Stephan F. Miescher. Making Men in Ghana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2005. Pp. xxxii, 323. $65.00

The use of gender as an analytical category has in the past three decades become increasingly prominent in African historical studies. Although the emergence in the 1960s of African history as a recognized academic endeavor took place at the same time that Western feminist scholarship began to influence the broader discipline, the two took some time directly to influence each other. When they did, the result was the dawning realization that the lived experience of African women was in many ways strikingly different to that of African men. This is obvious, perhaps, but, as elsewhere, potentially revolutionary for the reconstruction of the past, and particularly crucial for the emerging genre of social history. More recently still, the equation of “gender” with women has begun to be challenged by research that has sought to bring men back into the picture,...