This dissertation examines how women tuna wholesalers at Tema Port, Ghana—locally known as 'tuna madams' or 'Big Madams'—build trust with foreign vessel owners and develop domestic distribution networks, and how reciprocal exchange functions as th...
This dissertation examines how women tuna wholesalers at Tema Port, Ghana—locally known as 'tuna madams' or 'Big Madams'—build trust with foreign vessel owners and develop domestic distribution networks, and how reciprocal exchange functions as the driving force of their empowerment.
The research is based on ten months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between August 2017 and August 2018, supplemented by archival work at the Public Records and Archives Administration Department in Accra in 2019. Following the movement of tuna and the people who handle it, the study traces offshore bait-tuna exchanges between pole-and-line vessels and canoe fishers, cold-store transactions between Korean vessel owners and Big Madams, and the onward flow of tuna through smoking yards and retail markets in Tema, Kumasi, and farther north. Data were collected through participant observation, in-depth interviews with women traders, vessel owners, cold-store managers, and association members, life history collection, and audiovisual documentation.
The analysis combines Mauss's theory of the gift, Polanyi's concept of embeddedness, and Sahlins's typology of reciprocity with Kabeer's resources– agency–achievements (R-A-A) framework, drawing on Parpart's notion of strategic silence to address the limits of voice-centered models of women's agency.
The analysis yields four propositions. Reciprocity is not an external condition of the R-A-A sequence but its internal driving force: resources accumulate through the temporal depth of social ties, agency operates within the moral obligations to give, receive, and reciprocate, and achievements return to the next cycle as resources. The uneven distribution of reciprocal capital differentiates modes of agency: Big Madams leverage inherited networks to exercise patron-like authority through ritual sponsorship and routine cash distribution, while members of the Wɔnsom Wɔnsom Wɔnyi Nipa Tuna Ton Association, lacking such inherited capital, rely on collective ritual, mutual aid, and formal petitioning of the Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority. The R-A-A model, originally designed for individual analysis, extends into a multi-layered empowerment model in which individual and collective dimensions mediate one another through associational form. Silence and collective speech are reframed not as opposed expressions of strength and weakness but as parallel rational responses to differing resource conditions; collective speech itself, regardless of its instrumental outcome, constitutes both agency and achievement.
The dissertation contributes to anthropological scholarship on West African market women, the gendered organization of global fisheries, and the localization of Korean distant-water capital in West Africa.