Suchergebnisse

A group of Chagga-speaking men descend the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro to butcher animals and pour milk, beer, and blood on the ground, requesting rain for their continued existence. Returning Life explores how this event engages activities where life-force is transferred and transformed to afford and affect beings of different kinds. Historical sources demonstrate how the phenomenon of life-force encompasses coffee cash-cropping, Catholic Christianity, and colonial and post-colonial rule, and features in cognate languages from throughout the area. As this vivid ethnography explores how life projects through beings of different kinds, it brings to life concepts and practices that extend through time and space, transcending established analytics.--Publisher's summary

Based on fieldwork material among the WaChagga from Kilimanjaro, Northeastern Tanzania, this paper argues that women's grass-roots organizations serve the purpose of legitimizing economic activities which are at the borderline of acceptable female behaviour within a patriarchal society. In order to retain respectabilty and gain prestige and power within the local community and wider society, women try to manoeuvre prevailing discourses on femaleness in present-day Tanzania. Hence, WaChagga women use the forum of women's groups to signal modernity and development-mindedness at the same time as they retain an image of being good Christian mothers and housewives according to Chagga norms. Therefore, policies towards women's income generating groups should apply a perspective which enables an analysis of women's economic activities within the socio-cultural and political environment that women act within. (DÜI-Hff)

Cover; Contents; Foreword; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1 Understanding Disempowerment: Concepts and Claims; 2 Women's Knowledge Systems: Toward Ambivalence and Silences; 3 Speaking through Fashion: Khanga as Women's Knowledge System; 4 Inside Society: The Role of Women's Knowledge Systems in Africa's Development; 5 The Genesis of Women Disempowerment: The Case of Kilimanjaro; 6 Knowledge Is Power and Power Is Knowledge: The Politics of Women's Empowerment; 7 Conclusion; Notes; References; Index.