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Akosombo Township, designed by the Greek urbanist Constantinos Doxiadis, is the model city at the foot of the hydroelectric Akosombo Dam, Ghana's largest development project. The article explores different visions of high modernist planning for Akosombo and juxtaposes it with the desires for and imaginations of modernity among its residents. Officials of the Volta River Authority, the agency in charge of the township, promoted specific ideas about housing, husbandry, and hygiene, while residents engaged with and resisted this kind of social engineering. These tensions came to the fore, when the squatters of Combine struggled to remain in the township. In conversation with residents, VRA officials produced a form of ‘high modernist local knowledge’.

Falen at the center of this volume come a long way to debunk the myth about the male researcher's inability to conduct meaningful ethnographic work on women (cf. Gregory 1984; Gutmann 1997b). Based on their research in three West African communities and one in Andalusia, they show that male ethnographers have something to contribute to our knowledge on women. Much is remarkable about these articles. The authors represent two generations of anthropologists who approach the question about male researchers working on women from a variety of backgrounds. In the 1970s, when Baum and Brandes first conducted field research, anthropologists had not yet incorporated issues of gender, nor had their discipline taken its reflexive turn (see Brandes 1987). Berliner and Falen, who did their research over twenty-five years later, were trained in rather different academic environments variously affected by second-wave feminist scholarship. Berliner studied in a Francophone setting, where scholars were not "particularly preoccupied with issues of gender." Only through his subsequent engagements with the English-language academy did he receive encouragement to reflect on his own gendered position as a researcher. Since Falen had one of the founding figures of feminist anthropology as a graduate mentor (see Sanday, this volume), its insights and taboos were part and parcel of his training. By the late 1990s, a more complex understanding of the ethnographer's multidimensional positionality, as well as a more careful attention to the power relations between ethnographers and their subjects, had moved to the foreground of critical ethnography (Lamphere, Ragoné, and Zavella 1997). Yet as a graduate student, Falen still operated on the assumption that only women could be appropriate experts on women. When he conducted research among the Fon people of Benin, he was reluctant to work directly with women.

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