“To be married is to be led” Through an arranged marriage, that the father
“To be married is to be led” Through an arranged marriage, that the father
As the book begins, Mariatu is a happy little girl growing up in Magborou, a village of 200 near Port Loko, Sierra Leone. The first chapter teaches the reader about life in extended families where children may grow up under the care of relatives, men may have two or more wives and several generations live and work together. Mariatu tells us about her friends, her attraction to a possible boyfriend, Musa, her hopes of going to school one day, and her scary dream of standing in palm oil, a signifier of bad things to come. We learn about village life from preparations for a funeral, rotating crops of cassava and rice, dances, secret societies, and a child's daily chores of carrying water and collecting firewood.…
Monique and the mango rains is a touching story about a peace corps volunteer and a Malian midwife. The story is set in the small village of Namposella and is narrated by the Peace Corps volunteer Kris Holloway. The book gives you an in depth perspective on the life of a woman in Mali and their culture as a whole. In this paper I will be discussing anthropological concepts including rite of passage, patriarchy, and religion and how they apply to Monique and the mango rains.…
Tokugawa era Japan was a very different period than those before it, instead of proving loyalty and honor on the battlefield it was drawn from more diplomatic situations. The Tokugawa period brought with it an era of lasting peace for nearly 250 years, and with it came different ways in which to occupy ones self. Many things in society changed including, the warring ways of the samurai where honor was drawn from the strength and skill turned into peaceful times when martial skill was practiced to maintain. However, besides the peaceful times many things remained the same about the Japanese social structure. Men and women still were very aware of honorable behavior, which held the basis for social culture. Although some similarities between the two were apparent, the more interesting seem to be the ways in which women were observed to display honorable behavior. The seemingly confined life of a women was very basic yet very strict in conduct. While men presented the strength of the household outside women held up the integrity of the house from within.…
Shaki, or Napoleon A. Chagnon’s 15 month enculturation with the Yanomamo tribe, Bisaasi-teri is characterized by fear, discomfort, loneliness, nosiness, and invaluable experiences through relationships and modesty about human culture. Chagnon documents the experience through the struggle and discovery surrounding his proposed research, as his lifestyle gradually comes in sync with the natural functions of his community. Much of his focus and time was consumed by identification of genealogical records, and the establishment of informants and methods of trustworthy divulgence. Marriage, sex, and often resulting violence are the foremost driving forces within Yanomamo, and everything that we consider part of daily routine is completely unknown and inconsequential to them. Traveling between neighboring tribes, he draws conclusions about intertribal relations, especially concerning marriage and raiding. Chagnon deals with cultural complexity that takes time to decipher, and in process, potential risk. Confronted with seemingly trivial situations, they often become unexpected phenomena and Chagnon’s adherence to documentation is amazing. He encounters personal epiphanies that I find intriguing, related to privacy and hygiene. This report becomes an inspiring document of an extreme anthropologic lifestyle as much as it is a cultural essay.…
She analyzes an interpretation of the context of Pharaonic circumcision in the village Hofiyat of Northern Sudan, of which the population consists mainly of Muslims. She says that the Sudanese villagers of Hofiyat regard circumcision as a purification process. This is especially important, considering that “In Sudan, as elsewhere in the Muslim world, a family’s dignity and honor are vested in the conduct of its womenfolk”. The summer is seen as the season of purification, where circumcision is carried out on both boys and girls. This leads to the “transformation” from boys to men; the girls remain girls but the circumcision makes them “marriageable...it is a neceassary condition of being a woman”.…
There are references to god as “Nursing Mother” in women’s songs, and she is called upon in ENKISHON…
Abstract: In the country of Ethiopia, there live a group of people called the Surma. They all live very closely to one another. In this culture, the two popular practices they do are stick fighting and lip plates. For the men stick fighting is a type of fighting that is done in order to marry one of the girl in the village. The winner of the fight wins a wife and the loser ends up getting really hurt and ends up with no wife. For the women in this culture, lip plates is a common practice that is done in order to attract the male to get them to marry them. It is said that the bigger the lips the more likely hood that the women is going to get marry and that her family will get more cows as well.…
