(eBook PDF) Gendered Worlds 4th

Edition
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/ebook-pdf-gendered-worlds-4th-edition/
 Sexual Violence in Men’s Prisons
Gendered Violence in Conflict Zones
Central and South America: A Case Study
Working to End Violence
New Social Movements
Finding Solutions

9 Health and Illness

Health and Illness as Social Issues
Nation and Life Expectancy
Health and the Division of Labor
The Health Risks and Benefits of Women’s Employment in the Global North
Poor Women’s Health Risks on the Job in the Global South
Sexual and Reproductive Health
Toxins and Reproductive Risk for Men
Gendered Illness
Men’s Body Crises
Masculinity as a Health Risk
Stratification and Inequality in Health Care Professions
Care Work: The Unpaid and Low Paid Foundation of Health Care
Health Care Flashpoints: Abortion and HIV/AIDS
Abortion
The HIV/Aids Pandemic
Behavioral and Educational Approaches to Addressing HIV
Structural Violence and the Women’s Epidemic
The Need for Structural Change

10 Politics: Elections, Prisons, and the Military

Politics and the State
Electoral Politics
Voting Rights
The Gender Gap in Elections
Women Elected Officials
What Difference Does It Make?
Why So Few Women?
Three Models for Reform
Meritocratic Remedies
Affirmative Action Remedies
Radical Remedies
Political Institutions: The Courts and Prisons
 Young People in the Criminal Justice System
Why Are Men So Much More Likely to Be in Prison?
Political Institutions: The Military
Women in Combat
Sexual and Gender Harassment in the Military
Why the Hostility Against Women in the Military?
Masculinity and Heterosexuality in the Military
Why Are Differences in the Treatment of Women in the Military Important?
Be Careful What You Wish For
Women and Peace
What Is Political?

11 Popular Culture and the Media

Persuasion
Gender on Television
Reality TV and Gender
LGBT on TV
Missing Women in the Television Industry
The News Room
Symbolic Annihilation
Gender in Advertising
Advertising Masculinity
Men and Beer
Advertising Gender in Three Nations
Gender in U.S. Advertising
Gender in Turkish Advertising
Gender in Japanese Advertising
Gender in Film
Children’s Movies
Sexualization of Girls and Women in Media
Gender and the Internet
Media Theory
Music Videos

12 Sports
Sports and Masculinity
Women Navigating Masculine Athletics
Changing the Field
Bringing Women into Sports
What Continues to Hold Women Back?
Homophobia and Heterosexism in Sports
Assimilation or Reform?
13 Religion
Religion as an Institution
Abrahamic Religions
Catholicism
Islam
Buddhism
Fundamentalism on Gender Relations
Muslim Fundamentalism
Christian Fundamentalism
Fundamentalist Views of Masculinity
Evangelical Feminists
Hindu Fundamentalism
Women in the Pulpit
Religion as a Base of Resistance
Women Activists in Sri Lanka
Religion in the American Civil Rights Movement
Challenging Religions
What Difference Would More Gender-Equal Religions Make?
Feminist Theoretical Models
What If There Were No Religions?

Glossary
Credits
Index
Talking About
BOX 1.1: Hegemonic Masculinity and Supermen
BOX 2.1: The Heterosexual Matrix
BOX 2.2: “Where Do You Fit?”
BOX 2.3: Intersex Activism
BOX 2.4: Commonality
BOX 2.5: Bathroom Politics
BOX 2.6: The International Bill of Gender Rights, Adopted June 17,
1995, Houston, Texas, USA
BOX 2.7: Ancient Beliefs about Human Anatomy
BOX 2.8: Latino, Latina, Latinx, and Rejecting the Binary
BOX 3.1: Asexuality
BOX 3.2: Women’s Liberation
BOX 3.3: The Stonewall Monument
BOX 3.4: Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson
BOX 3.5: Men Who Have Sex with Men
BOX 3.6: Heterosexism and Heterosexual Privilege
BOX 3.7: “Is My Son Gay?”
BOX 4.1: Presenting Gender
BOX 4.2: Hansel and Gretel
BOX 4.3: Tokenism: The Smurfette Syndrome
BOX 4.4: A World Without Gender
BOX 5.1: Addressing Bias in the K–12 Classroom
BOX 5.2: Coed versus Single-Sex Schools and Classrooms
BOX 5.3: What’s Your Major?
BOX 5.4: Student Evaluations
BOX 6.1: Emotional Labor
BOX 6.2: Makeup
BOX 6.3: LGBTQ Rights in the Workplace
BOX 6.4: Sexual Harassment in the Workplace
BOX 6.5: World Poverty
BOX 6.6: Agricultural Workers, Hunger, and Gender
BOX 7.1: Promoting Marriage in Japan and Korea
BOX 7.2: Lesbian Mothers
BOX 7.3: Free Riders
BOX 7.4: Fathers
BOX 7.5: Child Care, Finnish Style
BOX 8.1: Acid Attacks
BOX 8.2: Campus Rape
BOX 8.3: Criminalizing Battered Women
BOX 8.4: Fraternities
BOX 8.5: The Thomas Theorem and Trayvon Martin
BOX 8.6: Tactics in #MeToo
BOX 8.7: Black Lives Matter
BOX 9.1: Danger on the Highways
BOX 9.2: Palm Oil Plantations in Malaysia
BOX 9.3: Cervical Cancer
BOX 9.4: Privatizing Water
BOX 9.5: Pain
BOX 9.6: Bollywood Bodies and Steroids
BOX 9.7: LGBTQ Health and Illness
BOX 9.8: Care Workers Take Action
BOX 9.9: How to Be a Change-Maker
BOX 10.1: Chinese Villages
BOX 10.2: Bystanders
BOX 10.3: Immigrant Women Take the Lead
BOX 10.4: Gender Quotas
BOX 10.5: Pregnant Women, Drugs, and Child Endangerment
BOX 10.6: Women Prisoners
BOX 10.7: Military Training
BOX 10.8: Transgender in the Military
BOX 11.1: YouTube and Children
BOX 11.2: Thin Girls and Fat Boys
BOX 11.3: Diversity Versus Normalizing
BOX 11.4: “Who Tells Us the News?”
BOX 11.5: Regulating Advertising
BOX 11.6: Top Ten Films Worldwide (in millions of dollars)
BOX 11.7: North, South, Hegemony, and Resistance
BOX 12.1: Kids at the Pool
BOX 12.2: Taking a Knee
BOX 12.3: Throwing Like a Girl
BOX 12.4: Team USA
BOX 12.5: Professional Cheerleading
BOX 12.6: Olympic Women
BOX 12.7: Black LGBTQ Athletes
BOX 13.1: Sunday School Curricula
BOX 13.2: Hijab and the Government
BOX 13.3: Stay-at-Home Daughters
BOX 13.4: Women Priests
BOX 13.5: Christianity In The White Nationalist Movement
BOX 13.6: Women’s Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement
BOX 13.7: Goddess Worship
Preface
The first edition of this book was a work of faith—faith that we could
grasp the massive wealth of gender scholarship in one brief volume. This
fourth edition is our continued effort to tap into the global discussions on
gender and to introduce our readers to an even broader array of empirical
research and theory-building that increasingly makes feminist scholarship
so crucial today.
This book is our attempt to bring together the multiple strands of
gender studies and related research on everything from the local and
everyday manifestations of masculinities and femininities to the gendered
institutions that undergird today’s global politics and social crises. To
accomplish this objective, each chapter builds on five principles.
First, we weave together theory and empirical data. The book gathers
scholarship—mainly sociological, but also interdisciplinary—that has
accumulated in many substantive areas. For example, readers will learn
about research on the gender of violence and how it affects families, as
well as how gender, together with race/ethnicity, social class, and
sexuality, shapes media, sports, politics, sexual rights, religion, education,
health, and bodies. Theories that have grown out of and alongside this
research provide frameworks for interpreting the issues presented in each
chapter, allowing students to see how theory emerges from and helps to
explain empirical studies.
Second, we connect personal experiences with sociological concepts
by offering both social constructionist and social structural approaches to
gender that explain the production of inequalities in face-to-face
interactions within organizations as well as the gendered character of the
institutions themselves. We ask how the gendered features of our everyday
lives are given life, shape, and meaning by these larger organizations and
institutions; and how we, in turn, act back on these structures to reimagine
social relationships and social structures that could move us toward a
more just world.
 Third, this is a book about gender as an inclusive concept. Often,
people conflate gender studies with women’s studies, but men’s lives, too,
are shaped by gender; and the experiences of transgender, gender
nonconforming, and intersex people show how gender enters everyone’s
life. In fact, a discussion of gender that focuses only on cisgender women
and cisgender men reinforces the myth of sex and gender binaries that
research shows are actually socially constructed and exclusionary
patriarchal tools. We invite the reader to join us in our attempt to uncover
and understand how the binary of woman/man is re-created on multiple
levels and how it might be eliminated by thinking and interacting with
each other differently, as well as by reorganizing our social institutions.
Fourth, this book reminds readers that there are differences within
groups. Inter-sectionality is an approach that recognizes that we are never
just gendered and sexed, but that we are all located in what black feminist
theorist Patricia Hill Collins called a “matrix of domination.” There is no
way to understand gender as a phenomenon separate from social class,
race/ethnicity, sexuality, and nation. Women are not a monolithic group;
they experience gender differently based on their race/ethnicity, for
example. This intersectional perspective is a feature of each chapter and is
intended to help readers better understand the complicated character of
power and inequality. Gendered identities are accomplishments, not fixed
states of being, and gender intersects with other social structures to
provide opportunities to some people while creating barriers for others.
Privilege and subordination are dynamic and variable, so that while some
men experience a massive amount of—taken-for-granted—privilege,
others are subordinated along racial/ethnic, national, sexual, and class
lines. In each chapter, we explore these advantages and disadvantages, as
well as how people are sometimes complicit in perpetuating but also often
resisting social inequalities.
Fifth, this book shoulders the enormous task of taking a global view.
Our goal is to help readers gain a sense of how culture, national identities,
and immigration and migration similarly or differently shape gender in
different places. We hope to encourage students to begin asking questions
about the many ways gender structures people’s lives all around the world.

