Those Who Play With Fire; Gender, Fertility and Transformation in East and Southern Africa OUT OF PRINT SEE Next ISBN 1845205979

by Henrietta L. Moore, Todd Sanders, and Bwire Kaare

• ISBN13: 9780485195699
• ISBN10: 0485195690
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 1999-02-01
• Publisher: Berg Pub Ltd

Summary

Whether initiating girls or healing cattle, bringing rain or protesting taxation, many in Africa share a vision of a world where the cultural, symbolic and cosmic categories of 'male' and 'female' serve, through ritual, to both reimagine and transform the world. Those Who Play With Fire introduces recent gender theory to the analysis of African ethnography, exploring the ways in which ideational gender categories permeate African systems of thought and ritual practices. Thus, the book provides a powerful framework with which to evaluate previous ethnographic material on Africa. In addition, Those Who Play With Fire presents a broad range of new case studies - of hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists and pastoralists - revealing the varied and complex ways in which African ideas and ideals of what it means to be 'male' and 'female' broadly inform and give meaning to a wide range of transformative rituals.

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors	vii
PART I INTRODUCTION	1	(38)
1 Gender, Symbolism and Praxis: Theoretical Approaches	3	(36)
Henrietta L. Moore
PART II RITUAL SYMBOLS: PERFORMANCE AND NARRATIVES	39	(146)
2 `Doing Gender' in Africa: Embodying Categories and the Categorically Disembodied	41	(42)
Todd Sanders
3 The Lion at the Waterhole: The Secrets of Life and Death in Chewa Rites de Passage	83	(18)
Deborah Kaspin
4 First Gender, Wrong Sex	101	(32)
Camilla Power
Ian Watts
5 Saisee Tororeita: An Analysis of Complementarity in Akie Gender Ideology	133	(20)
Bwire Kaare
6 Creation and the Multiple Female Body: Turkana Perspectives on Gender and Cosmos	153	(32)
Vigdis Broch-Due
PART III GENDER, FERTILITY AND SOCIAL AGENCY	185	(96)
7 `Dealing with Men's Spears': Datooga Pastoralists Combating Male Intrusion on Female Fertility	187	(38)
Astrid Blystad
8 Gender Ideology, and the Domestic and Public Domains among the Iraqw	225	(30)
Katherine A. Snyder
9 Women's Work is Weeping: Constructions of Gender in a Catholic Community	255	(26)
Maia Green
PART IV AFTERWORD	281	(14)
10 Chaos and Creativity: The Transformative Symbolism of Fused Categories	283	(12)
Anita Jacobson-Widding
Index	295
List of Tables	ix	(2)
Series Editor's Preface	xi	(2)
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction Forgotten Publics E pluribus unum	1	(12)
Chapter 1 The Public Voice of Vernacular Rhetoric	13	(24)
Rhetoric's Place in the Athenian Democracy
Civil Society and the Appearance of Public Opinion
Vox Populi and the Problem of "Public" Opinion
Rhetorical Antecedents of Publics
Conclusion
Chapter 2 Discourse, Rhetorical Discourse, and the Public Sphere	37	(20)
The Bourgeois Public Sphere
Rhetorical Counterassumptions to Habermas's Model
Conclusion
Chapter 3 Civic Conversation and the Reticulate Public Sphere	57	(25)
Outline of a Rhetorical Model of the Public Sphere
Public Conversation and the Associations of the Reticulate Public Sphere
Common Meaning and the Associative Networks of the Reticulate Public Sphere
The Ground of Civil Judgment
Rhetorical Criteria of the Public Sphere
Conclusion
Chapter 4 Reading Public Opinion from Vernacular Rhetoric	82	(29)
Witnessing Vernacular Discourse: An Outsider's Experience
Vernacular Rhetoric: The Rhetorical Locus of Public opinion
Public Opinion and Reasoning
Public Opinion and Common Understanding
The Dialogical Process of Opinion Formation
Conclusion
Chapter 5 Narrative, Cultural Memory, and the Appropriation of Historicity	111	(50)
Rhetoric and the Active Society
Memories of Hope: Poland
Memories of Despair: Yugoslavia
Contrasting Stories, Contrasting Possibilities
Conclusion: The Narrative Bridge from Tradition to Historicity
Chapter 6 Reshaping Publics and Public Spheres: The Meese Commission's Report on Pornography	161	(28)
A Call to Reshape the Literary Public Sphere
The Final Report: Version I
The Final Report: Version II
Reconstructing the Public Sphere
Conclusion
Chapter 7 Technologizing Public Opinion: Opinion Polls, the Iranian Hostages, and the Presidential Election	189	(43)
The Problem of Public Opinion
Transforming Victims into Heroes
Public opinion as Technological Constraint
Conclusion
Chapter 8 Democracy's Narrative: Living in Roosevelt's America	232	(36)
The Election of 1940
The People's Letters and Public Opinion
"Public" Opinion on the Third Term
Defining America
Conclusion: Forgotten Publics in a Land of Strangers
Chapter 9 The Rhetoric of Publicness: Theory and Method	268	(15)
Theoretical Considerations
Methodological Considerations
Appendix I: Chronology of Hostage Developments	283	(6)
Appendix II: Chronology of the 1980 Campaign	289	(4)
Notes	293	(18)
Bibliography	311	(18)
Index	329