Kaupunkiköyhyyden tutkimusta Etiopiassa ja Tansaniassa
Gendered Power and Mobile Technology
Sex, social reproduction, and mobile telephony as responses to precarity in urban Tanzania
The gendered effects of neoliberal economic restructuring around the world are usually studied in their most dramatic forms: cross-border migration, exploitation, resistance, and violence. This chapter examines significant transformations arising from economic restructuring in the nexus between gender, labour, and urban space — transformations in which mobile technologies are deeply implicated. It explores how mobile phones are used by the poor for day-to-day survival in Tanzania’s largest city. The chapter shows how gendered economic bargains are negotiated at the very bottom of a survival economy located within the dynamics of a globalized economic system. An important characteristic of m…
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Mobile money and the impact of mobile phone regulatory enforcement among the urban poor in Tanzania
Mobile money provides a tool for survival, particularly in urban conditions shaped by city regulations that make microvending difficult for the poor. An analysis of 165 interviews conducted in two low-income neighborhoods in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania over 8 years demonstrates how interlocked layers of technology and interaction make mobile money services semiformal. I introduce two mobile money-enabled survival strategies: intrahousehold transfers for day-to-day survival (transfers within the same city) and resource safeguarding through kin remittances of start-up capital (home-based subsistence business capital stored for kin access in emergencies). The recent tightening of mobile phone regu…
Transactional Sex, Early Marriage, and Parent-Child Relations in a Tanzanian Slum
Transactional sex has been recognized as a major factor in the persistence of HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, yet it also has implications for the persistence of poverty. Using interview data collected between 2010 and 2015, this article examines how Muslim families in Dar es Salaam are affected by transactional sexual behavior.1 Examined are motives for transactional sex, how poor families view the purpose of marriage, and religious teachings and cultural beliefs about the onset of adulthood. Familial strategies to ensure provision for daughters and to improve the family’s socio-economic situation are impeded by the fact that in a context of high unemploy ment, transactional sex of ten rep…
TRANSACTIONAL SEX, EARLY MARRIAGE, AND PARENT– CHILD RELATIONS IN A TANZANIAN SLUM
Transactional sex has been recognized as a major factor in the persistence of HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, yet it also has implications for the persistence of poverty. Using interview data collected between 2010 and 2015, this article examines how Muslim families in Dar es Salaam are affected by transactional sexual behavior.1 Examined are motives for transactional sex, how poor families view the purpose of marriage, and religious teachings and cultural beliefs about the onset of adulthood. Familial strategies to ensure provision for daughters and to improve the family’s socio-economic situation are impeded by the fact that in a context of high unemploy ment, transactional sex of ten rep…
Poverty, Consent, and Choice in Early Marriage : Ethnographic Perspectives from Urban Tanzania
The assumed inability of adolescents to voluntarily consent to marriage is a key definition of child marriage. Using ethnography, this study approaches consent, self-determination, and fulfillment ...
Early marriage and cultural constructions of adulthood in two slums in Dar es Salaam.
This study examines under-18 marriage in urban Tanzania from an ethnographic perspective. Due to poverty and high unemployment, some girls aspire to early marriage. Two pathways to early marriage are identified: first, poverty and gendered economic disparities motivate girls to begin transactional sexual activity at an early age, leading parents to favour early marriage as a risk-reduction measure. Second, educational opportunities are often closed off to girls before marriage, as a result of which early marriage becomes the only culturally approved pathway that allows girls to present themselves to others as a self-sufficient agent. These pathways are reinforced by cultural and religious c…
Causes and motives of early marriage in the Gambia and Tanzania : is new legislation enough?
Both The Gambia and Tanzania have high rates of under-18 marriage for girls and both also raised the legal age of marriage for girls to 18 in 2016. This ethnographic study of the urban Muslim poor in Tanzania and The Gambia explores the causes behind and meanings of early marriage in these countries and discusses the likelihood of the recent legislative changes to have effect on actual practice among the poor in the towns and cities of these countries.
Magic and Witchcraft in Their Everyday Context : Childhood Memories from the Nineteenth-century Finnish Countryside
The Rise of Finnish-Language Popular Literacy Viewed through Correspondence to Newspapers 1856–70
In the mid-19th century, a significant number of persons among the Finnish-speaking rural populace learned to read fluently and write for the first time. One of the first purposes to which Finnish-speakers could put their writing was letters to the press. This paper first provides a brief overview of how rural Finnish-speaking commoners acquired functional literacy. It then examines what letters to newspapers written by self-educated commoners reveal about writers’ motives, the uses to which writing could be put in mid- 19th century Finland, and the tensions which arose when newly literate commoners began to criticize their social superiors in the press and no longer needed their help in re…
Gender, Empowerment, and Mobile Phones in the Developing World
Rethinking gender and technology within intersections in the Global South
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines mobile technology use in the Global South through the lens of intersectional understandings of power. It explores the integration of mobile phones in the lives of women from Gishu County in Kenya, and the meanings and symbolism attributed to this technology. The book deals with the material-feminist concept of social reproduction to understand the deepening precarity of the urban poor in Tanzania and their gendered responses to it. It explains the concept of young men’s financial inclusion linked to the proliferation of mobile money in Uganda. The book discusses th…
Ethnographic challenges to studying the poor in and from the global South
