok, Madhok, Phillips, Wilson and Hemmings2013, 104), that is, to either attribute agency where there is none or to miss it altogether where it is exercised. In my analysis here, the challenge, like that of other theorists of agency in settings in the global South, is how to negotiate the subtlety of the agentic practices I encountered without romanticizing or downplaying them.
To help establish my analytical frame, I examine three scholars’ discourses on agency in settings located in Africa and India: those of Lila Abu-Lughod (Reference Abu-Lughod1990), Saba Mahmood (Reference Mahmood2005), and Sumi Madhok (Reference Madhok, Phillips, Wilson and Hemmings2013). I have chosen to concentrate on these texts as they are based on contexts with characteristics—absence of background conditions necessary for negative freedom, pervasive gendered violence, grave negative repercussions for dissident behaviors, and male control over women's sexuality and productive resources—that parallel greatly the features of the Dagaaba settlements that I analyze in this article. Related to this, they provide theoretical insights into the diffuse forms of agentic and resistance practices that are enabled by these contexts, but that may sit uncomfortably with dominant liberal-humanist suppositions. For instance, they address diffuse but innovative agentic practices among women.Footnote 17 Abu-Lughod's main thesis is the need to pay attention to particular forms that resistance assumes as a way of identifying the specific workings of power it subverts (Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod1990). Resistance should be read as a way of diagnosing power rather than as a consequence of the ineffectiveness of power or human freedom, she proposes. She contends that the latter runs the risk of eliding certain ways in which power works. This view is consistent with Foucault's call to take “the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point” in understanding power relations (Foucault Reference Michel1982, 780). Abu-Lughod analyzes the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin, located in Egypt, women's changing socioeconomic situation, and the complex, but diffused, forms that agency and resistance assume. These include strategies and discourses employed to resist forced marriage and male control over women's sexuality, and the specific operations of power, such as male dominance, that these subversive acts target. Based on the complex modes of resistance among the Bedouin women and the specific kinds of male power these seek to undermine, she asks: “how might we develop theories that give these women credit for resisting in a variety of creative ways the power of those who control so much of their lives, without either misattributing to them forms of consciousness or politics that are not part of their experience—something like a feminist consciousness or feminist politics …?” (Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod1990, 47). Abu-Lughod's analysis resonates profoundly with my study by drawing our attention to the exercise of power and resistance by the Bedouin women in the face of pervasive male dominance. Her focus thus helps us to better situate and understand agency such as that exercised by the Dagaaba women I worked with without mis/attributing feminist consciousness to their actions or misrecognizing agency as they practice it. This appears challenging, given the dispersed manner in which women in contexts like the Dagaaba's perform agency. Agentic practices among Dagaaba women could easily be missed if women's views of themselves as powerless, slaves, and ninbaala—weak person—are taken uncritically. But if we appreciate that the mystical insecurities inherent in that context require the women not to assert themselves, we can better understand the form of agency they do perform.
In a similar vein, Saba Mahmood takes issue with liberal-humanist, but also poststructuralist-feminist, suppositions that tether agency to resistance and social transformation (Mahmood Reference Mahmood2005). Mahmood's study of the women's piety movement, part of the Islamist revival movement in Cairo, reveals the exercise of agency as not necessarily geared toward resistance. Thus, Mahmood questions the binary pairing of agency and resistance that is pervasive in Butler's Gender Trouble (Butler Reference Butler1990/1999). She argues instead for an unstable and contingent construction of agency, which enables the viewing of appearances that may seem to represent passivity as agency. She also questions the tendency to insert agency where there is none, particularly in relation to feminist research in settings located in the global South (where hitherto women have been represented as lacking agency). One such study that Mahmood takes issue with is Janice Boddy's study of the zār cult. The zār cult is predominantly a women's spirit possession and exorcism cult that combines spirit mediums with Islamic idioms to heal perceived possessed women in Sudan (Boddy Reference Boddy1989; Mahmood Reference Mahmood2005). Having underscored the ambivalent character of Boddy's subjects—“sometimes repressed” and at other times active agents of feminist consciousness—Mahmood writes, “[w]hen women's actions seem to reinscribe what appear to be ‘instruments of their own oppression,’ the social analyst can point to moments of disruption of, and articulation of points of opposition to, male authority … however unintended these may be …” (Mahmood Reference Mahmood2005, 7–8). She provides analytical insights into the exercise of agency that is geared not toward undermining male authority or resisting female subordination, but toward consolidating prescribed religious norms and achieving greater piety.