CHANGES TO THE FOURTH EDITION

Updated data, both qualitative data and statistics, and streamlined the
presentation of information to make it more readable.
Clarified, further explained, and provided examples of topics based on
the suggestions of the thousands of students who have used this book in
courses taught by the authors.
Increased significantly the discussion of sexuality as a component of
gender and included more discussion of the experience of LGBTQ and
gender nonconforming people in every chapter.
Reversed the order of Chapters 3 and 4 to strengthen the logic of the text.
In addition, we have titled Chapter 4 Gender Theory as a jumping-off
place for considering the different levels at which gender operates in the
substantive topics covered in the rest of the chapters. Chapter 4 lays out
the fundamental sociological concepts of socialization, social
construction, and social institutions/social structure as interlocking
factors that shape our social interactions and our broader social world.
Revised the conceptualization of the book from being a repository of
information to being more of a teaching and learning tool. We have
retained the solid knowledge base by continuing to pack chapters with the
latest issues and research, but we have also altered the format of
information in many places to pose questions and move the readers from
being passive recipients to being engaged interpreters of information. For
example, we have added “Talking About” boxes throughout the chapters.
These boxes present photos and text and pose a series of questions that
call on students to not only review the topics but also to reflect on the
issues and to question their own thinking, as well as the authors’
presentation of material as they move through the text. We hope these
boxes prove useful to readers and, furthermore, will provide ready-made
discussion sections for instructors to use during class or as media
activities.

SUMMARY OF CHAPTERS
Chapter 1 provides a brief overview of the assumptions we make and the
tools we use throughout this book to introduce the reader to gender. The
chapter explains three basic ground rules for studying gender: life is
socially based and politically structured; gender is part of a larger web of
social inequalities; and scholarship is political. We also introduce the
overarching framework of the text: intersectionality.
Chapter 2 begins with the question of biology. Most people believe that
male and female, masculinity and femininity, and heterosexuality are
natural and normal. We discuss how biological, historical, and
anthropological research on intersex and transgender individuals
challenges this “standard story.” We show how not everyone is male or
female and explain that we overlook sex and gender diversity when we
assume that all “normal” males become heterosexually masculine and all
“normal” females become heterosexually feminine.
Chapter 3 focuses on sexuality as a key component of understanding
the relationships among sex, gender, and social power. We open with a
discussion of how the intersecting dimensions of gender, race/ethnicity,
class, and nation have historically shaped sexuality. While, currently, men
and women are often expected to be heterosexual, actual sex practices
offer much more complicated and interesting examples of the ways gender
identities enter into and produce sexual desires, sexual acts, and sexual
identities. Feminist, queer, and antiracist studies of sexuality have exposed
the political character of sexuality. The chapter moves from discussing the
construction of conventional sexualities by means of sexual scripts and
gendered double standards to describing the global politics of sex tourism
and sex trafficking, and exploring organized efforts by LGBTQ
communities to challenge normative sexualities and demand sexual human
rights.
If biology is not the basis of gender, then what is? Chapter 4 reviews
the sociological and social psychological theories scholars have developed
to explain the sources of gender. These theories look at three levels of
social life: socialization, social interaction, and social structure. We both
explain and critique these three theoretical approaches. We also show that,
when taken together, feminist theories on gender spotlight the
constructedness of our gendered worlds and thus open up possibilities for
change toward greater equality.
Chapter 5 makes clear that gender in education is not a simple story. In
some ways and in some places, girls and women are not allowed the same
opportunities in education as boys and men are, but gender in schools
creates problems for boys, too, especially for boys of color. Boys are more
likely to be diagnosed and treated for hyperactivity, for example. They
also have lower graduation rates, and black and Latino boys in the U.S. are
often stereotyped as potentially criminal and tracked out of the classroom
and into disciplinary spaces. Racism and poverty contribute to the
diminished education that many children receive, and when we look at the
intersection of these factors with gender in the global South, unexpected
problems become evident, such as how the lack of access to water and
toilets results in educational inequality.
Chapter 6 turns the lenses of gender, race/ethnicity, class, and nation
on local and global economies and on the gendered and raced character of
work. This chapter is divided into three broad issues: gender inequality in
the paid workforce; gender inequality in unpaid work; and gender
inequality in the global workforce. The chapter covers topics such as how
race/ethnicity intersects with gender to determine who encounters the
glass ceiling or who rides the glass elevator at work.
The family has been a contentious political issue in the United States
for many years, as conservatives hold its so-called decline responsible for
the ills of contemporary life. In Chapter 7, readers will have a chance to
draw their own conclusions about family life today. Does marriage really
prevent poverty? Will allowing same-sex marriage undermine marriage as
an institution, or will it give it new life? What is the purpose of marriage,
and whom does it serve? In addition to marriage, the chapter covers the
family issues of divorce, caregiving, and balancing work and family.
Chapter 8 shows that gender is a central feature of the continuum of
violence that stretches from our most intimate lives to the ongoing global
tragedies of militarism and war. Street harassment, rape, domestic
violence, gendered violence in prisons, militarist masculinity, wartime
rape, the enslavement of women by militias, sex trafficking, and growing
civilian casualties—what can explain such relentless and pervasive
gendered violence? This chapter reviews the complex intersections of
gender, nation, and race/ethnicity as a way of answering this question.
Inequalities of race/ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality shape our
relationship to violence, both as victims and as perpetrators. Feminist
movements to end violence are sweeping the globe, and so we discuss the
emergence of the #MeToo movement in the United States and Ni Una
Menos in South and Central America, as well as the work on the
International Criminal Court.
Chapter 9 recounts the many ways that health and illness are raced and
gendered around the globe. Everything we have explored up to this point
impacts the distribution of health and illness, including the sexual division
of paid and unpaid labor, the political economies and ruling orders of the
nations in which people live, and membership in particular sexual
communities. For example, how are men and women who work on Nestle-
and Kellogg-owned palm oil plantations in the global South facing risks
particular to local labor laws? This chapter also describes feminist and
antiracist social movements involving reproductive rights, including the
right to abortion. It also reviews the debate over how best to address the
HIV/AIDS pandemic. In addition, we discuss how local actions can grow
into transnational movements linking reproductive and general health to a
wide range of rights to housing, education, employment, and freedom
from violence.
Is changing the gender of officeholders sufficient to make positive
political change? According to studies we discuss in Chapter 10, the
evidence is mixed. This is because men dominate all channels of
contemporary politics around the world: electoral politics, the news
media, and the metaphors of political discourse—war and sports. These
issues are examined across nations, challenging the common belief among
Americans that the United States is a model of democracy by exploring
data on the participation of U.S. women in legislative and executive
positions compared to other nations. Policies that have made other nations
more gender equal in political representation are discussed, and readers
are asked to consider their efficacy and the barriers they might confront if
we were to attempt to implement them in the United States. Politics is not
just about elections and offices, however. Other political issues that are
also shaped by gender as well as race/ethnicity and class are reviewed in
this chapter, as are the prison system and the military. The chapter
concludes with a discussion of the conceptualization of power.
Our daily lives are saturated with media. The thousands of images and
messages we receive in these ways exhort us overtly or subtly to view,
experience, and act on the world in prescribed ways. Chapter 11 explores
how these messages are simultaneously gendered and raced, and often
sexualized. Some progress has been made, but gender stereotypes continue
to abound in all media forms. Women are still missing as subjects of
media stories and behind the scenes as reporters, writers, and producers.
While representations vary across borders and by race/ethnicity and age,
some factors are consistent, especially the underrepresentation of
transgender, queer individuals, and people of color. The chapter describes
these problems and discusses the notion of normalizing the diversity that
is our real social experience by emphasizing inclusion and rejecting
marginalization in media representations.
Chapter 12 covers the topic of sports. Historically, women have largely
been excluded from athletics, based on the widespread idea that femininity
does not include athletic ability or athletic experience. In contrast, being a
successful athlete and being a “real man” are closely related. Critics of
organized sports cite normalized violence, the weaponization of male
bodies, and excessive competitiveness as both physically and
psychologically damaging for men. For women, however, athletics can be
a space to challenge gender divisions and sexual barriers that have forced
queer athletes to hide their sexual identities and women athletes to
suppress their athletic performance and potential. Studying gender and
sports forces comparisons between the highly organized and competitive
fan-supported sports that have become big business and participation
sports that are more loosely and democratically organized activities.
In Chapter 13, we focus on gender and religion, one of the most loaded
topics of debate today, as we have seen the rise of religious
fundamentalism and the rise in hate crimes against religious minorities.
Ironically, although fundamentalist religions subordinate women in many
ways, more women than men are fundamentalists. But religious
communities, regardless of doctrine, can also be places where women find
support and space for some freedom of expression in otherwise restrictive
societies. Religion has played an important positive role in the civil rights,
peace, and antiwar movements, for example. Not all forms of spirituality
and religious organization constrain women; Ecofeminism has even
centered around the worship of goddesses. Ancient and indigenous
societies provide examples of forms of worship that were egalitarian and
that revered women’s bodies for their lifegiving abilities. Activists also
often resist constraints imposed on women within religions. Some
Catholics, for example, are calling for an end to the ban on women priests.
 Our world is filled with injustice, inequality, and pain. It is also filled
with hope and promise that grow from the many people who resist
injustices and promote potential and pleasure. We dedicate this book to
furthering those ends.
Acknowledgments
Writing this book required the authors to learn new areas of research about
which they may initially have known little. Judy Aulette thanks Anna
Aulette-Root, Elizabeth Aulette-Root, and Albert Aulette for their help
with this work through their careful reading and essential feedback on
many drafts of chapters. In addition, she thanks them for living with this
project for so many years. She also thanks her most recent coauthor,
Kristen Barber, for bringing to the text greater awareness of sexuality as a
critical component of gender and the value of queer theory in
understanding the links among sex, gender, and sexuality. In addition,
Barber’s insights into how to transform the book into a teaching tool were
invaluable. Most importantly, Judy Aulette thanks her coauthor, Judith
Wittner, for her knowledge, creativity, tenacity, and especially her
friendship.
Judith Wittner thanks the members of her writing group, Susan Stall
and Martha Thompson, for their encouragement and support. Her thanks
also go to Judy Aulette for her handholding and great patience and to
Kristin Blakely for the intelligence and energy she brought to our project.
Special thanks to Jenny Wittner, Jorge, Nathaniel, and Alex Pinheiro, Liz
Wittner, and John, Mollie, Mario, and Lily Pepper.
Kristen Barber thanks Judy Aulette, Judith Wittner, and Sherith
Pankratz for bringing her on board as a coauthor. She is honored to be part
of such a comprehensive feminist project. She is also grateful to Annie
Johnson, who helped dig up new statistics and images to update the text,
and to Damien Ricklis, who is a pillar of support and provided input on
many of the chapters. While working on this book, Oliver Beau Barber-
Ricklis was born, joining his sibling, Beatrice Rose Barber-Ricklis.
Together, this voyager and peacemaker have made Kristen even more
dedicated to the feminist mission of inclusion, equity, and justice—a
mission guiding this book.
 We all thank Sherith Pankratz from Oxford University Press for
choosing to continue the project and inviting us to write a fourth edition.
And we thank Grace Li and William Murray for their careful attention to
all of the details in the final stages. Special thanks to the terrific
copyeditor, Betty Pessagno. Also special thanks to Soma Chaudhuri for
reviewing the chapter on violence and to Michael Messner for providing
exceptionally thoughtful suggestions on the sports chapter. We also are
grateful to additional reviewers who provided vital and supportive
suggestions that helped make this text something we are very proud of:
Nancy Provolt, Eastern Michigan University
Lisa DiDonato, David & Elkins College
Annamaria Formichella Elsden, Buena Vista University
Melissa M. Gosdin, Albany State University
Nancy Porter, Chestnut Hill College
Amy Sorenson, Radford University
Nivedita Vaidya, California State University, Los Angeles
2 anonymous reviewers
GENDERED WORLDS
1 CHAPTER
What is This Book About?

