The Church of Women: Gendered Encounters between Maasai and Missionaries

Conclusion

256 CONCLUSION From the perspective of the Spiritan missionaries, their evangelization efforts among Maasai in Tanzania have been a legacy of frustration, even failure: from schools to bomas to individuals, they concentrated their efforts on attracting and converting men, but ended up mainly converting women. Insisting on a vision of community, whether as a boma or as a village, that included both men and women, they found themselves teaching and ministering to a community of women. Trying to develop male leadership among Maasai, they were dismayed to find women emerging as leaders. And seeking to enforce the power of elder men, they inadvertently subverted their power by providing an outlet for women to escape their control. Incorporating gender into our analysis of this missionary tale of “frustration ” and “failure” enables us to understand and explain this paradoxical outcome in a different manner. Catholic evangelization, baptism, and creation of churches provided fresh sites for the ongoing contestation and production of Maasai gender relations, including struggles over the gendered meanings of authority, morality, and ethnic identity. At a time when Maasai men, despite their differences, were consolidating their political-economic power, Catholicism offered them few attractions. Conversion was perceived as a rupture and threat to the dominant ideology of “being Maasai men,” and male converts were disparaged as ormeek, as non-Maasai “others.” Although the school and individual approaches allowed men to ignore missionary interventions, the boma approach brought the Catholic message and messengers into their homesteads. Unwilling to directly prohibit missionary activity, men expressed their disinterest through avoidance and absence. In contrast, missionary interventions complemented and expanded the spiritual dimension of female roles in Maasailand. By providing women with an expanded spiritual platform from which to launch their critiques of men, they enabled women to reaffirm and reinforce their claims to spiritual and Conclusion 257 moral superiority in opposition to the increasingly material interests of men. Once first the boma approach then the individual approach enabled women to participate, they responded eagerly and persistently to these new opportunities for spiritual engagement and female fellowship. Conversion enhanced their already substantial spiritual practice by offering new forms of spiritual expression and healing. By rejecting the authority of the iloibonok and assuming the powers of healing for themselves and Christian missionaries , women challenged male assertions of power and authority. Although conversion can be understood as the product of a convergence of cultural, historical, and political-economic factors, this book demonstrates that it is crucial to integrate the mediating role of social factors such as gender (or race, class, ethnicity) into the analysis. We can no longer assume that the experience of men—whether of missionization, conversion, or faith—represents the normative or “generic” model. Instead, following Peterson (2001: 489), we must explore how conversion can serve as a “grammar of ethnic and gendered debate.” In the Maasai case, incorporating gender into theories of conversion enables a richer understanding of the conversion process, attuned to the complicated intersections of expressive as well as instrumental concerns that were simultaneously constrained and enabled by historical events and processes, including the directives of Vatican II, colonial and postcolonial state policies, forced villagization, ethnic ideologies and images of “being Maasai,” and the gender, age, and residence restrictions implicit in the school and boma approaches. Conversion entailed different motivations as well as different meanings for men and women. In turn, these gendered motivations and meanings shaped the shifting contours of the missionary encounter and produced the seemingly paradoxical outcome. In seeking to possess the power of the spirit, Maasai women displayed their own powers and spirit, to the reluctant acquiescence of Maasai men and the astonished dismay of Spiritan missionaries. Perspectives So how does this study contribute to the study of gender, power, and mission? Clearly we must begin to rethink and rewrite studies of gender that ignore issues of spirituality and religious practice and belief. Gender ideologies , relations, and practices encompass and express a range of power relations among and between men and women that go beyond just the economic , political, and social. As the Maasai case demonstrates, attention to the spiritual aspects of those relations can complicate any easy understanding THE CHURCH OF WOMEN 258 of gender inequality. Moreover, spiritual beliefs and practices may be central to the production, reproduction, transformation, and negotiation of gendered identities, of masculinities and femininities. As such, they can then serve as a site of struggle or sustenance. This is...