The women religious teachers, from different socioeconomic backgrounds, lead teaching sessions on Islamic codes of practice that are attended by women. Also, the teachers re/interpret the Quran and other religious repertoire in ways that challenge conventional norms, for instance, women not being allowed to lead prayer sessions or women attending teaching sessions against the wishes of their husbands. The women also practice modes of bodily performance, including veiling and modesty in dressing, as ways of approximating Islamic ideals of piety geared toward realizing god's plan for them and self-realization, rather than as challenging patriarchal norms. “The women in Mahmood's ethnography emerge as agentic because of their ability to direct themselves toward seeking a flawless emulation of the laid down norms of piety” (Madhok Reference Madhok, Madhok, Phillips, Wilson and Hemmings2013, 108). In this sense, it is the capacity for reflective action that matters and not necessarily the resisting of male dominance. The women in Mahmood's study submit themselves to bodily practices and gestures in order to approximate the religious ideals set out in the Quran in the service of self-realization. By contrast, the participants in my ethnography submit to the supernatural power forms for fear that dissident behavior may incur the wrath of these nonhuman agents, which can in turn engender dire consequences for them and their loved ones. In this sense, both my study and Mahmood's explore agentic practices that are permeated by male and transcendental power forms, albeit exercised with different ends being emphasized.
Madhok, a political theorist, explores the question of how to theorize agency in the face of various forms of constraint. In exploring this issue, Madhok seeks to make some modifications to the conceptual structure of agency thinking, particularly in what she has termed “oppressive contexts” (Madhok Reference Madhok, Madhok, Phillips, Wilson and Hemmings2013, 102). By oppressive contexts, she is referring to settings where conditions necessary for negative liberty are nonexistent, on the one hand, and on the other hand, where negative repercussions for normatively nonconforming behavior are exceptionally high. The context of the Dagaaba has profound resonance with the rural Rajasthan context of Madhok's work in northwest India inasmuch as the consequences for transgressive behaviors are similarly dire (see Akurugu Reference Akurugu2017).Footnote 18 The main thrust of Madhok's argument is that in contexts that are manifestly oppressive, accounts of agency should not be limited to “the ability to act freely or ‘open’ resistance to the oppressor as a sign of agency and autonomy.” Madhok is instead in favor of a “non-insistence” on “free action.” She argues that “action-biased” practices should not necessarily constitute evidence of agency (Madhok Reference Madhok, Madhok, Phillips, Wilson and Hemmings2013, 107). She thus proposes a shift of focus from action to speech practices in theorizing agency in contexts with such conditions of oppression. Madhok clarifies at the outset that her focus is neither on examining the lack of freedom in this rural Rajasthan setting, nor is she interested in analyzing the impediments to women's exercise of agency. Nor does she focus on locating notions of agentic practices that are espoused in different cultures. Madhok's caveat, it seems, is based on the dangers of such reductive theorizing, including the risk of overemphasizing agency, as Abu-Lughod notes, or misdescription, in her terms. Similarly, in appropriating Madhok, I do not seek to identify agency or to proffer Dagaaba people's conceptions of agency. Rather, this article examines the way in which women's exercise of agency is filtered through contextual constraints, and which, if not critically examined, could mask their autonomy, as well as how these agentic practices diverge from some conventional assumptions and contexts within which issues of agency and autonomy are often discussed. Drawing on her ethnography in rural Rajasthan, Madhok illustrates how agency is practiced in speech by the sathins (development workers). For Madhok, there is a risk of misdescribing agency if the pervasiveness of action-bias in conventional agency accounts remains unchallenged. Based on her analysis, if political representation is a marker of agency among the sathins, they could easily be regarded as lacking “political agency” (Madhok Reference Madhok, Madhok, Phillips, Wilson and Hemmings2013, 113). But Madhok shows the exercise of agency by analyzing the case of a sathin who was coerced into abandoning her intention to contest a reserved local government seat for women. In reaching this decision, she considered carefully the consequences of ignoring the call to abandon her plans—the opinion leaders would make her work difficult. This sathin emerges as agentic because her withdrawal is based on a critical consideration of the repercussions of ignoring the order for her to step down. Nevertheless, Madhok's agents, like Mahmood's, may sit uncomfortably within some conventional liberal and poststructuralist analyses of agency in feminist discourses.
