21st century
A01=Jennifer Cole
adulthood
africa
analysis
anthropological
anthropology
Author_Jennifer Cole
bride
Category=JBSF
Category=JHMC
change
coming of age
consumerism
contemporary
cultural
culture
development
economic
economy
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
european
finance
future
gender
generational
growing up
history
human
husband
liberalization
madagascar
modern
poverty
rural
sexuality
social studies
tamatave
true story
urban
wealth
woman
women
womens issues
Product details
- ISBN 9780226113302
- Weight: 510g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 01 Dec 2010
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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"Sex and Salvation" chronicles the coming of age of a generation of women in Tamatave in the years that followed Madagascar's economic liberalization. Eager to forge a viable future amid poverty and rising consumerism, many young women entered the sexual economy in hope of finding a European husband. Just as many Westerners believe that young people break with the past as they enter adulthood, Malagasy citizens fear that these women have severed the connection to their history and culture. Jennifer Cole's elegant analysis shows how this notion of generational change is both wrong and consequential. It obscures the ways young people draw on long-standing ideas of gender and sexuality, it ignores how urbanites relate to their rural counterparts, and it neglects the relationship between these husband-seeking women and their elders who join Pentecostal churches. And yet, as talk about the women circulates through the city's neighborhoods, bars, Internet cafes, and churches, it teaches others new ways of being. Cole's sophisticated depiction of how a generation's coming of age contributes to social change eschews a narrow focus on crisis.
Instead, she reveals how fantasies of rupture and conceptions of the changing life course shape the everyday ways that people create the future.
Jennifer Cole is associate professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago and the author of Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar.
