Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T22:42:26.216Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘Her Name is Kamundage’: Rethinking Women and Property Among the Haya of Tanzania

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2011

Ambreena Manji
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article introduces three models by which it is possible to interpret women's relations to property: the structuralist model, the interactionist model and the entitlement model. By reference to fleldwork carried out in the Kagera region of Tanzania, it discusses the potential of each model to deepen our understanding of women's relations to land and argues that none of the models taken alone is adequate fully to explain the range of ways in which women interact with property in Kagera nor their experiences of struggling over land. The article therefore attempts to construct a theoretical framework for rethinking women and property.

Résumé

Cet article présente trois modèles permettant d'interpréter le rapport de la femme à la propriété: le modèle structuraliste, le modèle interactif et le modèle «prérogatif». Se référant à des travaux menés dans la région de Kagera en Tanzanie, il examine la capacité de chaque modèle à approfondir notre connaissance du rapport de la femme à la terre et déclare qu'aucun des modèles pris individuellement n'est totalement à même d'expliquer les différents modes d'interaction entre les femmes et la propriété à Kagera, ni les conflits qu'elles rencontrent à propos des terres. L'article tente donc de construire un cadre théorique pour repenser la question des femmes et de la propriété.

Type
Research Article
Information
Africa , Volume 70 , Issue 3 , August 2000 , pp. 482 - 500
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Agarwal, B. 1994. A Field of one's Own: gender and land rights in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Amadiume, I. 1987. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: gender and sex in an African society. London: Zed Press.Google Scholar
Arthurs, H. W. 1985. Without the Law: administrative justice and legal pluralism in nineteenth-century England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Bader, Z. 1975. ‘Women, Private Property and Production in Bukoba District’. M.A. dissertation, Dar es Salaam: University of Dar es Salaam.Google Scholar
Cooper, D. 1995. Power in Struggle: feminism, sexuality and the state. Buckingham: Open University Press.Google Scholar
Cornell, D. 1990. ‘Sexual difference, the feminine, and equivalency: a critique of Mackinnon's Towards a Feminist Theory of the State’, Yale Law Journal 100, 2247–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cory, H., and Hartnoll, M. 1971. The Customary Law of the Haya Tribe. London: Frank Cass for the International African Institute.Google Scholar
Devereux, S. 1996. ‘Fuzzy Entitlements and Common Property Resources: struggles over rights to communal resources in Namibia’. IDS Working Paper 44, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.Google Scholar
Dickenson, D. 1997. Property, Women and Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Elson, D. 1989. ‘How is structural adjustment affecting women?’ Development 1, 67–74.Google Scholar
Foucault, M. 1988. Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. L. Kritzman. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Fraser, N. 1989. Unruly Practices: power, discourse and gender in contemporary social theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Frazer, E., and Lacey, N. 1993. The Politics of Community. Hemel Hampstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.Google Scholar
Goody, J. 1973. ‘Bridewealth and dowry in Africa and Eurasia’, in Goody, J. and Tambiah, S. (eds), Bridewealth and Dowry, pp. 1–58. Cambridge Papers in Social Anthropology 7. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gore, C. 1993. ‘Entitlement relations and “unruly” social practices: a comment on the work of Amartya Sen’, Journal of Development Studies 29, 429–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hirschman, A. O. 1993. The Rhetoric of Reaction. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
James, R. W., and Fimbo, G. M. 1973. Customary Land Law of Tanzania: a source book. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau.Google Scholar
James, W. 1978. ‘Matrifocus on African women’, in Ardener, S. (ed.), Defining Females: the nature of women in society, London: Malaby Press.Google Scholar
Kaijage, F. 1997. ‘Social Exclusion and the Social History of Disease: the impact of HIV/AIDS and the changing concept of the family in northwestern Tanzania’. Paper presented to history seminar, University of Dar es Salaam, 6 February.Google Scholar
Laclau, E., and Mouffe, C. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: towards a radical democratic politics. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Larsson, B. 1991. Conversion to Greater Freedom} Women, church and social change in north-west Tanzania under colonial rule. Studia Historia Upsaliensis. Uppsala: Uppsala University Press.Google Scholar
McClintock, A. 1992. ‘Screwing the system: sexwork, race, and the law’, Boundary 19 (2), 70–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Macdonald, R. A. 1998. ‘Metaphors of multiplicity: civil society, regimes and legal pluralism’, Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law 15, 69–91.Google Scholar
Maher, V. 1984. ‘Possession and dispossession: maternity and mortality in Morocco’, in Medick, H. and Sabean, D. (eds), Interest and Emotion: essays on the study of family and kinship, pp. 103–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Manji, A. 1999. ‘Imagining women's “legal world”: towards a feminist theory of legal pluralism in Africa’, Social and Legal Studies 8 (4), 435–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moore, S. F. 1978. Law as Process: an anthropological approach. London: Routledge. Reprinted 2000, Hamburg: Lit Verlag and Oxford: James Currey.Google Scholar
Mtenget-Migiro, R. 1991. ‘Legal development of women's rights to inherit land under customary law in Tanzania’, Verfassung und Recht in Übersee 24, 362–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Osmani, S. 1995. ‘The entitlement approach to famine: an assessment’, in Basu, K., Pattanaik, P. and Suzumura, K. (eds), Choice, Welfare and Development: a Festchrift in honour of Amartya K. Sen. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Ramazanoglu, C. (ed.). 1994. Up against Foucault. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Sen, A. 1981. Poverty and Famine: an essay on entitlement and deprivation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Sen, A. 1982. ‘The right not to be hungry’, in Floistad, G. (ed.), Contemporary Philosophy, pp. 343–60. The Hague: Nijhoff.Google Scholar
Sen, A. 1985. ‘Women, technology and sexual divisions’, Trade and Development 6, 195–223.Google Scholar
Sen, A. 1990. ‘Gender and co-operative conflicts’, in Tinker, I. (ed.), Persistent Inequalities: women and world development, pp. 23–149. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sen, A. 1992. Inequality Re-examined. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Sen, A., and Kynch, J. 1983. ‘Indian women: well-being and survival’ in ambridge Journal of Economics 7, 363–80.Google Scholar
Sen, A., and Kynch, J. 1990. ‘Women's survival as a development problem’, New York Review of Books, 20 December.Google Scholar
Stevens, L. 1995. ‘Bananas,babies, and women whobuy their graves: atrifocal values in a patrilineal Tanzanian society’, Canadian Journal of AfricanStudies 29, 454–80.Google Scholar
Swantz, M. 1977. ‘Strain and Strength among Peasant Women in Tanzania’. BRALUP Research Paper 49, Dar es Salaam: University of Dar es Salaam.Google Scholar
Tanner, N. 1974. ‘Matrifocality in Indonesia and Africa and among blackAmericans’, in Rosaldo, M. Z. and Lamphere, L. (eds), Women, Culture andSociety. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Thomson, E. P. 1991. Customs in Common. London: Merlin Press.Google Scholar
Wallman, S. 1996. Kampala Women Getting By: well-being in the time of AIDS. London: James Currey.Google Scholar
Weiss, B. 1993. ‘“Buying her grave”: money, movement and AIDS in northwest Tanzania’, Africa 63 (1), 19–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weiss, B. 1997. The Making and Unmaking of the Haya lived World. Durham NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
White, L. 1990. The Comforts of Home: prostitution in colonial Nairobi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woodman, G. R. 1998. ‘Ideological combat and social observation: recent debate about legal pluralism’, Journal of Legal Pluralism 42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar