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  • Essay / An Anthropological Perspective on the Cultural Context of Child Marriages in Saving Maasai Girls

    The article “Saving Maasai Girls” takes an anthropological view on the subject of child marriages and explores the cultural context that gives an insight into why child marriages are so common. widespread among the Masai. The author, Caroline Archambault, returns to Esther, who was the subject of the UNFPA article. Archambault explained that Esther's father was a man who valued education and sent many of his children to school, but considered Esther to be more of a stay-at-home girl. Esther ran away from home to pursue an education and once her father saw how well she excelled academically, the two reconciled. The article backs away from dividing everything into a showdown between good and evil (in this case, Esther being the hero and her father the villain), but there are many factors that contribute to child marriages. One of the most striking elements is parental concern. The article briefly demonstrates how education is valued in Kenya, but resources are limited and schools are understaffed, leading to high dropouts and low completion rates in tertiary education. Many parents are aware of this and, although they want their children to be educated, they are wary of the success of the school system, and rightly so. For some parents, planning a wedding is a safer bet for securing their child's future than putting their faith in a rickety school system. Thus, the article repeatedly emphasizes the importance of understanding a culture before formulating hypotheses. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get an original essay While the first article focused on this issue and the community focused on saving girls from marriage and educating them, this article focuses on the importance of learning about a culture and the underlying values ​​to understand the reasoning behind the decisions made. The main problem addressed in this article is ignorance. Without trying to learn about other available points of view, conclusions are drawn and biased opinions are formulated, thereby projecting unjust personas of victims and perpetrators onto people from different cultures. The first article calls for radical change to sweep within Enkop and the emancipation of all. girls and give them the right to education. This poses some problems that Archambault illustrates throughout the article. First, education is not stable in Kenya. As mentioned previously, the large class sizes (some contain 100 students in a single class) make it almost impossible for a student to receive one-on-one help from a teacher. There are not enough teachers, which only fuels the problem of classroom overcrowding. Other problems include students living far from schools, high costs of secondary school, gender diversity which leads to teenage pregnancies and school dropouts, and difficulty achieving high test scores. to progress. Giving girls a path to education is just one step. There are several issues related to education that the UNFPA article does not even address. The article also neglects to examine different points of view, the most important of which is that of parents. The UNFPA article simply assumes that all girls face the same problem, have the same unforgiving fathers, the same fearful mothers and the same overall situation. Simply put, the problem with the solutions of the last..