| The research is delimited in place and time. The place is the area of Sub-Sahara Africa. The time is 1960 to 2001. The main research method is biographic unstructured interviews (life history). The wives of development workers are interviewed after returning home to the Netherlands. Gender and ethnicity are the most important concepts in this research. They both deal with the balance of power. Gender and ethnicity are constructed on a social, political and symbolic level, all in which the past plays an essential role. Wives are subordinate within the gender balance, yet they are dominant (hegemonic) as white females in a developing country. Ethnicity is viewed from the notion that the colonial past is still present in these times. The main research question deals with the way in which way the wives of development workers accept or reject the obviousness of the balance of power in gender and ethnicity. |
