Beyond Bodies: Rainmaking and Sense Making in Tanzania (Anthropological Horizons) - Softcover

Sanders, Todd

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802095828 ISBN 13: 9780802095824

Publisher: University of Toronto Press, 2007

Synopsis

For over a century, the Ihanzu of north-central Tanzania have conducted rainmaking rites. As with similar rites found across sub-Saharan Africa, these rites are replete with gender, sexual, and fertility motifs. Social scientists have typically explained such things as symbolizing human bodies and the act of procreation. But what happens when our interlocutors deny such symbolic explanations, when they insist that rain rites and the gender and sexual motifs in them do not symbolize anything but rather aim simply to bring rain?

Beyond Bodies examines Ihanzu sensibilities about gender through a fine-grained ethnography of rainmaking rites. It considers the meaning of ritual practices in a society in which gender is not as bound to the body as it is in the Euro-American imagination. Engaging with recent anthropological and gender theory, this book crucially calls into question how social scientists have explained gender symbolism in myriad ethnographic and historical studies across Africa.

About this title

About the Author

Todd Sanders is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, and a visiting professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Trondheim, Norway.

From the Back Cover

'Beyond Bodies is an engrossing, enlightening, and eminently readable study that effectively unsettles certain Euro-American commonplaces about gender, symbolism, and power. It is tightly focused and based on solid research, demonstrating a remarkable knowledge of the literature on gender and rain-making. A unique and rich ethnography, it should appeal to Africanists and students of gender and religion.'-Adeline Masquelier, Department of Anthropology, Tulane University

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802095828
• ISBN 13: 9780802095824
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288