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OBJECTIVE: This paper documents how intra-marital differences in educational status vary across Africa’s heterogeneous educational expansion, which has encompassed an enormous breadth of educational opportunities over the past 50 years. BACKGROUND: Educational expansion influences intra-marital status differences both by altering the educational composition of men and women and by reconfiguring the social conventions associated with a given educational context. Status differentials between marital partners can influence spousal wellbeing and, in the aggregate, determine the extent to which marriage provides a pathway to upward social mobility. METHOD: Using Demographic and Health Survey data representing 32 sub-Saharan African countries and 5 decades of birth cohorts, the paper examines the prevalence and propensity of educational pairings as a function of educational access (the percentage of a cohort who ever attended school) and wife’s education level. RESULTS: Educational expansion created gendered changes in educational compositions of married individuals, which led to increased prevalence of hypergamy (wives who married “up”) in most countries. Educational expansion has also led hypogamous marriages to become less of a social aberration: in lower-education contexts (but less so in higher-education contexts), conventions lead women to “marry down” at far lower rates than would be expected based on the sex-specific compositions of husbands and wives. CONCLUSION: Educational attainment remains a central determinant of social positioning in African society. However, as schooling expands across the continent, social conventions regarding educational status are playing a weakening role in determining who marries whom.

In Uganda, the cultural norm of hypergamy, which dictates that husbands should have higher economic and social status than wives, is pervasive and influential. Yet hypergamy has recently been challenged by women’s gains in education relative to men and by an unemployment crisis leaving educated young men unable to find steady work. Using interviews with recent university graduates in Kampala, we investigate how highly educated young adults navigate frictions between the hypergamy ideal and these recent transformations in gendered status. Some women reduce the salience of hypergamy by preventing their relationships from becoming serious, while other women intentionally perform the role of submissive housewife while preserving their autonomy. Men reframe their romantic circumstances to underplay their inability to achieve economic hypergamy, portraying educated women as undesirable and characterizing their partners as nonmaterialistic. These findings reveal how demographic and economic changes reconfigure relationship norms, gendered power dynamics, and family formation processes.

Background: Qualitative evidence from sub-Saharan Africa, where a generalized AIDS epidemic exists, suggests that attractiveness may play a role in shaping individual-level HIV risk. Attractive women, who are often blamed for the epidemic and stigmatized, are believed to pose a higher HIV risk because they are viewed as having more and riskier partners. Objective: We examine the association between perceived attractiveness and HIV infection and risk in rural Malawi in the midst of the country's severe AIDS epidemic. Methods: We use interviewers' ratings of respondents' attractiveness, along with HIV test results and women's assessments of their own likelihood of infection, to estimate the association between perceived attractiveness and HIV infection and risk for a random sample of 961 women aged 15‒35. Results: Results show that women who are rated by interviewers as 'much less' or 'less' attractive than other women their age are 9Š more likely to test positive for HIV. We also find that attractiveness is associated with women's own assessments of their HIV risk: Among women who tested negative, those perceived as 'much less' or 'less' attractive than average report themselves to be at greater risk of HIV infection. Conclusions: These results suggest that attractiveness is negatively associated with HIV risk in Malawi, countering local beliefs that hold attractive women responsible for perpetuating the epidemic. Contribution: This study highlights the need to consider perceived physical attractiveness, and sexual desirability more broadly, as an under-examined axis of inequality in HIV risk in high-prevalence settings.

Hunting is one of the greatest threats to tropical vertebrates. Examining why people hunt is crucial to identifying policy levers to prevent excessive hunting. Overhunting is particularly relevant in Southeast Asia, where a high proportion of mammals and birds are globally threatened. We interviewed hunters in Southwest China to examine their social behavior, motivations, and responses to changes in wildlife abundance. Respondents viewed hunting as a form of recreation, not as an economic livelihood, and reported that they would not stop hunting in response to marked declines in expected catch. Even in scenarios where the expected catch was limited to minimal quantities of small, low-price songbirds, up to 36.7% of respondents said they would still continue to hunt. Recreational hunting may be a prominent driver for continued hunting in increasingly defaunated landscapes; this motivation for hunting and its implications for the ecological consequences of hunting have been understudied relative to subsistence and profit hunting. The combination of a preference for larger over smaller game, reluctance to quit hunting, and weak enforcement of laws may lead to hunting-down-the-web outcomes in Southwest China.

In this article we compare how AIDS in Malawi is represented in two sources of data, newspaper articles and conversational field journals that depict local interpretations of the epidemic, over the ten-year period 1999–2008. In each of these discursive fields we focus on “moral vocabularies”—the sets of instructions about what people should and should not do to reduce their personal risks or to mitigate the burdens of HIV infection. During this decade, international AIDS organizations came to define the epidemic in the global South as a crisis to be managed less by individual effort than by interactions with bureaucratic institutions. In Malawi, these include Government of Malawi health facilities that provide testing, treatment, and other forms of medical care, as well as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and associations that support people living with HIV or AIDS (PLWHA) and orphans. In 1995 there were 12 NGOs registered as implementing AIDS activities; by 2005, there were approximately 300, most of them small but formalized community-based organizations in rural areas (Wangel 1995; National AIDS Commission 2005; Swidler and Watkins 2009). Correspondingly, we found a shift in the moral vocabularies deployed in response to AIDS, from injunctions about individual behavioral choices toward those that require engagement with formal institutions. By comparing the moral vocabularies in media accounts and informal conversations, we uncover striking differences. While the frequency of injunctions to engage with specialized institutions increased in both sources

Imagined futures, once a vital topic of theoretical inquiry within the sociology of culture, have been sidelined in recent decades. Rational choice models cannot explain the seemingly irrational optimism of youth aspirations, pointing to the need to explore other alternatives. This article incorporates insights from pragmatist theory and cognitive sociology to examine the relationship between imagined futures and present actions and experiences in rural Malawi, where future optimism appears particularly unfounded. Drawing from in-depth interviews and archival sources documenting ideological campaigns promoting schooling, the author shows that four elements are understood to jointly produce educational success: ambitious career goals, sustained effort, unflagging optimism, and resistance to temptation. Aspirations should be interpreted not as rational calculations, but instead as assertions of a virtuous identity, claims to be “one who aspires.”

Research on young-adult sexuality in sub-Saharan Africa typically conceptualizes sex as an individual-level risk behavior. We introduce a new approach that connects the conditions surrounding the initiation of sex with subsequent relationship well-being, examines relationships as sequences of interdependent events, and indexes relationship experiences to individually held ideals. New card-sort data from southern Malawi capture young women’s relationship experiences and their ideals in a sequential framework. Using optimal matching, we measure the distance between ideal and experienced relationship sequences to (1) assess the associations between ideological congruence and perceived relationship well-being, (2) compare this ideal-based approach to other experience-based alternatives, and (3) identify individual- and couple-level correlates of congruence between ideals and experiences in the romantic realm. We show that congruence between ideals and experiences conveys relationship well-being along four dimensions: expressions of love and support, robust communication habits, perceived biological safety, and perceived relationship stability. We further show that congruence is patterned by socioeconomic status and supported by shared ideals within romantic dyads. We argue that conceiving of ideals as anchors for how sexual experiences are manifest advances current understandings of romantic relationships, and we suggest that this approach has applications for other domains of life.