Gossip, Markets, and Gender : How Dialogue Constructs Moral Value in Post-Socialist Kilimanjaro

"All traders are thieves, especially women traders," people often assured social anthropologist Tuulikki Pietilä during her field work in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, in the mid-1990s. Equally common were stories about businessmen who had "bought a spirit" for their enrichment. Pietilä places these and similar comments in the context of the liberalization of the Tanzanian economy that began in the 1980s, when many men and women found themselves newly enmeshed in the burgeoning market economy. Even as emerging private markets strengthened the position of enterprising people, economic resources did not automatically lead to heightened social position. Instead, social recognition remained tied to a complex cultural negotiation through stories and gossip in markets, bars, and neighborhoods. With its rich ethnographic detail, Gossip, Markets, and Gender shows how gossip and the responses to it form an ongoing dialogue through which the moral reputations of trading women and businessmen, and cultural ideas about moral value and gender, are constructed and rethought. By combining a sociolinguistic study of talk, storytelling, and conversation with analysis of gender, the political economy of trading, and the moral economy of personhood, Pietilä reveals a new perspective on the globalization of the market economy and its meaning and impact on the local level. Winner, Aidoo-Snyder Prize, African Studies Association Women's Caucus Frontmatter Illustrations (page vii) Acknowledgments (page ix) Introduction (page 3) Part 1. Women 1. Domesticating the Market, Marketing the Domestic (page 29) 2. Feeding, Drinking, and Eating: Market Women Restructuring Gender (page 63) 3. Constructing Moral Reputation: The Case of Mama Njau (page 89) 4. From Captured Wives to Bound Men: Rethinking Female Respect (page 118) Part 2. Men 5. Urban Men in Their Home Lineages (page 143) 6. Making Sense of Failure: Stories of Businessmen and Wealth (page 165) Conclusion (page 191) Notes (page 203) Glossary (page 217) Bibliography (page 221) Index (page 235)