Drawing on research with Gambian female asylum seekers in London, who are claiming asylum on the basis of the threat of forced female genital mutilation, this article examines their narratives of self-production in the asylum claims process. Refuting representations of asylum seekers as victims of such a process we argue that they must be seen as partly complicit in the production of a victim identity, as they assume the identity of victim to verify and strengthen their narratives. By focusing on the production of victim identities, we seek to problematise Western liberal notions of agency. We argue that recognition of a claim entails the representation of the claimant as victim of a 'backward' practice and patriarchal society, thereby feeding into Western feminist accounts of oppressed 'third world' women. It is within these 'historically specific relations of subordination' that female asylum seekers exercise their agency.

West Africans have a long history of investing in their children's education by sending them to Britain. Yet, some young British-Nigerians are being sent to Nigeria for secondary education, going against a long historical grain. The movement of children from London to Nigeria is about the making of good subjects who possess particular cultural dispositions and behave in such a manner as to ensure educational success and the reproduction of middle class subjectivities within neoliberal globalisation. We maintain that this movement highlights the way in which global geographies of power -rooted in a colony -metropole divide -are being challenged and reconfigured, serving to provincialize the U.K., through the educational choices that Nigerian parents make for their children. Such small acts disrupt imagined geographies and particular spatial and temporal configurations of progress and modernity, in which former colonial subjects have travelled to the metropole for education, whilst generating counter narratives about Nigerian education, society and economy. Yet, the methods to instil new dispositions and habits in the contemporary Nigerian educational context are informed by the British educational colonial legacy of discipline through corporal punishment. Physical punishment was central to the civilizing mission of British colonial educational policy. Consequently, the choice to send children to school in Nigeria, and other African countries, as well as challenging global geographies of power, sheds light on the continued relevance of the colonial educational legacy and its disciplinary strategies which are, in turn, part of the broader project of modernity itself.

This article examines the moral economy of the Gambian Mandinka household, focusing on girls' labour contributions in the time of neoliberalism. Scholarship on the moral economy of the household within rural production systems reduces the term to altruism and harmony within the domestic unit. This article provides a more theoretically nuanced understanding of the moral economy of the household, with a focus on the cultural codes that underpin intra-household relations, the inter-generational contract, as well as the generational and gendered hierarchies that inform processes of negotiation in relation to labour contributions. Transitions in the moral economy of the household can be captured in the shifting nature of girls' labour contributions and in their changing attitudes towards these contributions. Interpretations of work obligations are increasingly framed in terms of exchanges and incentives. Further, girls aspire to get an education and a good job, or marry well in order to move out of farming. Such novel interpretations and practices recast the moral economy of the household as dynamic and subject to change. These ethnographic insights have relevance for the anthropological study of children's labour, intra-household relations, and the moral economy of the household.An understanding of the structure and nature of the household is crucial to the portrayal of the material conditions of people's lives. Consequently, there have been a number of debates within feminist and economic anthropology on the conceptualization of the household. The feminist critique (Guyer & Peters 1987; Harris 1981) of Chayanovian and domestic mode of production theories focuses on two main points: in providing a purely class-based analysis of household accumulation strategies, the household is not placed in a larger socio-cultural and ideological context (Sen 1991); and in presenting the household as a self-sufficient unit, unequal relationships within the household are not examined. This second point serves as the basis of the critique of Becker's New Household Economics (1981), in which it is argued that resources in the household are pooled and decisions are taken by an altruistic head who is interested in meeting the needs and interests of the household as a whole (Bruce 1989: 979). Folbre (1988: 252) points to an inconsistency in this neo-classical unitary model of the household: individuals are self-seeking in the marketplace, yet in the household they become 'selfless' altruists.Additionally, feminists have critiqued the way in which gender relations are modelled within the household, which is partly reflected in work on the conjugal contract, and bargaining and co-operative conflict models (Harris 1981;Sen 1991;Whitehead 1981). However, a critique of much of this literature points to the inflexibility of these models in terms of: (a) the way in which they freeze a certain relationship of authority and power; and (b) the emphasis which is placed on conjugal relations to the exclusion of other types of intra-household relatio...

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