If attention is not paid to the speech practices that give rise to this nuanced form of agency, it might be missed and, as such, calling attention to them is apt. However, speech practices can also constitute action even if Madhok claims not to ascribe “any form of action-related properties” in their speech (Madhok Reference Madhok, Madhok, Phillips, Wilson and Hemmings2013, 116). For instance, Butler underscores the theatrical dimension of speech and notes that “speech itself is a bodily act” (Butler Reference Butler1990/1999, xxv). A distinction between them (if necessary at all) also has to indicate their imbrication. In the context of my study, although speech practices reveal agency, the dangers associated with them, as I return to shortly, cannot be overemphasized. The discourses on agency explored here draw attention to forms of agency that liberal-humanist thought does not capture; acts that could easily be regarded as lacking agency have been shown as agentic. In all of these, the actors are constrained by contextual proscriptions and sanctions. Thus, read through a liberal-humanist framework, these acts could easily be misinterpreted. But careful analyses have brought these agentic activities to the fore. This kind of keen attention is necessary for an understanding of agentic practices in many societies in the global South. Similarly, in the context of the Dagaaba, the women could easily be misinterpreted as “compliant dupes of patriarchy” (Narayan Reference Narayan, Antony and Witt2002, 420). But to read them as such will amount to grave misrepresentation and a misrecognition of the challenges that weigh heavily against them. In exploring the question of agency in a manifestly mystical context, I am concerned with the oppressive conditions outlined by Abu-Loghud, Mahmood, and Madhok. I am also interested in the uncoordinated, diffuse forms that agentic practices assume. Furthermore, like Madhok, I am not concerned with the absence of liberty and autonomy in this northern rural Ghanaian context. Instead, I am interested in the way in which women exercise agency under conditions that are outside standard assumptions and conditions within which the issue of agency is often discussed. My analysis, however, diverges from Abu-Loghud's, Mahmood's, and Madhok's by paying critical attention to pervasive belief in supernatural forces in the rural context of the Dagaaba. In order to minimize the kind of misdescriptions noted above, we need to consider the form of agentic practices that are enabled by such pervasively supernatural contexts. I develop an account of agency that takes into consideration the challenges associated with exogamous marriage, such as women's ambiguous identities—not fully belonging to either marital or natal families—in addition to the male and supposedly mystical power forms that permeate Dagaaba settlements. The examples I turn to below encapsulate the complex and diffused forms in which most of the women I worked with exercise agency.
My earliest encounter with the complex ways in which Dagaaba women exercise agency and their expressed appeal to a powerless—baala—weak position was when I first sought suitable accommodation in Serekpere. The first case I present here is an encounter with Adwoama (aged about fifty-six), who lives in her estranged husband's compound. She farms for herself and is to a great extent independent. She is assertive and, consequently, stigmatized as a pog gandao, a willful woman, as mentioned above. She is feared by members of her section of the settlement for her assertiveness. Despite this power and independence, when I went into her compound seeking a place to live, she claimed she could not tell me whether there was a vacant room in the house. “I am like a Fulani man tending cattle,” she told me.Footnote 19 Adwoama's assertion suggests that she was in charge of cleaning and maintaining the house but not of decisions regarding tenancy. In everyday speech, she referred to herself and other women as yeme—slaves. She often explained to me that the women in marriage have been bought with cowries (Dagaaba marriage payment) to serve the men and produce children to continue family lineages. In this sense, we see how housework and the yeme notion are tied up in women's position due to exogamous marriage practices. However, as our relationship blossomed, it soon became clear to me that she was not as powerless and vulnerable a victim of exogamous marriage as her statements suggest. Adwoama exercised power and agency in her family and, as I mentioned above, she is feared by both the male and female members of her marital family.
But Adwoama's response to my questions regarding her earlier assertion of being just a slave still points to the constraints within which she practices her agency. According to her, she would be endangering her life and those of her children by exposing them to witchcraft and juju if she were to assert her rights regarding the house. As to whether the androcentric institutions employ this as a ruse to put fear into women so that they relinquish their entitlements, she exclaims: “What? It does happen! … everywhere it happens; if you are not lucky you and your entire family [children] will die. [The husband's family] would say ‘you think you are smart and have taken over your husband's property, ignoring his family.’” Although we see the constraints posed by supernatural powers, agency is also evident. By this I am referring to Adwoama's reflective decision to tread cautiously so as not to attract any negative attention from evil people in the inner core of the family. Despite supernatural insecurities, Adwoama has managed to inspire a considerable level of fear among the males in her marital family. Nonetheless, her open actions and speech practices point to ninbaala and yeme status. In this case, therefore, giving attention to speech practices, as Madhok proposes, is not enough to understand the mode of agency practiced. It is a careful analysis of the in/actions and an understanding of the mystical forces and their potential to harm nonconforming subjects that can help us understand this mode of agency. This is necessary if agency as practiced not only by Adwoama, but by all the women I worked with, is not at risk of being silenced based on the face value of speech or action-biased practices.