The Nuer people are pastoral people who live on flood plains, they herd cattle’s and gather corn grain, and tobacco, and they also hunt for fish. The young men learn to care for the cattle while they are very young, this will be their life’s work so they must learn to do it well, when the plains flood the young men and women must take the cattle to a temporary camps where they take care of them and in the evenings the men smoke fresh tobacco they harvested and dance and sing behind their oxen to impress the women. The cattle being a very important part in these people’s lives are passed down from father to son, because only the men can have the cattle. These are patrilineal people so everything belongs to the father including the children. When a woman marries a man the man has to give the wife’s family a bride price of twenty-five cattle. These cattle play a vital role in these peoples lives; they never kill them unless it is for a sacrifice to god. An example of a sacrifice these people might make is, a mans daughter is sick and his son has died when he went off in the woods alone and he was not buried properly and the sons ghost has became a demon and went into the mother; the ghost of the boy will speak through his mother and wan an ox sacrifice and a bride, if they do not strike the ox in the heart the first time it is considered a very bad thing. They also sacrifice an ox…
The Chronicles of a Savanna Marriage is about a young woman and the life she lived going through marriage and the hurdles she had to jump over. Nayiani has been married with her husband for six years. She is asked if she is happy, she replies that she is happy now that she has had children and everyone in the settlement likes her now so everything is fine. This could imply that having children can change the respect that someone has for another. Traditions are a big part of the Masai tribe. They…
When looking upon many other cultures and the affects globalization and commercialization has had on their lives, in comparison to Kuna men and women, we find there to be a generally beneficial outcome. Although in contrasting of gender, we find women to be doing exceptionally well with the connection to Mola making. From the commercialization of their hand crafted products we are able to see them becoming active in marketing, retaining control over land and economic resources, learning and developing business skills, as well as controlling income in the household.…
Falling into the Lesbi World holds more relevance to the anthropology of gender than simply pointing out a flaw in another academic’s work. For Blackwood, this piece is also, to some extent, an extension of her work on the understanding of kinship amongst Minangkabau. In her previous work on the matrilineal nature of the Minangkabau, Blackwood established the importance of the mother-daughter relationship (2005, 12-3), so in this ethnography when she examines the relationship between tombois and their mothers, it begs questions of how mothers react to seemingly losing a “daughter.” Through describing the ways in which tombois are both treated as men—given some masculine chores, allowed out at night—and expected to maintain some aspects of…
In the third tribe, the Tchambuli, there was a great difference between the sexes. The males showed what we would say are ‘female’ characteristics and the women showed ‘masculine’ characteristics. Women are self-assertive, practical and manage all the affairs of the households. Men are skittish, wary of each other, interested in art, in the theatre, and, in a thousand petty bits of insults and gossip. The men wear lovely ornaments and the women shave their heads and are unadorned. The men do the shopping, and, they carve, paint and dance as well.…
The Masai society is strongly patriarchal, with a large majority of elder men and retired elders making decisions and choices for other members of the Masai society. Matters that may cause confrontation or problems within the group will be resolved by the paying of cattle, which is their main source of food. Most Masai are Christian or Muslim in faith and have beliefs such as divination, prophecy and shamanistic healing.…
Lutkehaus, Nancy C., and Paul B. Roscoe, eds. Gender Rituals: Female Initiation in Melanesia , 1995.…
Women are projected as sacrificing and subservient beings; that fall as a victim against the cruelties of feudal society. They are complete strangers to the composition of panchayat system and hardly ever make an impact on the panchayat decisions by the virtue of their powers of persuasion and influence. They receive punishment without even participating; the male members of their family symbolically represent their cases. Women are commoditized into instruments of executing ‘justice’ for violation of both the formal law and of culturally-rooted notions of morality. In tribal communities, a woman exercising her right to determine the course of her love life is viewed as anathema. And so, as long as women hand over the reins of their womanhood and sexuality to a male guardian and a broader community, no one gets killed. But when they choose to command it, they risk their…