Legacies: Kinship and Change in Kumasi, Ghana

This study situates current kinship and inheritance practices among the matrilineal Asante within an analysis of cultural and legal change. Based on 18 months of fieldwork in Kumasi, Ghana, I analyze matrilineal kinship and marriage by considering the ways in which ongoing kin relations influence inheritance decision-making in conjunction with broadly shared notions of custom or law. I critically examine a supposed schism between “traditional” and “modern” inheritance to show various points of convergence between past and present notions of inheritance and kinship. I show that people incorporate the principles of both state inheritance law and local custom in multiple ways, not just to distribute property during decision-making about inheritance, but to assign responsibility for the care of the sick or of children and to distribute the funeral debts. In contemporary Ghana, the period of inheritance decision-making is a time when profound ethical ambiguities in kinship and social relations become apparent. To understand how inheritance is changing, I argue that analysts need to discard assumptions that matrilineal kinship and marriage is inherently harmful to women as well as assumptions about the progressive nature of social change. Instead, I argue that inheritance is an emergent process that combines both general cultural knowledge and the particular knowledge of a deceased individual’s life and relationships to produce decisions that assign responsibility and reform relations that have been disrupted by death. From this perspective, both the significant social changes to and ongoing vitality of matrilineal kinship and marriage become apparent.Ph.D