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

2. Feeding, Drinking, and Eating: Market Women Restructuring Gender

I once observed a situation in the market place where a prominent female trader was having a loud dispute with a male customer. Another important female trader, with whom I was sitting nearby, snorted disapprovingly: “That woman!”A man, next to her, echoed her contempt, and added, “And, at that, a wife of someone!”(Na tena ni mke wa mtu!) The conversations in markets and about market women span both the economics of trading and the sociospatial boundaries of the marketplace to address the current concerns of gender relations and gendered behavior in the Chagga society. Women are often suspected of being prone to develop inappropriate gender qualities and sexual behavior in the market. In this chapter, I will study how conversations among and about market women address current concerns of larger society, especially in the domestic domain. It is only by studying the wider connotations and context that, for instance, the market women’s rather fierce emphasis on their motherly responsibilities becomes fully intelligible. 63 2 Feeding, Drinking, and Eating Market Women Restructuring Gender The market and the domestic sphere are confluent in many ways; a fact that shows how artificial a strict separation between public and private would be. The intensity of a woman’s trading depends on her domestic situation , which both determines needs and provides possibilities for trading. The husband’s contributions, the household’s land situation, the number of children and their ages, and the available help all affect the scope of a woman’s marketing. Her success in trade and in combining the diverse tasks eventually affects the domestic situation. Thus, trading both reflects and influences the gender relations and their transformation within the domestic sphere. Women’s earnings have become ever more crucial for the maintenance of families, and they most commonly make money through market trading . Thus, more and more women are trading on a regular basis, and many spend several days a week in the market. Most are there for two to four market days a week, but there are women who are involved in trading six, some practically seven days a week. These are either the quite large-scale traders who hire people to do domestic and cultivation work, or women who mostly depend on small-scale trading for their livelihood because they have either very little or no land at all. Earlier studies of African female traders have shown that a woman’s increased economic contribution often leads to her having more say in household issues and possibly in more public matters as well.1 Many studies done in different parts of Africa and at various times have found that female traders are frequently suspected of immoral behavior, especially sexual promiscuity. I consider such allegations and other forms of the public criticism as well as market women’s conversations as a dialogue that addresses and constructs transformations in gender relations, and even in the gendered constitution of society. The intense dialogue shows how such transformations are not simply economically driven—in other words, money and economic success do not automatically lead to changes in acknowledged social position, but only through cultural conceptualization and social negotiation. Research on African marketplaces and market women has most often concentrated on the economic and material aspects of marketing. The most important of these studies, such as by Sudarkasa (1973), Clark (1994), and Robertson (1997), provide detailed information on the economic and pragmatic sides of trading and marketplaces as well as their wider social context and impact. There are relatively few studies on the more symbolic and social construction of marketing and marketplaces. An exception is Bastian’s (1992) study of the cosmological construction of the Onitsha market system . Van Donge (1992) studies the social construction of markets in Dar es Salaam. Somewhat paradoxically, however, by “social construction”he ends 64 Women up meaning the traders’ goal of “maximum independence from other people” (ibid., 197). In what follows, I will study the social and conceptual construction of marketplaces, marketing, and gender in Kilimanjaro by focusing on the giving of meaning to market women’s practices and qualities, by both the women themselves and the nontrading public. Kapchan’s (1996) approach comes close to mine in her focus on women’s discourses in a Moroccan marketplace as a way to construct and transform identities. I will go beyond the marketplace context, however, and study discussions in and about markets...