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

The seemingly ubiquitous market is the setting of Pietilä’s study of everyday talk and negotiated morality in contemporary Tanzania. It is told in ethnographic detail against the backdrop of the creative and sometimes contradictory social relations of businesspersons and traders in the Kilimanjaro region (both women and men). Pietilä is interested in everyday conversation, stories, even gossip and rumor, which reveal not simply a changing economic reality but a public conversation. Public dialogue is concerned with the morality of markets, market women, and businessmen. She subtly shifts our focus of analysis from the actual economic changes that market liberalization and globalization have brought to the ways that people debate, challenge, and construct individual and collective morality in response to these changes.

Pietilä brings comprehensive order to the Himo market in Kilimanjaro without sacrificing complexity, in describing both the organization of the market and the structure of negotiation and economic transactions. She provides scrupulous accounting of the possible moral meanings of each of the various steps of a seemingly simple transaction such as the bargaining between a trader and a customer. Her goal is to use everyday conversation as a tool for blurring the lines between the market economy and the “moral economy.” While the literature on economic relations in so-called noncapitalist societies tends to see these two economies as distinct, Pietilä’s interest is in how traders in Kilimanjaro draw on concepts and language from kinship and domestic spheres to bring the “moral economy” into the marketplace. In this case, Chagga experiences are informed not only by the market economy but also by the history of Tanzanian socialism; everyday conversation and gossip reveal uneasiness with the perceived corruption and individualized wealth accumulation under postsocialist regimes.

At the same time, conversations in the market, especially among and about women traders, are part of the renegotiation of gender roles in contemporary Tanzania as well as ways to build, shape, and contest moral reputations. Pietilä’s particular interest is in the morality of women and men, and what everyday stories and discourse reveal about gender relations, and (to a lesser extent) age, class, and other important social hierarchies. She argues that women traders use idioms of motherhood, kinship, and patronage to bring “stable sociality and reciprocity to the market” (48). In this way, women traders use what appears to be casual talk, such as gossip and joking, to construct and preserve the moral reputations of entrepreneurs in the context of rapid economic change. Traders use rhetoric to “domesticate the marketplace,” transforming it into the familiar and morally appropriate realm of personal relations, and to create socially sanctioned values like honesty and neediness (59). Women traders in particular go to great lengths to describe their activities as necessary, as “food” for their children, for example.

Stories by members of the community about others, usually gossip about someone’s perceived failure in business, reveal important political and social values about personhood, about morality in the community; as Pietilä notes, they are attempts “to control changes in the status hierarchies” (166). And individual traders and businesspersons themselves are also active agents of story-making, using socially and morally meaningful terms to avoid or address criticism about the motivations that drive their business endeavors. Especially rich is the chapter she dedicates to one successful market woman, Mama Njau, or Mary. Pietilä interweaves a detailed recounting of her own life history, told by Mary, with the gossip and rumors about Mary from other market women, and men, traders, and community members. In this way she constructs a dynamic portrait of a woman’s reputation and status in the community. Through each of her examples, she argues that “women do not speak with one voice but argue with each other from different perspectives” (139).

While the descriptive sections on land, economic changes, and evolving kinship and...