Joking Market Women

Critiquing and Negotiating Gender and Social Hierarchy in Kankossa, Mauritania

Bibliographic Data

ID2102938
AuthorsKatherine Ann Wiley (University of Virginia, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume84
Issue1
Pages101-118
Publication date2014-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAfrica (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0001-9720 • E-ISSN: 1750-0184
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0001972013000673
OpenAlexW2170169387
LanguageEN
Citations received12
References cited43

The streets of Kankossa's busy daily market often ring with laughter as female vegetable vendors joke with each other and passersby. This joking comes at a time when gender roles are shifting in Mauritania since it has become challenging for many men to provide for their families, causing women to take on roles as significant income earners. Likewise, as slavery has diminished over the last century, Ḥarāṭīn, a group consisting of ex-slaves or descendants of slaves, have been negotiating their places in the polity. To gain insight into the shifting social order, this article analyses examples of joking by Ḥarāṭīn market women who in this way engage with issues of gender and the social hierarchy. The social space of the market is a critical setting for such practices since it both facilitates their occurrence and also gives women's words weight because they are spoken in the presence of an audience. While jokes are always ambiguous, women's joking in front of others in this space makes their jokes bite, thus enabling them to give voice to deeply personal anxieties and make sense of changes in the social order

Economics · Hierarchy · Joke · Laughter · Negotiation · Order (exchange · Political science · Politics · Polity · Social hierarchy · Social science · Social space · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · African history and culture studies · African Studies and Geopolitics · Gender Studies · Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology

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