A second example from Gbankoma's (aged about sixty) case draws attention to the ambivalence of gendered power. Gbankoma lives with her husband and children, and she does most of the farm work in her household. Yet her husband mis/appropriates the proceeds, and sometimes she has to find alternative means to provide food for the family. Her attempt to hoe separately so that she could manage the produce was rejected by her husband. He verbally abuses her and threatens to slash her throat frequently. On several mornings I ran into a distraught Gbankoma bemoaning the sheer abuse and deprivation her husband subjects her to. As to why she is still in the marriage, Gbankoma explained that she could not leave her children behind; she would rather die than go without her children. Like Adwoama and indeed most of the women I worked with, on many occasions Gbankoma alluded to the concept of a woman in marriage as ninbaala, without control over her body or her labor. Once she remarked: “what say has a woman concerning when to have sex; is the thing [vagina] for her? If the owner [husband] wants it what else can she do but give it out?” Nonetheless, a serendipitous discussion with her husband revealed to me that for at least the past five years she has refused to engage in any sexual relationship with him. According to him, she claims that if she does she will get a bloated stomach and die as a menopausal woman. Rather than prevailing upon her, as her views appear to suggest, her husband has found alternative ways of fulfilling his desires; he travels to the district capital, Nadowli, in search of casual sexual partners. Gbankoma's husband divulged this information to me unsolicited and, as the belief that if a menopausal woman has sex she will get a bloated stomach and die is pervasive in Dagaaba settlements, I have no cause to doubt him. Gbankoma, like many other women in the settlement, is not as powerless as she claims. Being culturally aware that women are expected to be less powerful than and submissive to men, the women I worked with often present themselves as powerless and vulnerable to male and ancestral power, to avoid attracting the wrath of evil people in the marriage space, including the ancestors. Even where Gbankoma appears vulnerable and victimized by exogamous and male power (for example, regarding farm-related issues), she still exercises her agency—reflexive choice—by continuing to work on her husband's farm and not fleeing from the marriage in the face of his dangerous threats.
From the analysis presented here, the complex situation of power/lessness and agency that characterizes Dagaaba marriage relations can be seen. This complex situation, which is a result of the constraints within which agency is exercised, is characteristic of the manner in which Dagaaba women practice agency and subversion more broadly. Although statements of seeming powerlessness by Dagaaba women cannot be credited wholesale, they should also not be dismissed as mere rhetoric. What characterizes these marriage relations and gendered performances are the contradictions of power—the women are powerful in some sense but are also constrained. The form of agentic practice revealed here is subtle, combining both speech and action in ways that are sensitive to the pervasively mystical context of the Dagaaba. But, during my fieldwork, I also encountered open speech practices that were perceived to have given rise to harmful consequences, including mental derangement. This was the case of Nzoma (aged about sixty-eight), a widow. According to the women in her family, when Nzoma's husband died in the mid-1980s, she was left to fend for her children all by herself. In the late 2000s when her last daughter got married, her late husband's kin wanted to charge her prospective son-in-law a high bride price. Nzoma expressed her disapproval of this, since she had raised her children all alone. Her mental health deteriorated shortly after this encounter and is believed to have been caused by her late husband's kin for her being “unwise,” that is, defying the norm of women not meddling in bride-wealth issues. In this regard, there is a difficulty relating to speech practices or to assuming the position of the speaking subject rather than to open resistance only. To ignore the difficulties that speech practices can create is to risk consequences that can extend beyond one's imagination.
The operations of power and agency attributed to the supposed mystical power forms or nonhuman agents have important resonance with Donna Haraway's influential essay “A Cyborg Manifesto.” In it, Haraway draws attention to the problems associated with reified dualism in some conventional feminist accounts. Haraway draws on the notion of a cyborg, a hybrid creature made of machine and organism, to challenge rigid separation between these and more broadly feminist theoretical perspectives that are premised on dualisms. Haraway provocatively asks: “Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?” (Haraway Reference Haraway1991, 178). In reading this, Amy Hinterberger observes that Haraway's question draws our attention to the fact that our lives are intricately linked with other “entities” or “beings” that are not necessarily human (Hinterberger Reference Hinterberger, Evans and Williams2013). Actors may come in varied forms, including objects. Bringing this to the pervasively mystical social world of the Dagaaba people, we can understand how both masculine and feminine subjects are inherently interconnected with the supernatural forces examined above. By performing gender in ways that seek not to upset these supposed paranormal “beings,” the Dagaaba people recognize that these entities are important actors whose in/actions have profound implications for their daily and ritual lives.