FIGURE 1.1: In 2017, the bronze statue, “Fearless Girl,” by artist Kristen Visbal, was placed in
front of Wall Street’s “Charging Bull” by Arturo Di Modica, which had been there since 1989 and
represented U.S. resiliency after the 1987 stock market crash. Following the Women’s March, the
Fearless Girl was installed by the investment management group, State Street Global Advisors, to
mark International Women’s Day. While some people called her an advertising ploy, other people
rallied behind the sentiment of courage and independence, and so the statue remained in place
well beyond the few weeks for which she was scheduled. In 2018, Fearless Girl was permanently
installed across from the New York Stock Exchange. Why do you think the presence of the
Fearless Girl resonated with so many people? How does the Charging Bull represent masculinity,
and what does it say about the United States to have the bull serve as a symbol of national
character? Would the Fearless Girl have been received differently by the public if she had not been
installed just after the 2017 Women’s March?

LEARNING OBJECTIVES
> Identify and explain three basic ground rules for studying gender: Life is
socially based and politically structured; gender is part of a larger web of
social inequalities; and scholarship is political.
> Understand the importance of variation in gender equity across the globe
by reviewing some empirical evidence ranking different nations.
> Know how intersectional analysis is key to understanding gender in a
global context.
> Be able to define the concepts: sex, gender, hegemonic masculinities,
emphasized femininities, and transnational feminism.

Introduction
Climate change and the environmental disasters that accompany it would
seem to be issues that touch all human beings in the same way. But when a
tsunami hit Indonesia in 2004 killing more than a quarter of a million
people, 75% of them were women (Oxfam 2005). This scenario is not
unusual. Women typically far outnumber men in mortalities resulting from
environmental disasters. This effect is strongest in countries where women
have few social and economic rights (Neumayer and Pluemper 2007; Juran
2012).
Physical differences between men and women do not explain the higher
mortality rate for women in disasters. In the case of the tsunami, for
example, some men may have survived because of greater physical strength
that allowed them to hang on to trees or to stay afloat. But not all men are
stronger than women, and there tend to be more in-group than between-
group differences in terms of size and abilities. For example, supermodel
Petra Nemcova was strong enough to survive the tsunami by clinging to a
palm tree for eight hours with a broken pelvis. Social factors were far more
significant, especially the social factor of gender (Oxfam 2005; Doocy et
al. 2007). Reports on the tsunami identify a number of gendered issues that
contributed to women being more likely to have died:

Swimming and tree climbing were taught mainly to boys. These skills
were essential to survival when the waves of the tsunami hit land.
Women were indoors, whereas men were more likely to be outside
working, shopping, and socializing; therefore, information warning
residents to leave the area reached women later than men who were out in
public.
Responsibilities for others, especially children and adult dependents,
prevented women from moving fast enough to escape the floods. In Aceh,
for example, many women were found dead with babies still clutched in
their arms. Some personal accounts from survivors tell of mothers pushing
their children to safety on buildings or trees that withstood the tsunami,
but being swept away themselves.
The same division of labor that placed women indoors and in charge of
dependents placed men in fishing boats at sea (a tsunami wave is not as
dangerous at sea as when it crashes to shore), farming in agricultural areas
away from the beach, or serving as soldiers in conflict areas away from
the shore, making them less likely to be affected.
Long dresses women wore inhibited their ability to run or swim to save
themselves from the floods. In addition, some women who were in their
homes but casually dressed when the first wave struck ran to put on
culturally “acceptable” outdoor clothes before seeking safety and as a
result drowned or barely escaped (Juran 2012).

Are you surprised that gender played such an important role in determining
whether people lived or died in this environmental disaster? Do the
differences in gender seem relatively insignificant if they are taken out of
context? For example, would you have thought that gender differences in
clothing or play activities like swimming and tree climbing could be so
important?
The tsunami scenario emphasizes gender differences. You are probably
familiar with the images of devastation following Hurricane Katrina that
revealed the importance of race/ethnicity and social class in that disaster. If
you look at images of the people desperately weathering the flood at the
Superdome—a shelter of last resort—many were women. Why is this? How
did gender add to or interact with the racial/ethnic and class inequalities
that made it more difficult for poor black women to survive the storm and
its aftermath (Deitz and Barber 2015)?
The researchers who studied the tsunami argue that biology had little to
do with differences in survival. What do you think of this argument in
general? Is gender mostly a function of biology? Or are social factors most
important? And what exactly is gender? Is gender a problem only for
women? Or does gender cause problems for men, too? And what can we
learn about gender by looking at the lives of gender-nonconforming
individuals?
The tsunami describes a situation in Asia, but how does gender affect
people’s lives around the globe? Why is it important to consider other
social factors, including race/ethnicity, social class, sexuality, and
immigration status, for example, to really understand the effects of gender
on groups of people? How are gender expectations being challenged locally
and globally? And how might these changes reshape our relationships,
behavioral expectations, structural opportunities, and institutional
protections?
These are the kinds of questions we will be asking in this text. Our goal
is to explore how gender appears in every corner of our lives and every
section of the globe. Before the tsunami, very few scholars had ever
considered the connections between gender, environmental disasters, and
mortality (Enarson and Morrow 1998). Every day, researchers are
discovering new situations in which gender critically impacts people’s
lives. We will be trying to keep up with them as we travel around the world
looking for gender and seeking ways to understand how it works, what its
effects are, and the ways we might address the problems it causes.

SOME GROUND RULES FOR STUDYING GENDER

Determining a place to begin answering questions about gender is difficult.
What to focus on and what to ignore are challenging issues. In this book,
we approach the subjects with three assumptions: life is socially based and
politically structured; gender is part of a larger web of social inequalities;
and scholarship is political. These assumptions reflect a critical approach
to understanding gender as a complicated and often invisible structure that
profoundly shapes people’s lives around the world in myriad ways.

