The gendered spaces of historical knowledge: Women's knowledge and extraordinary women in the Serengeti District, Tanzania

International Journal of African Historical Studies

Volumn 36, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 283-308

  Shetler, Jan Bender ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60949857703     PISSN: 03617882     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3559385     Document Type: Review

References (56)

1. For example, Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, eds., Women's Words:The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York, 1991);
2. Ruth Behar, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story(Boston, 1993);
3. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988).
4. Special thanks to Marcia Good, Holly Hanson, and the anonymous readersfor this journal who helped to improve my work. This article is based primarilyon Chapters 2 and 4 of my Ph.D. thesis, Jan Bender Shetler, "The Landscapesof Memory: A History of Social Identity in the Western Serengeti, Tanzania"(Ph.D. thesis. University of Florida, 1998). Research in Tanzania from January1995 to July 1996 was supported by Fulbright I.I.E. and the Joint Committee on African Studies of the Social Science Research Council and the American Councilof Learned Societies, with funds provided by the Ford, Mellon, and Rockefellerfoundations. Writing was facilitated by a grant from the College of Liberal Artsand Sciences, University of Florida, and the Linda Vance award for women'shistory from the History Department.
5. A shorter version of this article was first presented at the conferenceon "Gender, Power and Difference in African Societies, " June 6-8, 1997, Institute for the Study of Gender in Africa, University of California at Los Angeles, and another version at the African Studies Association meetings in Philadelphia, 1999.
6. Isabel Hofmeyr, "We Spend Our Years as a Tale that Is Told":Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom (Portsmouth, N. H, 1993), 6.
7. Similarly, in Purity and Exile Liisa Malkki demonstrates how"historical consciousness is embedded in and emerges from particular, local, lived circumstances." She traces the construction of a Hutu identityand national history in the refugee camps as opposed to the cosmopolitanidentity and denial of history among town refugees. Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania(Chicago, 1995), 241.
8. David W. Cohen's caution against a formalist definition of oral traditionas a set of fixed texts allows us to see how both men and women exchangehistorical knowledge in "the everyday critical, lively, intelligence whichsurrounds the status, activities, gestures, and speech of individuals."David W. Cohen, "The Undefining of Oral Tradition, " Ethnohistory 36, 1(Winter 1989), 12.
9. See Janice Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan (Madison, 1989), 5-7, on the analysis of spirit possession cultscontrolled by women as a counter-hegemonic discourse to the dominant male, Islamic discourse.
10. The analysis of spatial organization as creating and created by dailypractice relies on the work of P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge, 1977);
11. and specifically in relation to gender from Henrietta L. Moore, Space, Text, and Gender: An Anthropological Study of the Marakwet of Kenya (Cambridge, 1986).
12. Interview with Jackson Benedicto Mang'oha Maginga, Mbiso, 18 March 1995(Nata, f. ). Translation published in Jan Bender Shetler, Telling our own Stories: Local Histories from South Mara, Tanzania (Leiden, 2003), 257.
13. See Shetler, "Landscapes, " Introduction, for a fuller analysisof core spatial images in oral tradition.
14. See Brad Weiss, The Making and Unmaking of the Haya Lived World:Consumption, Commoditization, and Everyday Practice (Durham, 1996), 29-31, 51-52, who describes the Haya ceremony for blessing a new house which involveslighting the fire for the first time by the father or a senior agnate.
15. For the Kuria see Eva Tobisson, Family Dynamics among the Kuria:Agro-Pastoralists in Northern Tanzania (Goteborg, Sweden, 1986), 128-32.
16. For a discussion of the symbols of fire and water, see Anita Jacobson-Widding, "Encounter in the Water Mirror, " in Anita Jacobson-Widding, ed., Body and Space: Symbolic Models of Unity and Division in African Cosmology and Experience (Uppsala, 1990), 177-216.
17. P. M. Mturi and S. Sasora, "The History of the Ikizu and Sizaki, " in Shetler, Telling Our Own Stories (Leiden, 2003), 59, 61.
18. See Karen Sacks, Sisters and Wives: The Past and Future of Sexual Equality (Westport, Conn., 1979).
19. For example, Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1966),
20. translated from the French, La Pensee Sauvage (Paris, 1962).
21. For a structuralist interpretation in which the wilderness is male, see Steven Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom: A History (Madison, 1974), 53-64;
22. for one in which the wilderness or nature is female see Kaj Arhem, "The Symbolic World of the Maasai Homestead, " in Jacobson-Widding, ed., Body and Space, 51-80.
23. Shetler, "Landscapes, " 170-71.
24. A. O. Anacleti, "Pastoralism and Development: Economic Changes in Pastoral Industry in Serengeti 1750-1961, " (Master's thesis, University of Dar es Salaam, 1975), 189-93. I did not hear any stories even remotely like thisone in Ngoreme or elsewhere.
