What is it about?
The article explores the ways that Kuria women in East Africa engage with the entry of new resources and normative templates in the local economy. It examines the processes of negotiating obligations and constructing new 'relational freedoms' that women small entrepreneurs turn to in their collaborative work and savings groups and modified 'women-to-women marriages'. It explores Kuria women's creative ways of cutting the flows of relationships and obligations, allowing for a certain degree of independence in the patriarchal and polygynous system, often wrought with conflicts and excessive demands on women's resources.
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Why is it important?
The article argues that the investigation of Melanesian perspectives on personhood provides fruitful insights into the concept of relationality and the challenges and opportunities it presents for analyzing social change in Africa. The issues raised in Melanesian studies, as well as the conceptual tools utilized, contribute to a dynamic, situated understanding of relationality. This is especially relevant at the present time, when relationally diverse social forms are on the rise in many societies in the Global South.
Perspectives
The Kuria case in Africa illustrates the need to situate the alternative modes of collectivity and changes in political and domestic sociality in a broader context of personhood and kinship. It underlines the politically motivated nature of domestic claim-making, and and the highly relational nature of emerging public spaces.
Daivi Rodima-Taylor
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This page is a summary of: Chapter 4 Gathering Up Mutual Help: Work, Personhood, and Relational Freedoms in Tanzania and Melanesia, December 2022, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/9781785332647-005.
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