Situating Globality: African Agency in the Appropriation of Global Culture

The main threat to these traditions is not Western habits, but decades of economic hardship, shrinking community resources, and an interest in promoting earlier marriages so as to head off loose moral behaviour and disease. Despite these pressures, mothers and prospective brides have conspired to maintain, and even enhance, the material prerequisites of marriage in a remarkable show of resistance to local authority and male views. Other chapters discuss trends in media ownership and control, the "poetics" of corruption, the competing strands of Islam in Senegal, and the role of initiation secrets in southern Senegal - but none of these really belong in this book.