Sleeping Together: The Dynamics of Residence among the Abutia Ewe

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Abstract
Social and cultural anthropologists have converged in treating residence as an epiphenomenon of other social phenomena such as marriage, kinship, and economics. In this paper, I treat residence as a distinct and autonomous social phenomenon: the occupation of a dwelling place for purposes of sleeping. Insofar as only specific and restricted sets of individuals are allowed to occupy a dwelling place for such purposes, it has its own dynamics. This paper investigates the residential groups of the Abutia Ewe of southeastern Ghana, and demonstrates (1) that the existing models are powerless to account for them, and (2) that residence is a phenomenon to be studied in its own right.

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