Life Is Socially Based and Politically Structured

Like many features of social life, we all build explanations about the world
based on our own experiences and observations of gender. Our familiarity
with the topic, however, means we may take a lot for granted and thus
accept the conventional wisdom of our time. In addition, our experiences
are limited to, well, our experiences. One aspect of conventional wisdom
about both sex and gender is the belief that these ideas are biological
certainties: all humans are male or female; men are inherently masculine
and women are feminine; and these categories are inborn, natural,
unchanging givens. This book challenges these ideas by emphasizing the
social character of gender. We will also be noting contemporary global
shifts in gender and sexual policing, movements, and identities. For
example, recent changes in gender include the increasing number of people,
especially young people, who are openly trans and gender nonconforming
(Davis 2018). Gender is complex, variable, and dynamic, and in our
examination of the issues, we will need to be constantly aware of these
factors.
In addition to asking you to critically reconsider biological
explanations, we propose that gender never stands alone. In order to
understand its social construction, we also must look at the organization of
other relations of power, especially race/ethnicity, class, and sexuality, and
how they intersect with gender to differently shape our identities and our
interpersonal and structural experiences. For example, how do all these
things come together to shape our educational opportunities, work lives,
and risk of interpersonal violence?
You will notice in this book that we use the term “race/ethnicity” rather
than separating these two factors. We do this because the distinction
between the two terms implies that race is a biological factor, while
ethnicity is a social one. Since we regard both race and ethnicity as social
factors that are intertwined, we have combined the terms to remind us that
neither has anything to do with biology but both are socially constructed
and have enormous social consequences. We also maintain that sex, gender,
and sexuality are socially constructed and that these three concepts have
been defined differently over time and across cultures. This book is
dedicated to showing how and with what consequences sex, gender,
race/ethnicity, and sexuality are social constructions, not biological truths.
In addition, we explain how these constructions work together to create
hierarchical relations between groups of people within power systems
where some are privileged at the expense of others.

Gender is Part of a Larger Web of Social Inequalities

This book explores gender inequalities, their consequences, and the
movements around the world that are challenging them. We emphasize the
plural character of inequality because gender does not stand alone in
limiting or providing opportunities and compensation, for example.
Instead, we live in a world built atop gendered differences intertwined with
hierarchies of race/ethnicity and sexuality, but also put together by class-
based systems of power at the global level: patriarchal oppression,
heterosexual privilege, the racist repercussions of colonization and
slavery, and the dynamics of global capitalism that feed the growing gap
between the rich and powerful few and the disenfranchised many.
Sometimes scholars use the word lenses to talk about the complexity of
social life. If you were to put on a pair of glasses that allowed you to see
only objects that were green and another pair that blocked everything but
blue or red, and so on, then each time you took off one pair of glasses and
put on another, you would see only a piece of the view and never the whole
picture. Similarly, if we investigate our social world using only one lens,
whether it is the lens of gender or that of race/ethnicity, class, nation, or
sexuality, we have a distorted view of history as well as of the present. In
this book, we put on our rainbow glasses and try to see a more
comprehensive wholistic panorama of the world, with all of its variations
and intersections.
In this book, we try to see the whole picture by considering diversity
within the United States but also diversity more globally by comparing and
contrasting differences among nations. Table 1-1 provides us with some
data that give us a glimpse of a global view of gender. In the next section,
we discuss the information provided in Table 1-1 and explore some of the
key comparisons. Throughout the book, we will investigate why these
differences exist by looking at how gender operates in varying contexts.

TABLE 1-1
The Global Gender Gap Index 2017 Rankings (highs and lows)
Country Highest Ten Ranks Score
Iceland 1 .88
Norway 2 .83
Finland 3 .82
Rwanda 4 .82
Sweden 5 .82
Nicaragua 6 .81
Slovenia 7 .80
Ireland 8 .80
New Zealand 9 .79
Philippines 10 .79
Country Lowest Ten Ranks Score
Jordon 135 .60
Morocco 136 .60
Lebanon 137 .60
Saudi Arabia 138 .59
Mali 139 .58
Iran 140 .58
Chad 141 .58
Syria 142 .57
Pakistan 143 .55
Yemen 144 .52
Source: World Economic Forum (2017).

GENDER GAP AROUND THE GLOBE. One of the most important goals we have
in this book is to present a global view of gender. The gender gap affects
everyone’s lives, but the way in which gender is constituted and
experienced varies across many social and political borders. The World
Economic Forum (WEF) ranks the inequity between men and women in
144 of the world’s approximately 195 nations. Table 1-1 lists the ten
countries with the least inequality and the ten countries with the most
inequality. We can see here that, according to these rankings, no country
has achieved gender equity. If you would like to see all of the nations’
rankings, as well as much more information on individual countries, check
out the full report: http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2017.pdf.
WEF ranks countries by evaluating four factors: economic participation
and opportunity; educational attainment; political empowerment; and
health and survival. The highest possible score a nation can receive is 1.00,
which would mean that women and men were 100% equal on all four
factors.
In the nations represented in the full table, equity ranges from .52 in
Yemen to .88 in Iceland. Some of the highest-ranked nations are what most
people would expect. They are located in Europe and Scandinavia, nations
that are known to value gender equality between women and men and to
have implemented strong policies to encourage it. Other high-ranking
nations, such as Rwanda, the Philippines, and Nicaragua, may be more
surprising, since we don’t hear about them in discussions of gender as
often.
These numbers have been compiled annually following changes that
have occurred over the past few decades. The rankings and the scores of the
top rated countries have nearly completely closed the gap between women
and men in health outcomes (96%) and educational attainment (95%). The
gap between women and men remains wide in economic outcomes (59%)
and political outcomes (23%) (WEF 2017).
The numbers in Table 1-1 give us one way to make comparisons around
the globe, but we also don’t want to forget the gaps that exist within
nations. The numbers for each nation, for example, hide the diversity of
experience among racial/ethnic groups and social classes within each
nation. In addition, statistics for trans or gender nonconforming individuals
would surely reveal a gap in all of the measures between them and
cisgender individuals. The term cisgender might be a new one for you. In
Chapter 2 we will discuss the term more extensively, but for now just
remember that cisgender refers to people whose gender identity
corresponds with the sex to which they were assigned when they were born
(Gingerich 2017).
Scholarship is Political
Sociologists have long debated whether the study of human beings can be
based on a model that demands distanced “objectivity” and that promotes
the idea that only experts can tell us all we need to know about social life.
Writing in the third person and avoiding the use of “I” in formal scientific
papers, for example, evokes what Donna Haraway (1988) refers to as the
“god trick” that gives the impression research findings are being made and
reported by disembodied unbiased authorities (Haraway 1988, 581). More
than six decades of feminist activism and research have developed the
alternative idea—standpoint epistemology—which asserts that
researchers cannot and should not claim to be neutral. The questions
researchers ask, how they go about designing studies to investigate these
questions, and how they make sense of their findings are all shaped by their
social locations, their political beliefs, and their personal biographies.
Feminists argue that, rather than claiming objectivity, researchers
should acknowledge that their political opinions and interests shape their
studies and identify exactly what those opinions and interests are.
Feminists also support and conduct research that amplifies the voices of
people at the bottom of power systems of gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality,
and class. As a challenge to the history of the scientific community—the
experts—speaking for disenfranchised people, building knowledge from
the perceptions and lives of the marginalized and least powerful members
of society produces knowledge for—not just about—people (Smith 1999).
Promoting research that gives voice to those who are most marginalized is
not only more just, it is also more valid because it allows us to obtain the
fullest view of social life.
This book is written in the tradition of the scholars who take this
alternative, political view of scholarship. We seek to replace the “view
from above” with the “view from below” by exploring the lives of people
who have often been invisible, ignored, censored, or oppressed (Mies
1986). The topics we examine and the perspective we take emphasize the
point of view of those who are marginalized by gender as well as by
race/ethnicity, sexuality, social class, nation, and religion. This does not
mean we ignore privilege. We consider inequality a double-sided coin that
privileges a few at the expense of many. By writing from the perspective of
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 DANCE ON STILTS AT THE GIRLS’ UNYAGO, NIUCHI

Newala, too, suffers from the distance of its water-supply—at least

the Newala of to-day does; there was once another Newala in a lovely
valley at the foot of the plateau. I visited it and found scarcely a trace
of houses, only a Christian cemetery, with the graves of several
missionaries and their converts, remaining as a monument of its
former glories. But the surroundings are wonderfully beautiful. A
thick grove of splendid mango-trees closes in the weather-worn
crosses and headstones; behind them, combining the useful and the
agreeable, is a whole plantation of lemon-trees covered with ripe
fruit; not the small African kind, but a much larger and also juicier
imported variety, which drops into the hands of the passing traveller,
without calling for any exertion on his part. Old Newala is now under
the jurisdiction of the native pastor, Daudi, at Chingulungulu, who,
as I am on very friendly terms with him, allows me, as a matter of
course, the use of this lemon-grove during my stay at Newala.
 FEET MUTILATED BY THE RAVAGES OF THE “JIGGER”
(Sarcopsylla penetrans)

