African Marriage and Social Change

As is clear from the terms of reference of the original Survey of African Marriage and Family Life, for which the study reprinted in this volume was prepared, the project was conceived as an experiment in ‘practical anthropology’. Its findings were to produce for policy-makers a picture of the forces producing changes in family relationships and in the stability of marriage to which legislators, civil or religious, could refer when deciding what practices to treat as permissible and what to forbid.

An anthropologist who seeks to interpret African society to Western readers is apt to feel that he must begin by clearing away misconceptions. He knows that what he describes will be alien to their experience, and is anxious to make it plain at the outset that it should not on that account be considered inferior. This book, moreover, was addressed to readers  who were directly concerned with the divergence of African customs from what has been regarded as the civilized, or Christian, ideal.