What is it about?
The article studies the recent proliferation of mutual help associations among the Kuria people of Tanzania, examining the apparent paradox of spreading cooperation and sharing alongside the expansion of the money economy. The study is based on thirty-two months of ethnographic field research in Tarime and Serengeti districts of Mara region that investigated local patterns of cooperation and the emerging modes of personhood within novel associational environments. It explores the patterns and narratives of sharing and cooperation, and examines broader socialities that are reproduced in Kuria mutual help groups that are active in both economic activities and community peacekeeping. The article provides an overview of different forms of Kuria cooperation from historical and contemporary perspectives and situates these in a broader framework of culturally relevant social exchanges and moralities.
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Why is it important?
There has been a significant increase in the number of informal associations in Africa in the past few decades. Liberalization and decentralization reforms, with the decline of formal sector employment, have contributed to the rapid expansion of new collectivities and civic spaces that revolve around experimentation with novel livelihood activities. Local institutions of mutual assistance are therefore becoming increasingly important in regulating access to resources and redefining patterns of association in many African communities.
Perspectives
Kuria mutual help groups enabled their participants to advance their socio-economic standing and extend themselves as individuals in culturally accepted ways. Participating in the work group was an ongoing and relational process of extending one’s self through ties of interdependence. Kuria work and savings groups were defined by their ability to effect socially relevant value conversions, which accorded them the power to engage new types of resources and carve novel niches and gendered spaces.
Daivi Rodima-Taylor
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: PASSAGEWAYS OF COOPERATION: MUTUALITY IN POST-SOCIALIST TANZANIA, Africa, October 2014, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/s0001972014000497.
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