The water-supply of New Newala is in the bottom of the valley,

some 1,600 feet lower down. The way is not only long and fatiguing,
but the water, when we get it, is thoroughly bad. We are suffering not
only from this, but from the fact that the arrangements at Newala are
nothing short of luxurious. We have a separate kitchen—a hut built
against the boma palisade on the right of the baraza, the interior of
which is not visible from our usual position. Our two cooks were not
long in finding this out, and they consequently do—or rather neglect
to do—what they please. In any case they do not seem to be very
particular about the boiling of our drinking-water—at least I can
attribute to no other cause certain attacks of a dysenteric nature,
from which both Knudsen and I have suffered for some time. If a
man like Omari has to be left unwatched for a moment, he is capable
of anything. Besides this complaint, we are inconvenienced by the
state of our nails, which have become as hard as glass, and crack on
the slightest provocation, and I have the additional infliction of
pimples all over me. As if all this were not enough, we have also, for
the last week been waging war against the jigger, who has found his
Eldorado in the hot sand of the Makonde plateau. Our men are seen
all day long—whenever their chronic colds and the dysentery likewise
raging among them permit—occupied in removing this scourge of
Africa from their feet and trying to prevent the disastrous
consequences of its presence. It is quite common to see natives of
this place with one or two toes missing; many have lost all their toes,
or even the whole front part of the foot, so that a well-formed leg
ends in a shapeless stump. These ravages are caused by the female of
Sarcopsylla penetrans, which bores its way under the skin and there
develops an egg-sac the size of a pea. In all books on the subject, it is
stated that one’s attention is called to the presence of this parasite by
an intolerable itching. This agrees very well with my experience, so
far as the softer parts of the sole, the spaces between and under the
toes, and the side of the foot are concerned, but if the creature
penetrates through the harder parts of the heel or ball of the foot, it
may escape even the most careful search till it has reached maturity.
Then there is no time to be lost, if the horrible ulceration, of which
we see cases by the dozen every day, is to be prevented. It is much
easier, by the way, to discover the insect on the white skin of a
European than on that of a native, on which the dark speck scarcely
shows. The four or five jiggers which, in spite of the fact that I
constantly wore high laced boots, chose my feet to settle in, were
taken out for me by the all-accomplished Knudsen, after which I
thought it advisable to wash out the cavities with corrosive
sublimate. The natives have a different sort of disinfectant—they fill
the hole with scraped roots. In a tiny Makua village on the slope of
the plateau south of Newala, we saw an old woman who had filled all
the spaces under her toe-nails with powdered roots by way of
prophylactic treatment. What will be the result, if any, who can say?
The rest of the many trifling ills which trouble our existence are
really more comic than serious. In the absence of anything else to
smoke, Knudsen and I at last opened a box of cigars procured from
the Indian store-keeper at Lindi, and tried them, with the most
distressing results. Whether they contain opium or some other
narcotic, neither of us can say, but after the tenth puff we were both
“off,” three-quarters stupefied and unspeakably wretched. Slowly we
recovered—and what happened next? Half-an-hour later we were
once more smoking these poisonous concoctions—so insatiable is the
craving for tobacco in the tropics.
Even my present attacks of fever scarcely deserve to be taken
seriously. I have had no less than three here at Newala, all of which
have run their course in an incredibly short time. In the early
afternoon, I am busy with my old natives, asking questions and
making notes. The strong midday coffee has stimulated my spirits to
an extraordinary degree, the brain is active and vigorous, and work
progresses rapidly, while a pleasant warmth pervades the whole
body. Suddenly this gives place to a violent chill, forcing me to put on
my overcoat, though it is only half-past three and the afternoon sun
is at its hottest. Now the brain no longer works with such acuteness
and logical precision; more especially does it fail me in trying to
establish the syntax of the difficult Makua language on which I have
ventured, as if I had not enough to do without it. Under the
circumstances it seems advisable to take my temperature, and I do
so, to save trouble, without leaving my seat, and while going on with
my work. On examination, I find it to be 101·48°. My tutors are
abruptly dismissed and my bed set up in the baraza; a few minutes
later I am in it and treating myself internally with hot water and
lemon-juice.
Three hours later, the thermometer marks nearly 104°, and I make
them carry me back into the tent, bed and all, as I am now perspiring
heavily, and exposure to the cold wind just beginning to blow might
mean a fatal chill. I lie still for a little while, and then find, to my
great relief, that the temperature is not rising, but rather falling. This
is about 7.30 p.m. At 8 p.m. I find, to my unbounded astonishment,
that it has fallen below 98·6°, and I feel perfectly well. I read for an
hour or two, and could very well enjoy a smoke, if I had the
wherewithal—Indian cigars being out of the question.
Having no medical training, I am at a loss to account for this state
of things. It is impossible that these transitory attacks of high fever
should be malarial; it seems more probable that they are due to a
kind of sunstroke. On consulting my note-book, I become more and
more inclined to think this is the case, for these attacks regularly
follow extreme fatigue and long exposure to strong sunshine. They at
least have the advantage of being only short interruptions to my
work, as on the following morning I am always quite fresh and fit.
My treasure of a cook is suffering from an enormous hydrocele which
makes it difficult for him to get up, and Moritz is obliged to keep in
the dark on account of his inflamed eyes. Knudsen’s cook, a raw boy
from somewhere in the bush, knows still less of cooking than Omari;
consequently Nils Knudsen himself has been promoted to the vacant
post. Finding that we had come to the end of our supplies, he began
by sending to Chingulungulu for the four sucking-pigs which we had
bought from Matola and temporarily left in his charge; and when
they came up, neatly packed in a large crate, he callously slaughtered
the biggest of them. The first joint we were thoughtless enough to
entrust for roasting to Knudsen’s mshenzi cook, and it was
consequently uneatable; but we made the rest of the animal into a
jelly which we ate with great relish after weeks of underfeeding,
consuming incredible helpings of it at both midday and evening
meals. The only drawback is a certain want of variety in the tinned
vegetables. Dr. Jäger, to whom the Geographical Commission
entrusted the provisioning of the expeditions—mine as well as his
own—because he had more time on his hands than the rest of us,
seems to have laid in a huge stock of Teltow turnips,[46] an article of
food which is all very well for occasional use, but which quickly palls
when set before one every day; and we seem to have no other tins
left. There is no help for it—we must put up with the turnips; but I
am certain that, once I am home again, I shall not touch them for ten
years to come.
Amid all these minor evils, which, after all, go to make up the
genuine flavour of Africa, there is at least one cheering touch:
Knudsen has, with the dexterity of a skilled mechanic, repaired my 9
× 12 cm. camera, at least so far that I can use it with a little care.
How, in the absence of finger-nails, he was able to accomplish such a
ticklish piece of work, having no tool but a clumsy screw-driver for
taking to pieces and putting together again the complicated
mechanism of the instantaneous shutter, is still a mystery to me; but
he did it successfully. The loss of his finger-nails shows him in a light
contrasting curiously enough with the intelligence evinced by the
above operation; though, after all, it is scarcely surprising after his
ten years’ residence in the bush. One day, at Lindi, he had occasion
to wash a dog, which must have been in need of very thorough
cleansing, for the bottle handed to our friend for the purpose had an
extremely strong smell. Having performed his task in the most
conscientious manner, he perceived with some surprise that the dog
did not appear much the better for it, and was further surprised by
finding his own nails ulcerating away in the course of the next few
days. “How was I to know that carbolic acid has to be diluted?” he
mutters indignantly, from time to time, with a troubled gaze at his
mutilated finger-tips.
 Since we came to Newala we have been making excursions in all
directions through the surrounding country, in accordance with old
habit, and also because the akida Sefu did not get together the tribal
elders from whom I wanted information so speedily as he had
promised. There is, however, no harm done, as, even if seen only
from the outside, the country and people are interesting enough.
The Makonde plateau is like a large rectangular table rounded off
at the corners. Measured from the Indian Ocean to Newala, it is
about seventy-five miles long, and between the Rovuma and the
Lukuledi it averages fifty miles in breadth, so that its superficial area
is about two-thirds of that of the kingdom of Saxony. The surface,
however, is not level, but uniformly inclined from its south-western
edge to the ocean. From the upper edge, on which Newala lies, the
eye ranges for many miles east and north-east, without encountering
any obstacle, over the Makonde bush. It is a green sea, from which
here and there thick clouds of smoke rise, to show that it, too, is
inhabited by men who carry on their tillage like so many other
primitive peoples, by cutting down and burning the bush, and
manuring with the ashes. Even in the radiant light of a tropical day
such a fire is a grand sight.
Much less effective is the impression produced just now by the
great western plain as seen from the edge of the plateau. As often as
time permits, I stroll along this edge, sometimes in one direction,
sometimes in another, in the hope of finding the air clear enough to
let me enjoy the view; but I have always been disappointed.
Wherever one looks, clouds of smoke rise from the burning bush,
and the air is full of smoke and vapour. It is a pity, for under more
favourable circumstances the panorama of the whole country up to
the distant Majeje hills must be truly magnificent. It is of little use
taking photographs now, and an outline sketch gives a very poor idea
of the scenery. In one of these excursions I went out of my way to
make a personal attempt on the Makonde bush. The present edge of
the plateau is the result of a far-reaching process of destruction
through erosion and denudation. The Makonde strata are
everywhere cut into by ravines, which, though short, are hundreds of
yards in depth. In consequence of the loose stratification of these
beds, not only are the walls of these ravines nearly vertical, but their
upper end is closed by an equally steep escarpment, so that the
western edge of the Makonde plateau is hemmed in by a series of
deep, basin-like valleys. In order to get from one side of such a ravine
to the other, I cut my way through the bush with a dozen of my men.
It was a very open part, with more grass than scrub, but even so the
short stretch of less than two hundred yards was very hard work; at
the end of it the men’s calicoes were in rags and they themselves
bleeding from hundreds of scratches, while even our strong khaki
suits had not escaped scatheless.

