Dorothy L Hodgson
Biographic Data
| ID | 90685 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dorothy L Hodgson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dorothy L |
| FAMILY NAME | Hodgson |
| SIGNATURE | HODGSON D L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0605-6745 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 508 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Women’s History
127 long-form essays The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Women’s History is the first reference work of its kind: a comprehensive resource that documents the centrality of women – their lives, experiences, accomplishments and perspectives – to the history of Africa. The almost 120 entries explore African women across states, regions, and time periods and their contributions to such fields as politics, law, science, arts and literature, and popular…
Gender, Justice, and the Problem of Culture
Africa from the Margins
This article argues for the continued merits of research with rural, long-marginalized peoples, including those whose fervent invocations of ethnic difference-such as Maasai-make many scholars and politicians nervous. Their perspectives "from the margins" offer key theoretical and political insights into this complicated place we call "Africa" by challenging grand narratives of modernization, "Africa rising," and supposedly "universal" ideas of p…
Gendering Ethnicity in African Women’s Lives
Do African men and think about and act out their ethnicity in different ways? Most studies of ethnicity in Africa consider men's experiences, but rarely have scholars examined whether have the same idea of what it means to be, for example, Igbo or Tswana or Kikuyu. Or, studies have invoked the adage women have no tribe to indicate a woman's loss of ethnicity as she marries into her husband's community. This volume engages directly the issue of wo…
Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights
In this interdisciplinary, international collection of original essays, distinguished scholars, lawyers, and activists probe the complex relationship between gender, culture, and rights. The authors offer thoughtful, provocative case studies to suggest that the power of women's rights is also the source of its limits
Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous
Listen to an Africa Past & Present podcast with the author
Milking the Rhino
Becoming Indigenous in Africa
This article traces the history of how and why certain African groups became involved in the transnational indigenous rights movement; how the concept of the indigenous has been imagined, understood, and employed by African activists, donors, advocates, and states; and the opportunities and obstacles it has posed for the ongoing struggles for recognition, resources, and the rights of historically marginalized people like Maasai
Moving the Maasai
Moving the Maasai is a compelling analysis of the history and legacies of the Maasai moves of 1904 and 1911 and the ensuing 1913 court case in Kenya (then British East Africa). Although many scholars have written about the moves and Maasai relations with the British government and settlers, Lotte Hughes draws on a broad range of sources, including oral interviews with Maasai elders and recently discovered letters from Norman Leys to British MPs E…
Miracles and Extraordinary Experience in Northern Kenya by Bilinda Straight
Worlds of Power
Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa. Stephen Ellis and Gerrie Ter Haar. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 263 pp
Commentary
Association for Feminist Anthropology
Culture, Economy, Power
Dilemmas of Counter-Mapping Community Resources in Tanzania
Recent work has celebrated the political potential of 'counter-mapping', that is, mapping against dominant power structures, to further seemingly progressive goals. This article briefly reviews the counter-mapping literature, and compares four counter-mapping projects from Maasai areas in Tanzania to explore some potential pitfalls in such efforts. The cases, which involve community-based initiatives led by a church-based NGO, ecotourism companie…
"Wicked" Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa
Introduction - and the reconfiguration of gender in Africa, Dorothy L. Hodgson and Sheryl McCurdy. Part 1 Contesting conjugality: women, marriage, divorce and the emerging colonial state in Abeokuta (Nigeria) 1892-1904, Judith Byfield she thinks she's like a man - marriage and deconstructing gender identity in colonial Buha, Western Tanzania, 1943-1960, Margot Lovett wayward and useless men - contest and change in gender relations in Ado-Odo, Sou…
Women's Rights as Human Rights
In recent years “women’s rights as human rights” has emerged as a new transnational approach to demanding women’s empowerment. This article explores the advantages and limitations of such an approach to women’s activism in Africa through a case study of Women in Law and Development in Africa (WiLDAF) a multinational African NGO that has been at the forefront of using “women’s rights as human rights” to educate women throughout the continent about…
Enriching Gender Studies in Sub-Saharan Africa
Once Intrepid Warriors
Once Intrepid Warriors
Introduction: Seeing Maasai 1. Gender, Generation, and Ethnicity: Being Maasai Men and Women Maasai Portrait 1: Koko 2. Modernist Orders: Colonialism and the Production of Marginality Maasai Portrait 2: Wanga 3. Why Are You in Such a Hurry? Development and Decolonization Maasai Portrait 3: Thomas 4. Politics of the Postcolonial Periphery: Gender, Ethnicity, and Citizenship Maasai Portrait 4: Edward Moringe Sokoine 5. Poverty and Progress: Gender,…
Precarious Alliances