Read through liberal and poststructuralist lenses of agency accounts that emphasize overt actions, the exemplars I have analyzed here could easily qualify as lacking agency/structure; the women could be seen as living in the world of their oppressors. But if the in/actions are read within the constraints (normative expectations and supernatural power) and if we shift our attention from action-bias, as Madhok proposes, we can see how agency is actually at work. Power is exercised not only by the men or the androcentric gods, but also by the women. Yet the women are in a less advantageous position due to the specific arrangement of exogamous marriage. In some sense, the way in which power works here has some resonance with James Scott's work. According to Scott, in power relations both the powerful and the apparently powerless are somehow limited, but they are also engaged in some kind of deception. Outwardly, both groups put on appropriate performances but in private it is a different ball game; the supposedly powerful have fears while the powerless ridicule their dominators. Scott writes: “[e]very subordinate group creates, out of its ordeal, a ‘hidden transcript’ that represents a critique of power spoken behind the back of the dominant” (Scott Reference Scott1990, xii).Footnote 20 In the first two cases presented in this section, we see how women's “hidden transcripts”—their private actions—reveal agentic practices, whereas their public performances, though not necessarily deceptive, can be misleading if taken at face value. Their public declarations, or transcript, as Scott notes, are of lacking power—yeme and ninbaala—whereas in private they assert power and agency in dynamic ways. The women's hidden transcript therefore offers an important way to think about the kind of agentic practices/activities authorized in the inherently mystical context. Indeed, as Scott observes, the public transcript alone is limited in helping us understand the workings of power and the interactions between the superordinate and the subordinate. It is the “full transcript” (Scott Reference Scott1985, 284), a combination of both the public and private acts and discourses, that will enable a better understanding of the exercise of agency.
The Complexities of Gendered Power and Agency in a Mystical Context
This article has drawn attention to the workings of power in various ways, first to how mystical power pervades daily life among the Dagaaba people, and second to the form of agency authorized in that context. Power is not simply concentrated in men or the ancestors and deployed against women; it permeates the webs of relations that constitute the marriage space. Indeed, if the subjects are formed by power and if agency is inherent to power, there is no subject who does not exercise power and agency. Yet it does seem in this Dagaaba context that the men and the androcentric ancestors occupy some privileged power positions by being male and transcendental respectively. I have also demonstrated how the fear of supernatural powers—mystical insecurities—shape daily life. My analysis demonstrates that there can be dire consequences, including mental illness and even death for both feminine and masculine subjects, for stepping out of the normative. Finally, in relation to agentic practices among the women I worked with, both constraints posed by beliefs in supernatural forces and the exogamous marriage arrangement serve as limiting factors. Nonetheless, the women are not simply passive dupes of heteropatriarchy and exogamy, even as they proclaim their ninbaala and yeme status in everyday interactions (for strategic reasons); they exercise agency and power in complex ways. Within such an intrinsically supernatural context, the exercise of agency, action-biases, and even speech practices have been shown to be limited, and this has implications for theorizing agency and power in such and similar contexts. Furthermore, my discussion draws attention to the problems with some contemporary, dominant Western notions and debates on agency that are premised on overt practices: speech and action. Such theorizing is constrained because, as I have discussed throughout this article, in Dagaaba contexts, belief in mystical forces is prevalent and structures virtually every social action. Anyone, man or woman, who is in the limelight is at risk of attack by “evil” people from the inner core of the family who may use their mystical power to harm her or him. Expressive ways of exercising agency are critically constrained due to this risk of harm. In sum, in order to avoid the kind of misdescriptions that Madhok draws our attention to, I suggest that in theorizing agency in Dagaaba and similar contexts across sub-Saharan Africa, the role of the aforementioned factors and power forms, particularly mystical forces, in constraining its exercise require critical attention. This is in recognition of the central role of supernatural forces and nonhuman agents in the everyday and ritual lives of many Africans, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, even as I acknowledge the wide diversity of the inhabitants of the African continent.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Carolyn Pedwell and Cathrine Degnen for their immense support and critical questions during the larger project from which data for this article was drawn. I am also thankful to the anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions. Final ethics approval for the research was granted by Professor Andy Gillespie on behalf of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Ethics Committee at Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, England on June 4, 2013.
Constance Awinpoka Akurugu is Lecturer in the Faculty of Planning and Land Management, University for Development Studies. They do research in gender relations and power, and in feminist and postcolonial theories. They are also interested in the mystical world of the ethnicities in northern Ghana and the way in which the pervasiveness of the belief in the supernatural complicates agency and resistance practices. Their current project is “Marriage, Power and Performativity: A Comparative Analysis of Gender Relations in Patrilineal and Matrilineal Ghana.” cakurugu@uds.edu.gh