NATIVE PATH THROUGH THE MAKONDE BUSH, NEAR

MAHUTA

I see increasing reason to believe that the view formed some time
back as to the origin of the Makonde bush is the correct one. I have
no doubt that it is not a natural product, but the result of human
occupation. Those parts of the high country where man—as a very
slight amount of practice enables the eye to perceive at once—has not
yet penetrated with axe and hoe, are still occupied by a splendid
timber forest quite able to sustain a comparison with our mixed
forests in Germany. But wherever man has once built his hut or tilled
his field, this horrible bush springs up. Every phase of this process
may be seen in the course of a couple of hours’ walk along the main
road. From the bush to right or left, one hears the sound of the axe—
not from one spot only, but from several directions at once. A few
steps further on, we can see what is taking place. The brush has been
cut down and piled up in heaps to the height of a yard or more,
between which the trunks of the large trees stand up like the last
pillars of a magnificent ruined building. These, too, present a
melancholy spectacle: the destructive Makonde have ringed them—
cut a broad strip of bark all round to ensure their dying off—and also
piled up pyramids of brush round them. Father and son, mother and
son-in-law, are chopping away perseveringly in the background—too
busy, almost, to look round at the white stranger, who usually excites
so much interest. If you pass by the same place a week later, the piles
of brushwood have disappeared and a thick layer of ashes has taken
the place of the green forest. The large trees stretch their
smouldering trunks and branches in dumb accusation to heaven—if
they have not already fallen and been more or less reduced to ashes,
perhaps only showing as a white stripe on the dark ground.
This work of destruction is carried out by the Makonde alike on the
virgin forest and on the bush which has sprung up on sites already
cultivated and deserted. In the second case they are saved the trouble
of burning the large trees, these being entirely absent in the
secondary bush.
After burning this piece of forest ground and loosening it with the
hoe, the native sows his corn and plants his vegetables. All over the
country, he goes in for bed-culture, which requires, and, in fact,
receives, the most careful attention. Weeds are nowhere tolerated in
the south of German East Africa. The crops may fail on the plains,
where droughts are frequent, but never on the plateau with its
abundant rains and heavy dews. Its fortunate inhabitants even have
the satisfaction of seeing the proud Wayao and Wamakua working
for them as labourers, driven by hunger to serve where they were
accustomed to rule.
But the light, sandy soil is soon exhausted, and would yield no
harvest the second year if cultivated twice running. This fact has
been familiar to the native for ages; consequently he provides in
time, and, while his crop is growing, prepares the next plot with axe
and firebrand. Next year he plants this with his various crops and
lets the first piece lie fallow. For a short time it remains waste and
desolate; then nature steps in to repair the destruction wrought by
man; a thousand new growths spring out of the exhausted soil, and
even the old stumps put forth fresh shoots. Next year the new growth
is up to one’s knees, and in a few years more it is that terrible,
impenetrable bush, which maintains its position till the black
occupier of the land has made the round of all the available sites and
come back to his starting point.
The Makonde are, body and soul, so to speak, one with this bush.
According to my Yao informants, indeed, their name means nothing
else but “bush people.” Their own tradition says that they have been
settled up here for a very long time, but to my surprise they laid great
stress on an original immigration. Their old homes were in the
south-east, near Mikindani and the mouth of the Rovuma, whence
their peaceful forefathers were driven by the continual raids of the
Sakalavas from Madagascar and the warlike Shirazis[47] of the coast,
to take refuge on the almost inaccessible plateau. I have studied
African ethnology for twenty years, but the fact that changes of
population in this apparently quiet and peaceable corner of the earth
could have been occasioned by outside enterprises taking place on
the high seas, was completely new to me. It is, no doubt, however,
correct.
The charming tribal legend of the Makonde—besides informing us
of other interesting matters—explains why they have to live in the
thickest of the bush and a long way from the edge of the plateau,
instead of making their permanent homes beside the purling brooks
and springs of the low country.
“The place where the tribe originated is Mahuta, on the southern
side of the plateau towards the Rovuma, where of old time there was
nothing but thick bush. Out of this bush came a man who never
washed himself or shaved his head, and who ate and drank but little.
He went out and made a human figure from the wood of a tree
growing in the open country, which he took home to his abode in the
bush and there set it upright. In the night this image came to life and
was a woman. The man and woman went down together to the
Rovuma to wash themselves. Here the woman gave birth to a still-
born child. They left that place and passed over the high land into the
valley of the Mbemkuru, where the woman had another child, which
was also born dead. Then they returned to the high bush country of
Mahuta, where the third child was born, which lived and grew up. In
course of time, the couple had many more children, and called
themselves Wamatanda. These were the ancestral stock of the
Makonde, also called Wamakonde,[48] i.e., aborigines. Their
forefather, the man from the bush, gave his children the command to
bury their dead upright, in memory of the mother of their race who
was cut out of wood and awoke to life when standing upright. He also
warned them against settling in the valleys and near large streams,
for sickness and death dwelt there. They were to make it a rule to
have their huts at least an hour’s walk from the nearest watering-
place; then their children would thrive and escape illness.”
The explanation of the name Makonde given by my informants is
somewhat different from that contained in the above legend, which I
extract from a little book (small, but packed with information), by
Pater Adams, entitled Lindi und sein Hinterland. Otherwise, my
results agree exactly with the statements of the legend. Washing?
Hapana—there is no such thing. Why should they do so? As it is, the
supply of water scarcely suffices for cooking and drinking; other
people do not wash, so why should the Makonde distinguish himself
by such needless eccentricity? As for shaving the head, the short,
woolly crop scarcely needs it,[49] so the second ancestral precept is
likewise easy enough to follow. Beyond this, however, there is
nothing ridiculous in the ancestor’s advice. I have obtained from
various local artists a fairly large number of figures carved in wood,
ranging from fifteen to twenty-three inches in height, and
representing women belonging to the great group of the Mavia,
Makonde, and Matambwe tribes. The carving is remarkably well
done and renders the female type with great accuracy, especially the
keloid ornamentation, to be described later on. As to the object and
meaning of their works the sculptors either could or (more probably)
would tell me nothing, and I was forced to content myself with the
scanty information vouchsafed by one man, who said that the figures
were merely intended to represent the nembo—the artificial
deformations of pelele, ear-discs, and keloids. The legend recorded
by Pater Adams places these figures in a new light. They must surely
be more than mere dolls; and we may even venture to assume that
they are—though the majority of present-day Makonde are probably
unaware of the fact—representations of the tribal ancestress.
 The references in the legend to the descent from Mahuta to the
Rovuma, and to a journey across the highlands into the Mbekuru
valley, undoubtedly indicate the previous history of the tribe, the
travels of the ancestral pair typifying the migrations of their
descendants. The descent to the neighbouring Rovuma valley, with
its extraordinary fertility and great abundance of game, is intelligible
at a glance—but the crossing of the Lukuledi depression, the ascent
to the Rondo Plateau and the descent to the Mbemkuru, also lie
within the bounds of probability, for all these districts have exactly
the same character as the extreme south. Now, however, comes a
point of especial interest for our bacteriological age. The primitive
Makonde did not enjoy their lives in the marshy river-valleys.
Disease raged among them, and many died. It was only after they
had returned to their original home near Mahuta, that the health
conditions of these people improved. We are very apt to think of the
African as a stupid person whose ignorance of nature is only equalled
by his fear of it, and who looks on all mishaps as caused by evil
spirits and malignant natural powers. It is much more correct to
assume in this case that the people very early learnt to distinguish
districts infested with malaria from those where it is absent.
This knowledge is crystallized in the
ancestral warning against settling in the
valleys and near the great waters, the
dwelling-places of disease and death. At the
same time, for security against the hostile
Mavia south of the Rovuma, it was enacted
that every settlement must be not less than a
certain distance from the southern edge of the
plateau. Such in fact is their mode of life at the
present day. It is not such a bad one, and
certainly they are both safer and more
comfortable than the Makua, the recent
intruders from the south, who have made USUAL METHOD OF
good their footing on the western edge of the CLOSING HUT-DOOR
plateau, extending over a fairly wide belt of
country. Neither Makua nor Makonde show in their dwellings
anything of the size and comeliness of the Yao houses in the plain,
especially at Masasi, Chingulungulu and Zuza’s. Jumbe Chauro, a
Makonde hamlet not far from Newala, on the road to Mahuta, is the
most important settlement of the tribe I have yet seen, and has fairly
spacious huts. But how slovenly is their construction compared with
the palatial residences of the elephant-hunters living in the plain.
The roofs are still more untidy than in the general run of huts during
the dry season, the walls show here and there the scanty beginnings
or the lamentable remains of the mud plastering, and the interior is a
veritable dog-kennel; dirt, dust and disorder everywhere. A few huts
only show any attempt at division into rooms, and this consists
merely of very roughly-made bamboo partitions. In one point alone
have I noticed any indication of progress—in the method of fastening
the door. Houses all over the south are secured in a simple but
ingenious manner. The door consists of a set of stout pieces of wood
or bamboo, tied with bark-string to two cross-pieces, and moving in
two grooves round one of the door-posts, so as to open inwards. If
the owner wishes to leave home, he takes two logs as thick as a man’s
upper arm and about a yard long. One of these is placed obliquely
against the middle of the door from the inside, so as to form an angle
of from 60° to 75° with the ground. He then places the second piece
horizontally across the first, pressing it downward with all his might.
It is kept in place by two strong posts planted in the ground a few
inches inside the door. This fastening is absolutely safe, but of course
cannot be applied to both doors at once, otherwise how could the
owner leave or enter his house? I have not yet succeeded in finding
out how the back door is fastened.