The ethnographic challenges of studying urban poor communities in the global South have been rarely addressed from a methodological standpoint. These issues are also relevant to studies of, and work with, migrants from the global South. Based on nearly 300 interviews conducted between 2010 and 2018 in low-income neighbourhoods of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the last 20 of which were conducted through Skype interviews through mobile phone. I discuss the benefits and disadvantages of using Skype for interviewing in the global South. I then consider some challenges of conducting interviews among individuals with extremely low education levels, whose basic needs are not met in their daily lives. T…
Kulttuuri ja aids-kriisi : vastikkeellinen seksi tansanialaisessa slummissa
Artikkelissa tarkastellaan etnologian keinoin miksi Tansanian nuoriso harjoittaa korkean hivtartuntariskin omaavia seksuaalisia käytänteitä. Tutkimus perustuu Tansanian suurimmassa kaupungissa Dar es Salaamissa tehtyihin 128 teemahaastatteluun. Analyysin lähtökohtana on ajatus siitä, että kulttuuristen odotusten ja asenteiden huolellinen analyysi antaa tutkijoille mahdollisuuden löytää uusia ratkaisuja hiv-tartuntariskin vähentämiseksi köyhillä kaupunkialueilla Saharan eteläpuolisessa Afrikassa. peerReviewed
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Africa's High Population Growth : Asking Tanzanian Women Why
Voicelessness and the Limits of Agency in Early Modern Finnish Narratives on Magic and the Supernatural
Introduction: Self, Narrative, and VoicelessnessGiven that narrative research has shown narration to be an innate trait of the human species (Abbott; see also Barthes; Nussbaum 230), the concept of narrative culture encompasses a vast domain. Here I define it as a system of conventions1 for representing temporally ordered events, conventions that are shared by a group. Such groups tend to be coterminous with linguistic communities. This definition implies that the conventions of a given narrative culture that are intelligible to one group may not necessarily be intelligible to another. Narrative culture is historically transmitted and inherited and can change over time. According to Clifffo…
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Women, Empowerment, and Mobile Phones in the Developing World
This chapter surveys and analyzes recent literature on mobile communication to examine its relationship to gender and development, more specifically how women in developing countries use and are impacted by mobile phones. Focusing on issues of power, agency, and social status, the chapter reviews how mobile telephony has been found to be implicated in patriarchal bargaining in different societies, how privacy and control are enabled through it, what benefits have been shown to accrue to women using mobile phones, and what barriers, limitations, and disadvantages of mobile use exist for women and why. The conclusion urges more gender-disaggregated analysis of mobile phone impact and use and …
Motives and Agency in Forced Marriage among the Urban Poor in Tanzania
Using the method of third-person elicitation and 171 interviews in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, I examine one form of forced marriage, ‘marriage on the mat’ (ndoa ya mkeka). In it, girls’ parents use the normative pressure of Islamic norms to circumvent the groom’s lack of consent to the marriage and promote their daughter’s future economic security. Premarital sex and forced marriage, rarely examined together, are often causally linked and provide strong motives for parents to resort to ndoa ya mkeka. In an urban context where girls’ and women’s income-earning possibilities are limited to transactional sex, marriage at a young age is often the only way to embody the culturally approved behavio…
Cultural Politics of Love and Provision among Poor Youth in Urban Tanzania
This article examines how urban youth in the poorest neighbourhoods of Dar es Salaam negotiate the terms of transactional intimacy, that is, heterosexual relations in which men are expected to provide for women materially. Using the concept of ‘affect’, I argue that this negotiation involves different levels of male providership, as well as moral values attached to notions of ‘true love’ and the Swahili concept of tamaa. Poor men and women view their agency differently within transactional intimacy, with women describing themselves as exploited by men who do not fulfil their end of the transactional bargain, and poor men portraying themselves as deeply disempowered in comparison to wealthie…
Muslim Intimacies : Challenges for Individuals and Families in Global Contexts
Oikeus kouluttautumiseen auttaa yhteiskuntaa kehittymään
Why daughters may choose early marriage
The causes of early marriage often remain unclear. A new study tests whether parental interests and coercion explain high rates of marriage for girls aged 15–18 in rural Tanzania. It finds that most brides choose their own partners and do not suffer harm to their physical or mental wellbeing later in life, and suggests alternative explanations.
The Materiality of the Imagined Family
Neighbourhood Open Spaces : Co-production and Spatial Transformation in Addis Ababa
The open spaces of a city are its lungs. They are places for people to exercise and carry out social activities, they influence the water cycle, and have considerable impact on air quality. In the developed world, companies are attracted to locations that offer well-designed, well-managed public spaces and these in turn attract customers, employees, and services (Byrne and Sipe 2010) . The presence of green parks, squares, gardens, and other public spaces in urban areas have therefore become vital marketing tools. Well-planned areas with green open spaces offer benefits to the local economy in terms of raising real-estate prices (ibid. ) . Open spaces facilitate social communication, relaxa…
Mobile Phone Theft, Resale, and Violence in Dar es Salaam
In Africa’s towns and cities more than those on any other continent, governments seem unable to ensure security for their citizens. The majority of urban residents find themselves ‘entangled within power dynamics that position them at the city’s margins, literally and figuratively’ (Myers 2011) . Although urban informality is defined by its ‘illegality’ from the perspective of regulatory elites (Potts 2007) , some informal activities are viewed as predatory or harmful by the urban residents who must deal with them in their everyday lives. These include bribery by officials and service providers, dispossession of inheritance by relatives, brokerage fraud, extortion by local government offici…
Examining Power and Inequality through Informality in Urban Africa
As increasing numbers of Africans live in cities, their strategies for living and surviving challenge prevailing theories and models of urban development. Scholars of poverty and development have given more attention to rural areas than to urban ones, yet urban lifeways need more study because people’s material lives in the city differ significantly from those in rural areas. Urban residents are exposed to more ethnic, religious, and socio-economic diversity than rural residents (Jha et al. 2005) . Urban areas are also highly monetized, and the lives of especially the poorest residents are determined almost entirely by market forces. Money thus becomes the focus of city dwellers’ attention:…