WOMENS WORTH AND WEDDING GIFT EXCHANGE IN MARADI, NIGER, 1907-89

Wedding gift exchange from the turn of the century to the present has served as a medium through which women in the Maradi valley of Niger c ould assert their worth, create social ties and respond to a shifting political economy. Rather than exploring the implications of 'bridewea lth' and 'dowry' in isolation, this paper sees wedding prestations as an ongoing and evolving dialogue in which women's roles and worth are contested, the nature of wealth is redefined and the terms of marriage are negotiated. The crisis in domestic labor which arose with the dec line of slavery in the early decades of the century gave rise to infor mal unions through which the labor of junior women could be controlled . Women responded to these informal marriages by staging highly visibl e ceremonies which established the worth and standing of the bride. Wi th the growth of an increasingly urban-centered commercial and bureauc ratic economy, women have been drawn into a desperate 'search for mone y' to continue to meet their obligations in the gift economy. While th e outward form of wedding gift exchange appears unchanged, the importa nce of cash to the acquisition of goods, services, and productive reso urces has radically altered both the content and the significance of g ift exchange. Gifts no longer embody wealth in people derived from abi lity within an agro-pastoral economy. Instead they reveal the giver's access to the resources of the state and the market. Women's eroding p osition within the economy since 1950 has drawn them further and furth er into gift exchange, both in order to build a safety net in the form of exchange value stored in a woman's dowry and to secure the social ties which can ensure their continued access to increasingly contested resources.