Gracia Clark
Associate Professor (now Emeritus)
Anthropology, Indiana University
Project: "Virtual Central Market" Interactive CD
Gracia Clark has studied the Kumasi Central Market in Ghana, West Africa since 1978. Her thesis research in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge highlighted the regional dominance of this urban daily market, and the relations of credit, leadership and domestic work that kept its 20,000 traders in their stalls.
She consulted for the International Labor Office and United Nations Development Fund for Women for several years before teaching at University of Wisconsin, Parkside and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Subsequent fieldwork addressed development issues of food security and trade liberalization and recorded life stories from older traders. A forthcoming Indiana University Press volume of life stories titled Raising Capital, Raising Children complements her 1994 book Onions are My Husband.
Her IDAH project Virtual Kumasi Central Market seeks to recreate the fieldwork experience by structuring the original materials interactively so that the visitors’ questions shape what they learn.