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

Acknowledgments

In the course of this study I have received support and assistance from a number of people and institutions. I owe my greatest thanks to the many Chagga market women, neighbors, and friends who allowed me to enter their lives and endured my endless questions. I am unable to mention all their names, but I would particularly like to thank Piliosi and Priscilla Temu and their family, who so readily made their home mine during my field work. What I had initially imagined would be the hardest part of my research—living with a foreign family—proved to be perhaps the easiest and most rewarding. Sharing their everyday life, the hilarious atmosphere in their family, and their courage to face the unanticipated gave me strength and helped to maintain my sense of reality during the field work. The personality and local knowledge of Haika Moshi, my first research assistant, undoubtedly affected the early stages of my research and the evolving research interests in a way I was unaware of at the time. Later, Elikaneni Makundi, Annense Moshi, Edlais Temu, and Flower Makundi provided ix Acknowledgments important assistance with interviews in the Kichagga language and in transcribing those interviews. Professor emerita Marja-Liisa Swantz paved the way for my research in Tanzania by including me in a seminar on women’s economy that she organized with Professor Aili Mari Tripp in Northern Tanzania in 1994. Involving mostly entrepreneurial and other active Tanzanian women, that seminar gave me my very first contact with such women and their lives, and immersed me in the Kiswahili language. Thanks to the seminar, I found my way to Kilimanjaro when one of the participants, Mrs. Mfinanga, kindly invited me to stay in her home. Professor Swantz, a pioneer in African and Tanzanian studies in Finland, has also been a role model of stamina in thinking and acting. Professor Karen Armstrong of the University of Helsinki has been a particularly invaluable source of advice and support throughout the course of my doctoral work—which she supervised—and thereafter. She has for years read and made valuable comments on several versions of the text that eventually evolved into this book. I am also grateful to Professor Richard Werbner of the University of Manchester, who has read and offered insightful comments at several stages of my work, each time challenging me to stretch my anthropological imagination to another level. Professor Jukka Siikala has been my mentor throughout the years I have studied social anthropology, and his enthusiasm and efforts to develop an ethnographically rich and theoretically ambitious line of anthropological research in Helsinki has had a profound influence on my thinking. I have also benefited from discussions with Harri Englund, Jeremy Gould, Adeline Masquelier, Joel Robbins, and Brad Weiss. Furthermore, discussions in seminars and elsewhere with colleagues, teachers, and students in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology in Helsinki, the Department of Social Anthropology in Manchester, and the African Studies Center in Boston have been very valuable. Much of the writing for this book was done while I was a visiting scholar at the Boston University African Studies Center. I am particularly grateful to Jean Hay for her good advice on editing and for her overall warm support and presence. James McCann eased my way mentally by making the writing of a book sound like a purely pragmatic matter, devoid of mysticism . I also thank him and Sandi McCann for their hospitality. The comments of the two reviewers of the manuscript for the University of Wisconsin Press were very helpful and constructive in the production of the final edition. I wish to extend my thanks to Simeon Mesaki for help with Kiswahili, Aili Mari Tripp and Stanlie James for taking my book in their series and all the people at the University of Wisconsin Press who have worked on finalizing the manuscript for publication. Any omissions or errors are on my own account. x Acknowledgments The main funding for this research was provided by the Academy of Finland: first as part of a project on Changing Gender Relations in Africa led by Karen Armstrong in 1994 –1996, and later for a visit to the University of Manchester. Additional funding was provided by the Sasakawa Foundation , the Graduate School of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences at the University of Helsinki, the Alfred Kordelin Foundation, and the Scandinavian Institute of African Studies in Uppsala, Sweden. The...