Politics and Gastropolitics: Gender and the Power of Food in Two African Pastoralist Societies
Author(s)
Holtzman, Jon
Abstract
I argue here that Yanagisako’s ‘realization that domestic relationships are part and parcel of the political structure of society’ has not significantly recast anthropological understandings of the social systems of African pastoralists. Pastoralists have long been viewed as quintessentially male-centred societies, with elders in particular at the core of social action, and males constructed ideologically as the ‘true pastoralists’. Certainly, a growing literature has made important strides in problematizing what Hodgson has termed the ‘myth of the patriarchal pastoralist’. Particularly since the 1980s there has been a marked increase in attention paid to the role of women in pastoralist societies, and such studies have shed important new light on the role of pastoralist women in a variety of domains, ranging from livestock product ion to religious systems to kinship. At the same time I will suggest that, while these are important in providing a more nuanced view of pastoralist gender relations, they rarely challenge the central assumptions upon which models of male dominance are predicated. In this essay I argue that, in order to move beyond long-standing conceptions of pastoral social systems as driven by the machinations of patriarchs and warriors, it is necessary to recognize the extent to which the masculine roles
