Editors’ Note

Abstract

GHANA STUDIES / Volume 11 ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168© 2010 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 1 EDITORS’ NOTE As the new editors, we are delighted to present you with Ghana Studies 11. What has become almost customary, we need to apologize for the lateness of its appearance but also hasten to add our commitment to bring the journal back on schedule. Ghana Studies 12, which will be a special issue on the theme of Revisiting Modernization, is scheduled to be published later this year, volume 13, which will include a group of papers on the legacy of Kwame Nkrumah, should follow early next year, and finally, Ghana Studies 14 will appear, on time, by about September 2011. We would like to take the opportunity to thank the outgoing editors, Takyiwaa Manuh and Lynne Brydon, for their dedicated work on the last five volumes. Under their leadership, the journal expanded its scope, while maintaining the standards of academic excellence laid by the founding editor , Larry Yarak. As we have been learning the ropes of editing and publishing a journal, we have come to appreciate the amount of work it takes to publish even a small journal, particularly in a time of economic crisis when universities have no funds for editorial assistants. Our editorship reflects a generational change. While we are grateful to our “elders” for the trails they have blazed, we are also prepared to take Ghana Studies into new directions as the journal enters its second decade of publication. We are pleased that we have gained several new members for the editorial board, which now reflects more of the diversity in terms of discipline, field of study, location , and gender we envision for future issues of Ghana Studies. We are also grateful to the reviewers of the articles contained in this volume. Finally, we need to thank the staff at the African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin, especially Lisa Bintrim, who has been responsible for seeing this and the last two volumes through the publication process. As editors, we continue the practice of a transcontinental collaboration . Akosua Adomako Ampofo, a development planner and sociologist by training, is a long-time faculty member at the University of Ghana and has 2 Ghana Studies • volume 11 • 2010 just taken on the directorship of the Institute of African Studies. She has published extensively on gender (including masculinities), sexuality, children and socialization, and feminism, was, until December 2009, the (first) Head of the Centre for Gender Studies and Advocacy at the University of Ghana, and continues to teach both graduate and undergraduate courses in African Studies, mainly gender, population and research methods. She is working with Awo Asiedu, University of Ghana, on representations of women in popular music in Ghana. Stephan Miescher teaches African history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is a co-director of the UC Multi-Campus Research Group in Africa Studies. He has had close ties with Ghana for over two decades and has published on gender, masculinities , oral history, and colonialism. Currently, he is writing a book on the history of the Volta River Project and the Akosombo Dam. While our professional affiliations include universities in Ghana and the United States, West Africa and North America, we both have deep personal and professional connections with various places and institutions in Europe (both of us had part of our education in Europe; Akosua has family in Europe and North America, while Stephan was raised in Switzerland). Thus, we can claim to represent, at least to some degree, the intellectual culture and practices of the three continents where most of the readers and contributors to Ghana Studies are based. The volume in front of you covers a variety of topics. It opens with two articles by anthropologists. In Sekondi, the annual Kundum festival has not been celebrated since the death of the paramount chief in 2003. Giancarlo Pichillo takes Kundum’s disappearance as a starting point to historicize the politics of chieftaincy. Colonial rule triggered transformations that had an impact on chieftaincy. Land became an expensive commodity and new social actors pressed for political influence. Sekondi turned into a “town stool...