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

Conclusion

Listening to gossip and other informal conversations in the mid-1990s in Kilimanjaro, one easily got the impression that the cause of moral upheaval is in the increasing importance of markets and individualistic profitseeking attitudes—precisely the issues propelled by neoliberal policies. Much of the moral discussion revolves around the market women and businessmen and their imputed impatient and asocial urge to get rich and keep the returns to themselves. However, rather than as reflections of reality , these views are more properly seen as arguments in an ongoing moral dialogue about the nature of markets, market women, and businessmen— and about contemporary women and men more generally. The background for the current debate is to be found in the changing economy, which has led to shifts in the relations of autonomy and dependence within families and local communities. It is, however, only through the cultural debate and conceptualization of such shifts in the moral dialogue that socioeconomic transformations are ultimately made real. 191 Conclusion In popular discussion traders and businessmen are criticized of the vices of privatization and individualism, which are often conceptualized as some kind of concealment. This is shown, for instance, in the persistent suspicion that market trading is a secretive profit-seeking exercise, and in the belief that modern houses and other extravagant signs of a man’s success veil dubious or far worse means of enrichment. The controversial quality most often associated with market women is ujanja (cunning), which connotes circumspect and “disguised” means that women use as they generate profits from trade. These involve persuasive, seductive, and deceptive skills, expressed as “draw” (kuvuta), “speech” (mdomo, literally “mouth”), and sometimes “binding” (kufunga). In contrast, businessmen are often suspected of using much more direct methods such as “stealing” (kuiba), “killing” (kuua) or “buying a spirit” (kununua jini). People make a mental distinction between men’s and women’s suspect paths to success; men’s crooked ways are considered to derive from and demonstrate their lack of education, while trading women’s enrichment is thought to draw from their market-derived education and knowledge (maarifa). In addition to the different forms of “concealment” integral to Chagga women’s trading techniques, there is also more need for women to conceal the riches they accrue than there is for men. A woman’s public display of wealth is readily taken as a sign of arrogance and is considered demeaning to her husband. In contrast, a public display of wealth is essential to men for attaining acknowledged status. The gendered differences in the acquisition and display of wealth reflect the fact that women, who are economically and socially in an inferior position to men from the start, have to be circumspect and delicate in both the making and using of money. More than simply designating behavioral and personal distinctions, in using the concepts described above people also address and discuss changing economic and gender relations. Ujanja reflects the current need for women to “run around”—physically, socially, and intellectually—to make a living from outside the home kihamba. One of the few concepts employed for both genders is ujinga (stupidity), the opposite of ujanja, which signi fies inactivity and unproductive immobility. The difference is that for men this state is considered unnatural and is usually caused externally by manipulation through witchcraft or womanly devices, whereas in the case of women it connotes a reliance on men to provide in economically difficult times. A wife who mostly stays at home fulfills the expectations of female settledness, but finds often that she has serious problems in fulfilling her wifely and motherly responsibilities of feeding her children and family. The trading women especially contrast the stay-at-home women’s “naiveté” and “stupidity” with their own “experience” (uzoefu) and “cunning” as accrued through their economic activities outside the home. 192 Conclusion Similar distinctions are found in other parts of Africa with different results . Among the Asante in Ghana, for instance, women who stay at home and do not involve themselves in market trading are also considered “stupid .” However, a woman’s attachment to home, husband and marriage is also disparaged as being self-indulgent and oriented towards sexual pleasure , whereas trading is considered a natural female occupation and a way for a woman to provide for her children (Clark 1999). How the Asante associate marriage and pleasure, on the one hand, and trading...