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

Author: Tuulikki Pietila
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Published: 02/01/2007
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.02lbs
Size: 9.24h x 6.03w x 0.73d
ISBN: 9780299220907

Review Citation(s):
Reference and Research Bk News 05/01/2007 pg. 123

About the Author
Tuulikki Pietilä is lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Helsinki. She is the author of numerous articles and essays on trade and gender issues in postcolonial Africa