Double Chickpea Summary

When trying to put myself in Holloway's shoes, shoes that do not fit as she has acquired more anthropological field experience in single days than I could hope to acquire in a lifetime, these inclusions of ritual like the chickpea prophecy strike me as more author than scientist in nature. Mrs. Halloway is a highly educated woman, earning her MPH from the University of Michigan, I find it very hard to accept that she truly believed that a connected double chickpea in Mawa's foraging basket had a tangible correlation to her eventual birthing of twins. So why does she include anecdotes such as this if she does not believe in their validity herself? On some level, we all have preconceived notions of certain people places and things, I think this

This book was incident to her journey, unlike many westernized accounts of life in Africa in which it seems the inverse, Henry Morton Stanley immediately comes to mind. From my readings I learned that culture should be enjoyed and respected from the outside, but it is the inside that is the target audience and hence matters most. Cultural folklore cannot be validated or invalided from people who are not part of that cultural group, it is not intended to apply to them. When ritual does no harm, such as in the case of Mawa and Dugutigi's twin boys being predestined, it can be a beautiful expression of our societal differences. However when they are clearly and self-evidently wrong, which itself a dangerous and tricky concept, such as female genital mutation, their role in a modern world supposedly moving towards a better future is called into

At the age of eighteen, Kris Halloway as an American woman would not have been able to buy alcohol or rent a car. However, her Malian female counterparts are married off at that exact age, eighteen on average. With marriage and incident consummation coming at such an early age, access to contraception would be vital to prevent pregnancy. Even with not only the requisite physical access to contraception but also cultural and societal power to demand its use, American women have untold numbers of unwanted pregnancies every year. With only six percent of Malian women having access to contraception, and undoubtedly some with access bring overruled by their husbands about usage, it is no surprise that the average woman in Mali has 6.8 children during her