Since 1990, over one hundred indigenous nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) have emerged in predominantly Maasai areas in Tanzania, attempting to organize people around diverse claims of a common "indigenous" identity based on ethnicity, mode of production, and a long history of political and economic disenfranchisement. Despite attempts to foster unity and promote common political agendas, the indigenous rights movement has been fractured by s…
Introduction
Using ethnographic case studies, these "In Focus" articles explore the indigenous rights movements in two regions, Africa and the Americas, where the histories, agendas, and dynamics of the movements are at once similar and different. They consider a range of relevant questions about the politics of representation, recognition, resources, and rights as these movements engage shifting political and economic landscapes; transnational discourses, al…
Gendered Modernities
Based on long-term ethnographic research, the book chapters explore the intersection of 'gender' and 'modernity' as they are mediated in the lives and subjectivities of diverse individuals and groups
Once Intrepid Warriors
Gendered modernities
Introduction D.L.Hodgson PART I: CONSUMPTION AND DESIRE Auditioning for the Chorus Line: Gender, Youth and the Consumption of Modernity in Thailand M.B.Mills Acadas and Fertilizer Girls: Young Nigerian Women and the Romance of Middle Class Modernity M.L.Bastian PART II: ALTERNATIVE MODERNITIES The Strength in the Song: Muslim Personhood, Audible Capital, and Women's Performance of the Haj B.M.Cooper 'Once Intrepid Warriors: Modernity and the Prod…
Introduction
Using ethnographic case studies, these "In Focus" articles explore the indigenous rights movements in two regions, Africa and the Americas, where the histories, agendas, and dynamics of the movements are at once similar and different. They consider a range of relevant questions about the politics of representation, recognition, resources, and rights as these movements engage shifting political and economic landscapes; transnational discourses, al…
Dilemmas of Counter-Mapping Community Resources in Tanzania
Recent work has celebrated the political potential of 'counter-mapping', that is, mapping against dominant power structures, to further seemingly progressive goals. This article briefly reviews the counter-mapping literature, and compares four counter-mapping projects from Maasai areas in Tanzania to explore some potential pitfalls in such efforts. The cases, which involve community-based initiatives led by a church-based NGO, ecotourism companie…
"Wicked" Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa
Introduction - and the reconfiguration of gender in Africa, Dorothy L. Hodgson and Sheryl McCurdy. Part 1 Contesting conjugality: women, marriage, divorce and the emerging colonial state in Abeokuta (Nigeria) 1892-1904, Judith Byfield she thinks she's like a man - marriage and deconstructing gender identity in colonial Buha, Western Tanzania, 1943-1960, Margot Lovett wayward and useless men - contest and change in gender relations in Ado-Odo, Sou…
Pastoralism, Patriarchy and History
DESPITE the substantial and significant body of scholarly work on changing gender relations among African peoples who are (or were) primarily cultivators, the gender relations of predominantly pastoralist peoples have been, with a few notable exceptions, curiously excluded from historical examination. Instead, despite work which has shown the complexities of trying to determine the 'status' of East African pastoralist women, pastoralist gender re…
Precarious Alliances
Since 1990, over one hundred indigenous nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) have emerged in predominantly Maasai areas in Tanzania, attempting to organize people around diverse claims of a common "indigenous" identity based on ethnicity, mode of production, and a long history of political and economic disenfranchisement. Despite attempts to foster unity and promote common political agendas, the indigenous rights movement has been fractured by s…
Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous
Listen to an Africa Past & Present podcast with the author
Those Who Play with Fire
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 reimagine and transform the world. Those Who Play With Fire introduces recent gender theory to the analysis of African ethnography, exploring the ways in which ideational gender categories permeate African systems of thoug…
Once Intrepid Warriors
Lessons Learned? Development Experiences in the Late Colonial Period
The post-World-War-II period has typically been seen as the beginning of the ‘development era’. As global power relations shifted and nationalist and international pressure to liberalize and end colonial rule mounted, the colonial powers sought to revise their rationales for the legitimacy of the colonial endeavor. Longstanding dichotomies such as metropole/colony and civilized/primitive were reworked into the categories of developed/underdevelop…
Taking Stock
In 1951, British colonial administrators in Tanganyika initiated the Masai Development Plan (MDP), a five-year plan whose seemingly innocuous objectives were to build more water supplies, clear tsetse infested bush and experiment with grazing controls and fodder production in a small pilot scheme. But the project was the product of broader British agendas to reassert the legitimacy of empire and rebuild the post-war economy at home and abroad. Th…
Becoming Indigenous in Africa
This article traces the history of how and why certain African groups became involved in the transnational indigenous rights movement; how the concept of the indigenous has been imagined, understood, and employed by African activists, donors, advocates, and states; and the opportunities and obstacles it has posed for the ongoing struggles for recognition, resources, and the rights of historically marginalized people like Maasai