MAKONDE LOCK AND KEY AT JUMBE CHAURO

 This is the general way of closing a house. The Makonde at Jumbe
Chauro, however, have a much more complicated, solid and original
one. Here, too, the door is as already described, except that there is
only one post on the inside, standing by itself about six inches from
one side of the doorway. Opposite this post is a hole in the wall just
large enough to admit a man’s arm. The door is closed inside by a
large wooden bolt passing through a hole in this post and pressing
with its free end against the door. The other end has three holes into
which fit three pegs running in vertical grooves inside the post. The
door is opened with a wooden key about a foot long, somewhat
curved and sloped off at the butt; the other end has three pegs
corresponding to the holes, in the bolt, so that, when it is thrust
through the hole in the wall and inserted into the rectangular
opening in the post, the pegs can be lifted and the bolt drawn out.[50]

MODE OF INSERTING THE KEY

With no small pride first one householder and then a second

showed me on the spot the action of this greatest invention of the
Makonde Highlands. To both with an admiring exclamation of
“Vizuri sana!” (“Very fine!”). I expressed the wish to take back these
marvels with me to Ulaya, to show the Wazungu what clever fellows
the Makonde are. Scarcely five minutes after my return to camp at
Newala, the two men came up sweating under the weight of two
heavy logs which they laid down at my feet, handing over at the same
time the keys of the fallen fortress. Arguing, logically enough, that if
the key was wanted, the lock would be wanted with it, they had taken
their axes and chopped down the posts—as it never occurred to them
to dig them out of the ground and so bring them intact. Thus I have
two badly damaged specimens, and the owners, instead of praise,
come in for a blowing-up.
The Makua huts in the environs of Newala are especially
miserable; their more than slovenly construction reminds one of the
temporary erections of the Makua at Hatia’s, though the people here
have not been concerned in a war. It must therefore be due to
congenital idleness, or else to the absence of a powerful chief. Even
the baraza at Mlipa’s, a short hour’s walk south-east of Newala,
shares in this general neglect. While public buildings in this country
are usually looked after more or less carefully, this is in evident
danger of being blown over by the first strong easterly gale. The only
attractive object in this whole district is the grave of the late chief
Mlipa. I visited it in the morning, while the sun was still trying with
partial success to break through the rolling mists, and the circular
grove of tall euphorbias, which, with a broken pot, is all that marks
the old king’s resting-place, impressed one with a touch of pathos.
Even my very materially-minded carriers seemed to feel something
of the sort, for instead of their usual ribald songs, they chanted
solemnly, as we marched on through the dense green of the Makonde
bush:—
 “We shall arrive with the great master; we stand in a row and have
no fear about getting our food and our money from the Serkali (the
Government). We are not afraid; we are going along with the great
master, the lion; we are going down to the coast and back.”
With regard to the characteristic features of the various tribes here
on the western edge of the plateau, I can arrive at no other
conclusion than the one already come to in the plain, viz., that it is
impossible for anyone but a trained anthropologist to assign any
given individual at once to his proper tribe. In fact, I think that even
an anthropological specialist, after the most careful examination,
might find it a difficult task to decide. The whole congeries of peoples
collected in the region bounded on the west by the great Central
African rift, Tanganyika and Nyasa, and on the east by the Indian
Ocean, are closely related to each other—some of their languages are
only distinguished from one another as dialects of the same speech,
and no doubt all the tribes present the same shape of skull and
structure of skeleton. Thus, surely, there can be no very striking
differences in outward appearance.
 Even did such exist, I should have no time
to concern myself with them, for day after day,
I have to see or hear, as the case may be—in
any case to grasp and record—an
extraordinary number of ethnographic
phenomena. I am almost disposed to think it
fortunate that some departments of inquiry, at
least, are barred by external circumstances.
Chief among these is the subject of iron-
working. We are apt to think of Africa as a
country where iron ore is everywhere, so to
speak, to be picked up by the roadside, and
where it would be quite surprising if the
inhabitants had not learnt to smelt the
material ready to their hand. In fact, the
knowledge of this art ranges all over the
continent, from the Kabyles in the north to the
Kafirs in the south. Here between the Rovuma
and the Lukuledi the conditions are not so
favourable. According to the statements of the
Makonde, neither ironstone nor any other
form of iron ore is known to them. They have
not therefore advanced to the art of smelting
the metal, but have hitherto bought all their
THE ANCESTRESS OF
THE MAKONDE
iron implements from neighbouring tribes.
Even in the plain the inhabitants are not much
better off. Only one man now living is said to
understand the art of smelting iron. This old fundi lives close to
Huwe, that isolated, steep-sided block of granite which rises out of
the green solitude between Masasi and Chingulungulu, and whose
jagged and splintered top meets the traveller’s eye everywhere. While
still at Masasi I wished to see this man at work, but was told that,
frightened by the rising, he had retired across the Rovuma, though
he would soon return. All subsequent inquiries as to whether the
fundi had come back met with the genuine African answer, “Bado”
(“Not yet”).
 BRAZIER

Some consolation was afforded me by a brassfounder, whom I

came across in the bush near Akundonde’s. This man is the favourite
of women, and therefore no doubt of the gods; he welds the glittering
brass rods purchased at the coast into those massive, heavy rings
which, on the wrists and ankles of the local fair ones, continually give
me fresh food for admiration. Like every decent master-craftsman he
had all his tools with him, consisting of a pair of bellows, three
crucibles and a hammer—nothing more, apparently. He was quite
willing to show his skill, and in a twinkling had fixed his bellows on
the ground. They are simply two goat-skins, taken off whole, the four
legs being closed by knots, while the upper opening, intended to
admit the air, is kept stretched by two pieces of wood. At the lower
end of the skin a smaller opening is left into which a wooden tube is
stuck. The fundi has quickly borrowed a heap of wood-embers from
the nearest hut; he then fixes the free ends of the two tubes into an
earthen pipe, and clamps them to the ground by means of a bent
piece of wood. Now he fills one of his small clay crucibles, the dross
on which shows that they have been long in use, with the yellow
material, places it in the midst of the embers, which, at present are
only faintly glimmering, and begins his work. In quick alternation
the smith’s two hands move up and down with the open ends of the
bellows; as he raises his hand he holds the slit wide open, so as to let
the air enter the skin bag unhindered. In pressing it down he closes
the bag, and the air puffs through the bamboo tube and clay pipe into
the fire, which quickly burns up. The smith, however, does not keep
on with this work, but beckons to another man, who relieves him at
the bellows, while he takes some more tools out of a large skin pouch
carried on his back. I look on in wonder as, with a smooth round
stick about the thickness of a finger, he bores a few vertical holes into
the clean sand of the soil. This should not be difficult, yet the man
seems to be taking great pains over it. Then he fastens down to the
ground, with a couple of wooden clamps, a neat little trough made by
splitting a joint of bamboo in half, so that the ends are closed by the
two knots. At last the yellow metal has attained the right consistency,
and the fundi lifts the crucible from the fire by means of two sticks
split at the end to serve as tongs. A short swift turn to the left—a
tilting of the crucible—and the molten brass, hissing and giving forth
clouds of smoke, flows first into the bamboo mould and then into the
holes in the ground.
The technique of this backwoods craftsman may not be very far
advanced, but it cannot be denied that he knows how to obtain an
adequate result by the simplest means. The ladies of highest rank in
this country—that is to say, those who can afford it, wear two kinds
of these massive brass rings, one cylindrical, the other semicircular
in section. The latter are cast in the most ingenious way in the
bamboo mould, the former in the circular hole in the sand. It is quite
a simple matter for the fundi to fit these bars to the limbs of his fair
customers; with a few light strokes of his hammer he bends the
pliable brass round arm or ankle without further inconvenience to
the wearer.
SHAPING THE POT

