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Secrets of a Swahili Marriage
Author(s) -
Daly Thompson Katrina
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
anthropology and humanism
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.153
H-Index - 17
eISSN - 1548-1409
pISSN - 1559-9167
DOI - 10.1111/anhu.12168
Subject(s) - swahili , ethnography , islam , orientalism , gender studies , wife , colonialism , sociology , anthropology , jealousy , african studies , history , literature , art , linguistics , psychology , philosophy , theology , social psychology , archaeology
SUMMARY I am a cultural studies scholar with a primary interest in African discourse, and my research thus intersects with and draws on linguistic anthropology. I teach a course in literary ethnography and am interested in redeeming ethnography for African cultural studies, where it is still largely perceived as tainted by colonialism and orientalism. This piece of fiction draws on my fieldwork in Zanzibar and Zimbabwe, particularly my linguistic anthropological work on the instructions Swahili women give a bride about gender roles as they prepare her for an Islamic marriage and how they talk about their own experiences as Muslim wives, as well as on autoethnographic work on my experience as the wife of a Zanzibari man. [Ethnographic fiction, Swahili marriage, pregnancy, jealousy, Islam]