Those Who Play with Fire: Gender, Fertility and Transformation in East and Southern Africa

Whether initiating girls or healing cattle, bringing rain or protesting taxation, many in Africa share a vision of a world where the cultural, symbolic and cosmic categories of male and female serve, through ritual, to both re-image and transform the world. This book introduces recent gender theory to the analysis of African ethnography, exp loring the ways in which ideational gender categories permeate African systems of thought and ritual practices. Thus, the book provides a framework with which to evaluate previous ethnographic material on Africa. In addition, it presents a broad range of new case studies - of hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists and pastoralists - revealing the varied and complex ways in which African ideas and ideals of what it means to be male and female broadly inform and give meaning to a wide range of transformative rituals.