African Families and the Crisis of Social Change
African Families and the Crisis of Social Change. Thomas S. Weisner. Candice Bradley. and Philip L. Kilbride. eds. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1997.370 pp
Rethinking Pastoralism in Africa
Critical interventions
Anthropologists are accountable in unique ways to “the people we study” in “the field.” Yet today “the field” is more likely to be some transnational process linking multiple actors, sites, and agendas rather than a bounded physical space. To whom, then, are we accountable in a world of blurred boundaries and of intersecting and often contradictory oppressions based on gender, class, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality? Are we equally accountab…
Once Intrepid Warriors
Women's Rights as Human Rights
In recent years “women’s rights as human rights” has emerged as a new transnational approach to demanding women’s empowerment. This article explores the advantages and limitations of such an approach to women’s activism in Africa through a case study of Women in Law and Development in Africa (WiLDAF) a multinational African NGO that has been at the forefront of using “women’s rights as human rights” to educate women throughout the continent about…
Women as Children
The study of gender, that is, the cultural and social relations of power between women and men (but also between women and other women, men and men), has received increasing theoretical attention in the past few decades. As distinguished from the ‘anthropology of women’ school, which seeks to recover and represent the experiences of women as central to their studies and texts (e.g., Shostak 1981), the anthropology of gender shifts the focus from …
Wayward Wives, Misfit Mothers, and Disobedient Daughters
Dorothy L. Hodgson, Sheryl McCurdy, Wayward Wives, Misfit Mothers, and Disobedient Daughters: "Wicked" Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa, Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol. 30, No. 1 (1996), pp. 1-9
Africa from the Margins
This article argues for the continued merits of research with rural, long-marginalized peoples, including those whose fervent invocations of ethnic difference-such as Maasai-make many scholars and politicians nervous. Their perspectives "from the margins" offer key theoretical and political insights into this complicated place we call "Africa" by challenging grand narratives of modernization, "Africa rising," and supposedly "universal" ideas of p…
Sultan to Sultan
First published in 1892, M. French-Sheldon's book describes her 1891 expedition that took her from the court of the Sultan of Zanzibar to the Mount Kilimanjaro region of East Africa. Unlike most women travellers of the period, the American-born French-Sheldon dressed extravagantly on her 1000-mile expedition, greeting African chiefs or sultans dressed as a White Queen - in a long white court dress bedecked with large jewels and wearing a waist-le…
Rethinking Pastoralism in Africa
Miracles and Extraordinary Experience in Northern Kenya by Bilinda Straight
Culture, Economy, Power
Engendered Encounters
A significant paradox of the missionary endeavor in many parts of Africa, as elsewhere, is the preponderance of female adherents to Christianity, despite concerted efforts by most mainstream missionary groups to convert men.Theoretical or comparative studies of missionization, conversion, or religious experience and change which have informed this article include Beidelman (1974), Etherington (1977), King (1995), Holden (1983), Bowie (1993), Rafa…
“My Daughter…Belongs to the Government Now”
(1996). “My Daughter...Belongs to the Government Now”: Marriage, Maasai and the Tanzanian State. Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines: Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 106-123
"My Daughter… Belongs to the Government Now"
Dorothy L. Hodgson, "My Daughter... Belongs to the Government Now": Marriage, Maasai and the Tanzanian State, Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol. 30, No. 1 (1996), pp. 106-123
Wayward Wives, Misfit Mothers, and Disobedient Daughters
Dorothy L. Hodgson, Sheryl McCurdy, Wayward Wives, Misfit Mothers, and Disobedient Daughters: "Wicked" Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa, Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol. 30, No. 1 (1996), pp. 1-9
Culture/Power/Place
Culture/Power/Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. AKHIL GUPTA and JAMES FERGUSON, eds. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997; 361 pp. In our relentless search for theoretical guidance in understanding culture, the central conceptual cornerstone of our discipline, cultural anthropologists have long looked to other analytic realms and disciplines for insight. By counterpoising to ecology, personality, history, or now, power and we have t…
African Families and the Crisis of Social Change
African Families and the Crisis of Social Change. Thomas S. Weisner. Candice Bradley. and Philip L. Kilbride. eds. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1997.370 pp
Women as Children
The study of gender, that is, the cultural and social relations of power between women and men (but also between women and other women, men and men), has received increasing theoretical attention in the past few decades. As distinguished from the ‘anthropology of women’ school, which seeks to recover and represent the experiences of women as central to their studies and texts (e.g., Shostak 1981), the anthropology of gender shifts the focus from …
Pastoralism, Patriarchy and History
