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Marja-Liisa Swantz has spent a lifetime conducting participatory action research in Tanzania, and In Search of Living Knowledge encapsulates her reactions. She started her career in 1952 in Tanganyika as an instructor to the first generation of women teachers at Ashira Teacher’s Training College, situated on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. In the first years of Tanzania’s independence from Britain, she devoted five years (1965-1970) to participant research in a coastal Zaramo village near the capital city of Dar es Salaam. The research culminated in her book, Ritual and Symbol in Transitional Tanzanian Society, and a doctorate in Anthropology of Religion, which she received from the Swe...
Beginning with the myth of origin that joins every young Zaramo woman to her origins as she is initiated into the secrets of life and womanhood, the book then provides us with an historical account of the Tanzanian coast around Dar es Salaam as a background to the persistence of the cultural institutions to which the reader is introduced. Statements and narrations by Salome as a representative of the modern educated Zaramo people intersperse the author's descriptions of the rituals of womanhood, of individual and social healing, and of the ways conflict is symbolically manipulated and managed. Rituals are seen in their vibrant role, not as remnants of tradition, but as means of handling encr...
What makes a periphery? The south-eastern corner of Tanzania is officially one of the poorest corners of the world and is always presented as a peripheral area. This volume presents a lively discussion on the making of a periphery. The contributors show the interaction between the perceptions of outsiders, the views of local people, and the actual development efforts. The authors perceive development as a negotiated and contested field. Culture is not considered a factor constraining development but is seen rather as an engine which, due to the plurality of local and outsider cultures, sets the parameters for the battle.
Dignity and Daily Bread compares the lives of women in the first and third worlds and examines how women have organized forms of production themselves. Covering a wide range of issues and areas, from cotton production in Bombay, conditions in Mexico and in some of the Far East economies, the contributors begin to break down some of the ideological barriers that colonialism and racism build among women. The immediacy of the accounts bring women's conditions in very different patriarchal societies to life, and underline the book's topicality in a time of global economic hardship. Dignity and Daily Bread will have considerable importance for women's studies and development studies.
This collection captures the vitality and urgency of feminists' responses to the environment and development debate. The authors - researchers, activists and policy-makers from North and South - offer new ways of challenging the present dominating knowledge-systems and development institutions, and discuss the difficulties women face on the margins of the development process. Contributions on resource management, power, knowledge production, culture, development institutions and politics, health and economics, show how gender relations are not simply a footnote to our understanding of history and societies, but must be central to the development discourse. In so doing, they suggest that diversity itself is necessary to the creation of new paradigms of development that are built upon gender equity, secure livelihoods, ecological sustainability and political participation.
Participation can be a double-edged sword in that it can be used to bind people into agendas and policies they have little control over or it can help enable them to give voice to real and significant issues. Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams, genuine participation has to be an open and democratic process which enables all to contribute to the creation of meanings. Adult education in communities can then be involved in the process of creating ‘really useful knowledge’, that is, knowledge which enables people – individuals and collectivities who experience systematic forms of oppression, domination and exploitation – to think about, analyse and act on their situation individuall...
A timely, ethnographically informed account of the "development state" of Tanzania, showing how development practice and culture have become integrated into everyday life, politically, socially and economically. How has development affected the practices of the state in Africa? How has the development state become the basis of social organisation? How do Tanzanians position themselves to obtain aid money to effect change in their personallives? Financial aid flows have entrenched an economy of intervention in which the main beneficiaries are those who can claim to undertake development activities. Even for those not formally engaged in the development sector, its discourses influence everyday discussion about class and inequality, poverty and wealth, modernity and tradition. With Tanzania as the country focus, the author shows how the practices of development have infiltrated not only the state at large but many aspects of people's everyday lives. Maia Green is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester.
Many people have wondered about the life-long relationship between Joan Wicken and Julius Nyerere, Tanzania's stalwart and founding president. This book provides the first in-depth window into the life of this British woman, who was in many ways Nyerere's staunchest and most loyal supporter. She was his personal assistant, speechwriter, confidant, sounding board, and friend. Finally in her own words, Wicken tells us about getting to know Nyerere and their decades' long collaboration. Readers will find out how she came to play such a significant role in Nyerere's life and, in essence, the building of Tanzania. She tells us much about the man as a person and how he experienced events in the country after Independence and leading up to his death. In this interview with Aili Mari Tripp, Wicken talks about her early life and how she became Nyerere's personal assistant. Tripp shows us a side of Joan Wicken that very few would have seen. Her wit and dry humour is on display as she discuss the Mwalimu she served for almost 40 years and the country she called home for most of her adult life.