Women’s Communicative and Economic Strategies in Ghana’s Kumasi Central Market

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the communicative and economic strategies market women employ in Ghana’s Kumasi Central Market (KCM) amid current and ongoing economic hardship. By examining the role of talk in market women’s daily transactions as they interface with local and global markets, this dissertation illuminates how traders in KCM utilize their vast repertoire of linguistic strategies to create and negotiate value, build relationships, and mitigate economic precarity. To circumvent these challenges, market women, who dominate the composition of traders in KCM, emphasize the importance of talk in the business of trade. Through talk in face to face interactions, traders (adwadifoɔ) evaluate and market commodities, negotiate relationships, and calculate potential gains. They wield verbal skill to bargain (di ano), advertise (pae) their wares, call out to (frɛ(frɛ)) and persuade (nnɛɛdɛɛ/de kasadɛ) potential buyers to purchase their goods to eke out meager profits (mfasoɔ). My research elucidates the extent that talk as a pragmatic, verbal performance in face-toface interactions underpins market transactions. I base my analysis and findings on 15 months gathering ethnographic and linguistic data between 2014 and 2017 in KCM and at a small neighborhood shop. Traders indicated that they use kasadɛ (‘sweet talk’/‘persuasive talk’) to woo potential buyers and krɔkrɔ (‘pamper’) recurring customers to mitigate risk and safeguard against persistent economic precarity. However, because precarity characterizes the nature of buying and selling, I argue that sweet (or persuasive) talk (kasadɛ), rough talk (kasa basabasa), and pampering (akrɔkrɔ) both temper and create new forms of risk. Therefore, much of traders’ communicative and business savviness involves assessing and minimizing risk at the interactional level through moment-to-moment decision making, requiring vigilance (anidahɔ/ahosohwɔ) and cleverness (aniteɛ/nyansakwan). This dissertation prioritizes the role of talk in market women’s everyday transactional exchanges. While we have an increased understanding of global impact of women’s labor in the “informal” sector, this dissertation illuminates how, through talk, traders insert themselves in the global economy as active producers of value and circulators of local and global goods.