DESPITE the substantial and significant body of scholarly work on changing gender relations among African peoples who are (or were) primarily cultivators, the gender relations of predominantly pastoralist peoples have been, with a few notable exceptions, curiously excluded from historical examination. Instead, despite work which has shown the complexities of trying to determine the 'status' of East African pastoralist women, pastoralist gender re…
Women's Voices in a Man's World
Once Intrepid Warriors
Critical interventions
Anthropologists are accountable in unique ways to “the people we study” in “the field.” Yet today “the field” is more likely to be some transnational process linking multiple actors, sites, and agendas rather than a bounded physical space. To whom, then, are we accountable in a world of blurred boundaries and of intersecting and often contradictory oppressions based on gender, class, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality? Are we equally accountab…
Engendered Encounters
A significant paradox of the missionary endeavor in many parts of Africa, as elsewhere, is the preponderance of female adherents to Christianity, despite concerted efforts by most mainstream missionary groups to convert men.Theoretical or comparative studies of missionization, conversion, or religious experience and change which have informed this article include Beidelman (1974), Etherington (1977), King (1995), Holden (1983), Bowie (1993), Rafa…
Lessons Learned? Development Experiences in the Late Colonial Period
The post-World-War-II period has typically been seen as the beginning of the ‘development era’. As global power relations shifted and nationalist and international pressure to liberalize and end colonial rule mounted, the colonial powers sought to revise their rationales for the legitimacy of the colonial endeavor. Longstanding dichotomies such as metropole/colony and civilized/primitive were reworked into the categories of developed/underdevelop…
Taking Stock
In 1951, British colonial administrators in Tanganyika initiated the Masai Development Plan (MDP), a five-year plan whose seemingly innocuous objectives were to build more water supplies, clear tsetse infested bush and experiment with grazing controls and fodder production in a small pilot scheme. But the project was the product of broader British agendas to reassert the legitimacy of empire and rebuild the post-war economy at home and abroad. Th…
Sultan to Sultan
First published in 1892, M. French-Sheldon's book describes her 1891 expedition that took her from the court of the Sultan of Zanzibar to the Mount Kilimanjaro region of East Africa. Unlike most women travellers of the period, the American-born French-Sheldon dressed extravagantly on her 1000-mile expedition, greeting African chiefs or sultans dressed as a White Queen - in a long white court dress bedecked with large jewels and wearing a waist-le…
Rethinking Pastoralism in Africa
Introduction - gender, culture and the myth of the patriarchal pastoralist, Dorothy I. Hodgson. Part 1 Making culture: gender and material culture in West Pokot, Kenya, Barbara Bianco gender, ethnicity and social aesthetics in Maasai and Okiek beadwork, Corinne Kratz and Donna Pido women and men of the Khoekhoen of Southern Africa, Andrew B. Smith and Lita Webley. Part 2 Domains of power: pastoralism, patriarchy and history among Maasai in Tangan…
Gendered Modernities
Based on long-term ethnographic research, the book chapters explore the intersection of 'gender' and 'modernity' as they are mediated in the lives and subjectivities of diverse individuals and groups
Once Intrepid Warriors
Those Who Play with Fire
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 reimagine and transform the world. Those Who Play With Fire introduces recent gender theory to the analysis of African ethnography, exploring the ways in which ideational gender categories permeate African systems of thoug…
Rethinking Pastoralism in Africa
Rethinking Pastoralism in Africa
Dilemmas of Counter-Mapping Community Resources in Tanzania
Recent work has celebrated the political potential of 'counter-mapping', that is, mapping against dominant power structures, to further seemingly progressive goals. This article briefly reviews the counter-mapping literature, and compares four counter-mapping projects from Maasai areas in Tanzania to explore some potential pitfalls in such efforts. The cases, which involve community-based initiatives led by a church-based NGO, ecotourism companie…
"Wicked" Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa
Introduction - and the reconfiguration of gender in Africa, Dorothy L. Hodgson and Sheryl McCurdy. Part 1 Contesting conjugality: women, marriage, divorce and the emerging colonial state in Abeokuta (Nigeria) 1892-1904, Judith Byfield she thinks she's like a man - marriage and deconstructing gender identity in colonial Buha, Western Tanzania, 1943-1960, Margot Lovett wayward and useless men - contest and change in gender relations in Ado-Odo, Sou…
Women's Rights as Human Rights
In recent years “women’s rights as human rights” has emerged as a new transnational approach to demanding women’s empowerment. This article explores the advantages and limitations of such an approach to women’s activism in Africa through a case study of Women in Law and Development in Africa (WiLDAF) a multinational African NGO that has been at the forefront of using “women’s rights as human rights” to educate women throughout the continent about…
Enriching Gender Studies in Sub-Saharan Africa
Once Intrepid Warriors
Sociology (38 works) · Political science (28 works) · Gender Studies (22 works) · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology (20 works) · Ethnology (18 works) · Law (18 works) · Maasai (18 works) · History (17 works) · Anthropology (16 works) · Tanzania (16 works)