The Maasai's New Clothes

A Developmentalist Modernity and Its Exclusions

Bibliographic Data

ID5136166
AuthorsLeander Schneider (corresponding author)
Year2006
Volume53
Issue1
Pages100-131
Publication date2006-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAfrica Today (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0001-9887 • E-ISSN: 1527-1978
PublisherIndiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/at.2006.0063
OpenAlexW4245216057
LanguageEN
Citations received28
References cited45

Dress-Up, a late 1960s campaign initiated by the Tanzanian state to induce the Maasai to abandon their traditional mode of dress, opens a window on a specific articulation in its historical context of development. The analysis draws on articles, letters to the editor, and politicians' statements printed in the Tanzanian press to portray how sections of Tanzanian society thought about the Maasai, tradition, modernity, and the nation. The article shows how, under the banner of development, cast as value-neutral and nonpartisan, Operation Dress- Up pursued what must always be a particular and therefore partisan vision of modern man. Special attention is paid to how the discourses through which the campaign was articulated rendered disagreement with its goals hard to imagine, and even harder to recognize as legitimate

Clothing · Economics · Maasai · Modernity · Political science · Socioeconomics · Sociology · Tanzania · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Law · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology · Sex work and related issues

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