Download The Church of Women: Gendered Encounters between Maasai and by Dorothy L. Hodgson PDF

By Dorothy L. Hodgson

In Africa, why have such a lot of extra girls switched over to Christianity than males? What explains the allure of Christianity to ladies? Do spiritual conversion and spirituality function websites for the negotiation of gender and ethnic id? Can faith encourage own, political, and collective empowerment of ladies? How does religious strength articulate with different domain names of energy? In The Church of ladies, Dorothy L. Hodgson explores how gender has formed the come across among missionary monks and Maasai women and men in Tanzania. construction on her broad event with Spiritan missionaries and Maasai, Hodgson examines how gendered swap between Maasai has affected women's and men's notions of non secular religion, spiritual perform, and religious strength. Hodgson seems at the allure of Catholicism between girls in East Africa, the enmeshing of Catholic and Maasai non secular ideals and practices, and the that means of conversion to new Christians. This wealthy, attractive and unique publication demanding situations notions approximately spiritual come across and the dominance of political monetary understandings of gender.

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Extra info for The Church of Women: Gendered Encounters between Maasai and Missionaries

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Birds were never eaten, but certain species were killed so that their bodies and feathers could be used to create elaborate headdresses for newly circumcised boys. Ilmurran especially prized ostrich feathers for their headdresses. Other natural phenomena, especially those concerned with the sky and weather, were also attributed to the interventions of Eng’ai and read as expressions of divine power and judgment—rain as blessing, drought as displeasure, thunder and lightning as anger, rainbows as approval, and comets as portents of bad luck (see many of the myths recounted in Hollis 1905; Baumann 1894: 163; Merker 1910 [1904]: 205–207).

Chapter 1 attempts to historically reconstruct Maasai religious beliefs 16 Introduction and practices before the advent of the missionaries, with attention to the centrality of gender and power to these domains. Chapter 2 examines the origins and early history of the Spiritans in Africa, and then analyzes the similarities and differences in the lives, thoughts, and experiences of individual missionaries through detailed profiles of three American Spiritans who worked with Maasai in Monduli. Chapter 3 recounts the history of Catholic evangelization of Maasai in Tanzania, with specific attention to the gendered assumptions and outcomes of the three main evangelization approaches of the missionaries and their catechists.

They sharply intensified efforts to “develop” these seemingly intransigent people, including renewed measures to increase livestock production and offtake. 21 Among Maasai men, the collaboration of elders with colonial authorities in the formation and running of the MNA aggravated the already tense relationships between elders and ilmurran (men of the “warrior” agegrade). 22 Ilmurran resented the interference in their lives, and responded with increased hostility to the elders and the colonial state and a firmer embrace of their own sense of male cultural identity.

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