SMOOTHING WITH MAIZE-COB

CUTTING THE EDGE

 FINISHING THE BOTTOM

LAST SMOOTHING BEFORE

BURNING

FIRING THE BRUSH-PILE

 LIGHTING THE FARTHER SIDE OF
THE PILE

TURNING THE RED-HOT VESSEL

NYASA WOMAN MAKING POTS AT MASASI

Pottery is an art which must always and everywhere excite the
interest of the student, just because it is so intimately connected with
the development of human culture, and because its relics are one of
the principal factors in the reconstruction of our own condition in
prehistoric times. I shall always remember with pleasure the two or
three afternoons at Masasi when Salim Matola’s mother, a slightly-
built, graceful, pleasant-looking woman, explained to me with
touching patience, by means of concrete illustrations, the ceramic art
of her people. The only implements for this primitive process were a
lump of clay in her left hand, and in the right a calabash containing
the following valuables: the fragment of a maize-cob stripped of all
its grains, a smooth, oval pebble, about the size of a pigeon’s egg, a
few chips of gourd-shell, a bamboo splinter about the length of one’s
hand, a small shell, and a bunch of some herb resembling spinach.
 Nothing more. The woman scraped with the
shell a round, shallow hole in the soft, fine
sand of the soil, and, when an active young
girl had filled the calabash with water for her,
she began to knead the clay. As if by magic it
gradually assumed the shape of a rough but
already well-shaped vessel, which only wanted
a little touching up with the instruments
before mentioned. I looked out with the
MAKUA WOMAN closest attention for any indication of the use
MAKING A POT. of the potter’s wheel, in however rudimentary
SHOWS THE a form, but no—hapana (there is none). The
BEGINNINGS OF THE embryo pot stood firmly in its little
POTTER’S WHEEL
depression, and the woman walked round it in
a stooping posture, whether she was removing
small stones or similar foreign bodies with the maize-cob, smoothing
the inner or outer surface with the splinter of bamboo, or later, after
letting it dry for a day, pricking in the ornamentation with a pointed
bit of gourd-shell, or working out the bottom, or cutting the edge
with a sharp bamboo knife, or giving the last touches to the finished
vessel. This occupation of the women is infinitely toilsome, but it is
without doubt an accurate reproduction of the process in use among
our ancestors of the Neolithic and Bronze ages.
There is no doubt that the invention of pottery, an item in human
progress whose importance cannot be over-estimated, is due to
women. Rough, coarse and unfeeling, the men of the horde range
over the countryside. When the united cunning of the hunters has
succeeded in killing the game; not one of them thinks of carrying
home the spoil. A bright fire, kindled by a vigorous wielding of the
drill, is crackling beside them; the animal has been cleaned and cut
up secundum artem, and, after a slight singeing, will soon disappear
under their sharp teeth; no one all this time giving a single thought
to wife or child.
To what shifts, on the other hand, the primitive wife, and still more
the primitive mother, was put! Not even prehistoric stomachs could
endure an unvarying diet of raw food. Something or other suggested
the beneficial effect of hot water on the majority of approved but
indigestible dishes. Perhaps a neighbour had tried holding the hard
roots or tubers over the fire in a calabash filled with water—or maybe
an ostrich-egg-shell, or a hastily improvised vessel of bark. They
became much softer and more palatable than they had previously
been; but, unfortunately, the vessel could not stand the fire and got
charred on the outside. That can be remedied, thought our
ancestress, and plastered a layer of wet clay round a similar vessel.
This is an improvement; the cooking utensil remains uninjured, but
the heat of the fire has shrunk it, so that it is loose in its shell. The
next step is to detach it, so, with a firm grip and a jerk, shell and
kernel are separated, and pottery is invented. Perhaps, however, the
discovery which led to an intelligent use of the burnt-clay shell, was
made in a slightly different way. Ostrich-eggs and calabashes are not
to be found in every part of the world, but everywhere mankind has
arrived at the art of making baskets out of pliant materials, such as
bark, bast, strips of palm-leaf, supple twigs, etc. Our inventor has no
water-tight vessel provided by nature. “Never mind, let us line the
basket with clay.” This answers the purpose, but alas! the basket gets
burnt over the blazing fire, the woman watches the process of
cooking with increasing uneasiness, fearing a leak, but no leak
appears. The food, done to a turn, is eaten with peculiar relish; and
the cooking-vessel is examined, half in curiosity, half in satisfaction
at the result. The plastic clay is now hard as stone, and at the same
time looks exceedingly well, for the neat plaiting of the burnt basket
is traced all over it in a pretty pattern. Thus, simultaneously with
pottery, its ornamentation was invented.
Primitive woman has another claim to respect. It was the man,
roving abroad, who invented the art of producing fire at will, but the
woman, unable to imitate him in this, has been a Vestal from the
earliest times. Nothing gives so much trouble as the keeping alight of
the smouldering brand, and, above all, when all the men are absent
from the camp. Heavy rain-clouds gather, already the first large
drops are falling, the first gusts of the storm rage over the plain. The
little flame, a greater anxiety to the woman than her own children,
flickers unsteadily in the blast. What is to be done? A sudden thought
occurs to her, and in an instant she has constructed a primitive hut
out of strips of bark, to protect the flame against rain and wind.
This, or something very like it, was the way in which the principle
of the house was discovered; and even the most hardened misogynist
cannot fairly refuse a woman the credit of it. The protection of the
hearth-fire from the weather is the germ from which the human
dwelling was evolved. Men had little, if any share, in this forward
step, and that only at a late stage. Even at the present day, the
plastering of the housewall with clay and the manufacture of pottery
are exclusively the women’s business. These are two very significant
survivals. Our European kitchen-garden, too, is originally a woman’s
invention, and the hoe, the primitive instrument of agriculture, is,
characteristically enough, still used in this department. But the
noblest achievement which we owe to the other sex is unquestionably
the art of cookery. Roasting alone—the oldest process—is one for
which men took the hint (a very obvious one) from nature. It must
have been suggested by the scorched carcase of some animal
overtaken by the destructive forest-fires. But boiling—the process of
improving organic substances by the help of water heated to boiling-
point—is a much later discovery. It is so recent that it has not even
yet penetrated to all parts of the world. The Polynesians understand
how to steam food, that is, to cook it, neatly wrapped in leaves, in a
hole in the earth between hot stones, the air being excluded, and
(sometimes) a few drops of water sprinkled on the stones; but they
do not understand boiling.
To come back from this digression, we find that the slender Nyasa
woman has, after once more carefully examining the finished pot,
put it aside in the shade to dry. On the following day she sends me
word by her son, Salim Matola, who is always on hand, that she is
going to do the burning, and, on coming out of my house, I find her
already hard at work. She has spread on the ground a layer of very
dry sticks, about as thick as one’s thumb, has laid the pot (now of a
yellowish-grey colour) on them, and is piling brushwood round it.
My faithful Pesa mbili, the mnyampara, who has been standing by,
most obligingly, with a lighted stick, now hands it to her. Both of
them, blowing steadily, light the pile on the lee side, and, when the
flame begins to catch, on the weather side also. Soon the whole is in a
blaze, but the dry fuel is quickly consumed and the fire dies down, so
that we see the red-hot vessel rising from the ashes. The woman
turns it continually with a long stick, sometimes one way and
sometimes another, so that it may be evenly heated all over. In
twenty minutes she rolls it out of the ash-heap, takes up the bundle
of spinach, which has been lying for two days in a jar of water, and
sprinkles the red-hot clay with it. The places where the drops fall are
marked by black spots on the uniform reddish-brown surface. With a
sigh of relief, and with visible satisfaction, the woman rises to an
erect position; she is standing just in a line between me and the fire,
from which a cloud of smoke is just rising: I press the ball of my
camera, the shutter clicks—the apotheosis is achieved! Like a
priestess, representative of her inventive sex, the graceful woman
stands: at her feet the hearth-fire she has given us beside her the
invention she has devised for us, in the background the home she has
built for us.
At Newala, also, I have had the manufacture of pottery carried on
in my presence. Technically the process is better than that already
described, for here we find the beginnings of the potter’s wheel,
which does not seem to exist in the plains; at least I have seen
nothing of the sort. The artist, a frightfully stupid Makua woman, did
not make a depression in the ground to receive the pot she was about
to shape, but used instead a large potsherd. Otherwise, she went to
work in much the same way as Salim’s mother, except that she saved
herself the trouble of walking round and round her work by squatting
at her ease and letting the pot and potsherd rotate round her; this is
surely the first step towards a machine. But it does not follow that
the pot was improved by the process. It is true that it was beautifully
rounded and presented a very creditable appearance when finished,
but the numerous large and small vessels which I have seen, and, in
part, collected, in the “less advanced” districts, are no less so. We
moderns imagine that instruments of precision are necessary to
produce excellent results. Go to the prehistoric collections of our
museums and look at the pots, urns and bowls of our ancestors in the
dim ages of the past, and you will at once perceive your error.
MAKING LONGITUDINAL CUT IN
BARK

DRAWING THE BARK OFF THE LOG

REMOVING THE OUTER BARK

 BEATING THE BARK

WORKING THE BARK-CLOTH AFTER BEATING, TO MAKE IT

SOFT

MANUFACTURE OF BARK-CLOTH AT NEWALA

To-day, nearly the whole population of German East Africa is
clothed in imported calico. This was not always the case; even now in
some parts of the north dressed skins are still the prevailing wear,
and in the north-western districts—east and north of Lake
Tanganyika—lies a zone where bark-cloth has not yet been
superseded. Probably not many generations have passed since such
bark fabrics and kilts of skins were the only clothing even in the
south. Even to-day, large quantities of this bright-red or drab
material are still to be found; but if we wish to see it, we must look in
the granaries and on the drying stages inside the native huts, where
it serves less ambitious uses as wrappings for those seeds and fruits
which require to be packed with special care. The salt produced at
Masasi, too, is packed for transport to a distance in large sheets of
bark-cloth. Wherever I found it in any degree possible, I studied the
process of making this cloth. The native requisitioned for the
purpose arrived, carrying a log between two and three yards long and
as thick as his thigh, and nothing else except a curiously-shaped
mallet and the usual long, sharp and pointed knife which all men and
boys wear in a belt at their backs without a sheath—horribile dictu!
[51]
Silently he squats down before me, and with two rapid cuts has
drawn a couple of circles round the log some two yards apart, and
slits the bark lengthwise between them with the point of his knife.
With evident care, he then scrapes off the outer rind all round the
log, so that in a quarter of an hour the inner red layer of the bark
shows up brightly-coloured between the two untouched ends. With
some trouble and much caution, he now loosens the bark at one end,
and opens the cylinder. He then stands up, takes hold of the free
edge with both hands, and turning it inside out, slowly but steadily
pulls it off in one piece. Now comes the troublesome work of
scraping all superfluous particles of outer bark from the outside of
the long, narrow piece of material, while the inner side is carefully
scrutinised for defective spots. At last it is ready for beating. Having
signalled to a friend, who immediately places a bowl of water beside
him, the artificer damps his sheet of bark all over, seizes his mallet,
lays one end of the stuff on the smoothest spot of the log, and
hammers away slowly but continuously. “Very simple!” I think to
myself. “Why, I could do that, too!”—but I am forced to change my
opinions a little later on; for the beating is quite an art, if the fabric is
not to be beaten to pieces. To prevent the breaking of the fibres, the
stuff is several times folded across, so as to interpose several
thicknesses between the mallet and the block. At last the required
state is reached, and the fundi seizes the sheet, still folded, by both
ends, and wrings it out, or calls an assistant to take one end while he
holds the other. The cloth produced in this way is not nearly so fine
and uniform in texture as the famous Uganda bark-cloth, but it is
quite soft, and, above all, cheap.
Now, too, I examine the mallet. My craftsman has been using the
simpler but better form of this implement, a conical block of some
hard wood, its base—the striking surface—being scored across and
across with more or less deeply-cut grooves, and the handle stuck
into a hole in the middle. The other and earlier form of mallet is
shaped in the same way, but the head is fastened by an ingenious
network of bark strips into the split bamboo serving as a handle. The
observation so often made, that ancient customs persist longest in
connection with religious ceremonies and in the life of children, here
finds confirmation. As we shall soon see, bark-cloth is still worn
during the unyago,[52] having been prepared with special solemn
ceremonies; and many a mother, if she has no other garment handy,
will still put her little one into a kilt of bark-cloth, which, after all,
looks better, besides being more in keeping with its African
surroundings, than the ridiculous bit of print from Ulaya.
MAKUA WOMEN