The challenge of marriage is often discussed in the literature on soldiers and veterans in Africa, with obstacles to marriage cited as a motivation for joining armed groups, and a key challenge in the process of ‘reintegration’. However, much of this work considers marriage as a once-and-for-all achievement, rather than as a site of struggle where a constant effort is required to maintain married status and avoid becoming ‘un-integrated’ again.
This seminar, based on a year’s ethnographic research and life history interviewing, and preliminary results from a survey of 800 veterans and their wives in Huambo, Angola, will trace veterans’ struggles to live up to a ‘breadwinner’ archetype in an uncertain economic context.
It will examine the different styles of masculinity that veterans adopt through their marital and extra-marital relationships with women, and how such choices can be considered as responses to the rising social value of money, religious visions of marriage articulated by churches and the opportunities, constraints and threats offered by a career in informal commerce.
About the Speaker:
John Spall is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex, working on a project on masculinities amongst war veterans in Huambo, Angola funded by the Fundação de Ciência e Tecnologia in Portugal.
Before this he was working as a research and communications assistant on the MICROCON project at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex, having previously worked as a researcher at the Governance and Social Development Resource Centre at the University of Birmingham. He has an MSc in Development Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, and a BA in English Literature and French from the University of Leeds.
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