25. J.E.G. Sutton, The Archaeology of the Western Highlands of Kenya(Nairobi, 1973), 50-58.
26. Adam Kuper, "Symbolic Dimensions of the Southern Bantu Homestead, " Africa 50, 1 (1980), 8-22.
27. th Century (Portsmouth, N. H., 1998), 92-98;
28. Schoenbrun, A Green Place, 159-60.
29. Robert A. LeVine, "The Gusii Family, " in Robert F. Gray and P.H. Gulliver, eds., The Family Estate in Africa: Studies in the Role of Propertyin Family Structure and Lineage Continuity (London, 1964), 70;
30. Tobisson, Family Dynamics, 128-37.
31. Hugo Huber, Marriage and Family in Rural Bukwaya (Tanzania) (Fribourg, Switzerland, 1973), 62-68, reports that there was no hut for the man and thatthe yard fire was the man's space in the homestead. A ritual was necessary forthe construction of the homestead gateway.
32. Interview with Bhoke Rotegenga (Nata, f.) and Mgoye Rotegenga Megasa(Nata, m.), Motokeri, 13 March 1995.
33. See Regina Smith Oboler, "The House Property Complex and African Social Organisation, " Africa 64, 3 (1994); 344, 351;
34. and T. Hakansson, "Family Structure, Bridewealth, and Environment in Eastern Africa: A Comparative Study of the House-Property Systems, "Ethnology 28 (1989), 117-34.
35. Interview with Tetere Tumbo, Mbiso, 5 April 1995 (Nata, m. ).
36. Megasa Mokiri, Motokeri, 4 March 1995 (Nata, m.) asserts (incontradiction to all other accounts) that first woman went to live in firstman's hunting shelter.
37. For archeological evidence see Sutton, The Archaeology, 50-58.
38. Shetler, "Landscapes, " 161-64, 184.
39. Karla O. Poewe, Matrilineal Ideology: Male-Female Dynamics in Luapula, Zambia (London, 1981), 21-26.
40. This is another story to be told elsewherebut concerns (1) the colonialrefusal to acknowledge the leadership role of healers/prophets/ rainmakers (2)the denial of a woman's right to have an independent household without a man orto obtain offspring through what is known elsewhere as "woman-to-woman" marriage, giving women access to independent wealth, and (3) theshifting of "traditional" inheritance and marriage laws to favor men.For an analysis of the changing role of women in colonial society see Steven Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tanzania (Madison, 1990), 181-203.
41. This has been noted by many observers in Africa, including earlyanthropologist, Lloyd A. Fallers, Bantu Bureaucracy: A Century of Political Evolution among the Basoga of Uganda (Chicago, 1965), 90, who states that"lineage males must often draw upon the genealogical knowledge of wives andmothers.... women often remember genealogical complexities better thanmen."
42. For an analysis of the interview process as part of the "malesociocommunication subculture" and thus intimidating to women, see Kristina Minister, "A Feminist Frame for the Oral History Interview, " in Gluckand Patai, eds., Women's Word, 31.
43. See Huber, Marriage and Family, 69-91;
44. David William Cohen, "Doing Social History from Pim's Doorway, "in Olivier Zunz, ed., Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), 191-235.
45. Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits, 56;
46. Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (London, 1987), 15.
47. On the position of these women as widows elsewhere in Africa, see Betty Potash, Widows in African Societies: Choices and Constraints (Stanford, 1986)
48. and Michael C. Kirwen, African Widows (Maryknoll, 1979).
49. Renee Louise Tantala, "The Early History of Kilara in Western Uganda: Process Models of Religious and Political Change" (Ph.D. thesis.University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1989); Schoenbrun, A Green Place, 238-40, 196-97.
50. David L. Schoenbrun, The Historical Reconstruction of Great Lakes Bantu Cultural Vocabulary: Etymologies and Distributions (Cologne, 1997), # 209 and#210.
51. Sarah LeVine and Robert LeVine, Mothers and Wives: Gusii Women of East Africa (Chicago, 1979), 12-4, and Conclusion.
52. Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands, 89.
53. Regina Smith Oboler's study of "woman/woman marriage" showsthat the Nandi in western Kenya classify a childless woman who pays bridewealthfor another woman to bear her children as male in specified socioculturaldomains. She becomes the social and legal father of the children and plays amale role in all negotiations over the property rights involving the children.In other areas of life not involving property, people continue to recognize herin a female role. Regina Smith Oboler, "Is the Female Husband a Man?Woman/Woman Marriage among the Nandi of Kenya, " Ethnology 19 (1) (January1980), 69-88.
54. For the institution in the Mara Region see Hugo Huber, "'Woman-Marriage' in Some East African Societies, " Anthropos 63/64(1968/69), 745-52.
55. Fieldwork for this article was done among the Simbete, Iregi, and Kenyeof the northwest portion of the Mara region. With little variation the practicesare similar to what I found operating in the Serengeti district in thesoutheast of the region. See also Denise O'Brien, "Female Husbands in Southern Bantu Societies, " in Alice Schlegel, ed., Sexual Stratification: ACross-Cultural View (New York, 1977), 109-126.
56. Eileen Jensen Krige, "Woman-Marriage, with Special Reference to the Lovedu - Its Significance for the Definition of Marriage, " Africa 44, 1(1974), 11-36.