In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CHAPTER 5 Situating the Fieldwork Setting: The Shinyanga Region in Historical Perspective It seems that most of my interaction so far has been with the nonSukuma members of the community. This town center is actually a mixture of people from different parts of the country. For example, one of the Tanzanian women with whom I have become friends is a Jaluo woman from the northern part of the country. Although her husband is Sukuma, he comes from a different district. . . . [N]eedless to say, my ‹rst week here I was feeling a bit anxious as I wasn’t meeting any Sukuma women. But that in itself is interesting, I suppose, and I also realize that I have only been here one week. —Letter from Bulangwa, November 24, 1992 When I originally selected the Shinyanga Region as the site for my ‹eldwork , my decision was based on two main factors. First, maternal mortality in the Shinyanga Region during the 1980s was quite high: for every 100,000 live births, approximately 300 women died from complications associated with pregnancy, childbirth, or the postpartum period (Kaisi 1989; Mandara and Msamanga 1988). Second, although the Sukuma people are the predominant ethnic group living in the region, the majority of the most recent studies from which information on Sukuma women’s health-care practices could be gleaned were at least twenty years old and had taken place primarily in the Mwanza Region to the north (Lang and Lang 1973; Reid 1969; Varkevisser 1973). By selecting a rural community in the Shinyanga Region as the site for my study, my goal was to address the apparent gap in the literature: pregnancy and childbirth among the southern Sukuma. The anxiety that is hinted at in the above excerpt from one of my ‹rst letters from the ‹eld re›ects my initial concerns that I had somehow ended up in the wrong place: a predominantly non-Sukuma community. What I 64 gradually came to realize over the course of my ‹eldwork is that despite the multiethnic makeup of Bulangwa, or perhaps because of it, certain aspects of Sukuma culture seemed to serve as a cultural backdrop against which everyday interactions in the community took place. This seemed especially true with regard to healing strategies in general and local practices surrounding pregnancy and childbirth in particular. Since returning from my ‹eldwork and immersing myself once again in the historical and anthropological literature for that part of the country, I have come to understand the cultural heterogeneity I observed in Bulangwa in a different light: not as a possible aberration but, rather, as a present-day re›ection of past historical processes in west central Tanzania.1 In this chapter I begin to situate contemporary social relations in Bulangwa within their historical context. In doing so, my aim is to show how past social and cultural formations in west central Tanzania continue to be re›ected in today’s cultural landscape of Bulangwa in general and, in later chapters, especially in women’s pregnancy-related experiences. Appadurai’s (1996:181) observation that there is a historical and dialectical relationship between how local subjects and neighborhoods are “produced , named, and empowered to act socially” seems particularly relevant to what I am trying to accomplish in this chapter. My discussion of some of the major themes in the history of west central Tanzania—early migrations , changes in the role of the chief, trading networks, interethnic relations , the impact of British colonial rule—is not meant to be a mere recounting of historical facts but, rather, an exploration of how locality was actively produced and maintained in west central Tanzania during the past. This chapter sets the stage for an examination of social relations in Bulangwa in the contemporary setting and, in later chapters, for a discussion of how the particularities of locality have shaped the management of motherhood and maternal health risk in the ethnographic present. For example, given the place that some female ‹gures occupied in the social life of contemporary Bulangwa, whether as healers or as ancestors seen as capable of affecting the fertility of their living kin, what does the historical record suggest about women’s participation in the ritual and political life of their communities (Berger 1976; Boddy 1989)? Although we don’t read much about women in the history books that mention this part of Tanzania, we know that women certainly must have been present. What were they doing? Why, for that matter, does sorcery ‹gure so...

Share