Gossip, Markets, and Gender: How Dialogue Constructs Moral Value in Post-Socialist Kilimanjaro. Tuulikki Pietilá. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 2007. xi + 241 pp.

Reviewed in conjunction with Ethos 36.1 by: Robey Callahan, Project Manager, "Digital Chicago Maya: Modern Spoken Yucatec and K'iche'," Center for Latin American Studies, University of Chicago

In this intriguing and multifaceted account, Pietilá takes us on a journey through Chagga (Tanzania) markets—places where not only goods are exchanged, but also ideas. While many of these ideas are felt by the Chagga to arise from "minds" stimulated by the hustle and bustle of commercial activity, they are frequently focused on moral matters that transcend the marketplace. They circulate within what Pietilá calls the "semi-public sphere" of largely "indirect dialogue"—a sort of ongoing, episodic "conversation" involving, at different times and places, gossipers and the targets of their gossip. At stake in this "moral economy" are individuals' and, to a greater or lesser extent, their lineages' reputations. At the heart of these reputations are notions of gender-appropriateness, often linked to lineage-grounded ideals of behavior. And yet markets, while a necessary part of Chagga life, can be reputational minefields for the women who must (or simply want to) navigate them, just as wealth acquisition for men can, under certain circumstances, hold its own potential hazards.

Pietilá identifies what amount to partially overlapping sets of criteria against which people's reputations are measured: "temperature"-inflected ideas of movement, morally ambivalent attitudes to money and markets in general, and more or less pragmatic notions about relative intelligence and the uses to which it is put. Good men should, at least during part of their adult lives, be "hotter" and more given to movement (though never excessively so), while good women should always be "colder" and more settled—too much physical wandering on the part of women is thought to lead to, or simply indicate, sexual and moral laxity. Money (conceptually) and markets (physically) also convey a sense of movement, so they pose greater potential risks for women's reputations. Intelligence or cunning indexes movement as well, for it is held to arise, for women at least, in the "school" of the marketplace.

It is against such a general backdrop that individuals' reputations are debated, often within the moral economy of the marketplace. Within this moral economy, women who must trade to support their families (or who simply enjoy selling) make use of a number of rhetorical strategies to "domesticate" the marketplace and to downplay the reputational dangers therein: they call themselves "mothers" or "farmers" (not "traders"); they "feed their children" (instead of "making profits"); and they cajole potential customers with friendly banter that often involves the use of kin terms and half-joking talk of gifts. As for men, if the source of their affluence becomes a matter of public speculation, they must be sure to put their wealth to good use (giving gifts, sponsoring feasts) to guard their reputations and to avoid rumors that they have secretly done harm to others, perhaps even kin, in order to get it. In both cases, money and the potentially alienating effects of commodity logic more generally are transformed rhetorically and often literally into gifts.

Concerns with commodity and gift logics and with the relatively recent liberalization of the Tanzanian economy guide part of Pietilá's analysis of the conceptual ground upon which gendered reputations are negotiated. She also addresses gender and market studies in other parts of Africa and the world, situates the Chagga case within wider debates on the person (for example, with regard to the ideal types of "dividuals" and "individuals"), and manages throughout to plot a middle course between agency and structure that will appeal to many. Still, at the end of the day, her main focus is the making and breaking of reputations in the "indirect dialogue" between gossipers and their targets, and the model she develops is heavily inspired by Bakhtin.

Pietilá rarely quotes her sources directly in great depth, and so, given her general concerns with dialogicality, some readers with a strong taste for discourse analysis may be slightly disappointed. However, her carefully contextualized paraphrases of her subjects' conversations and descriptions of their actions reveal her to be a perspicacious investigator and should satisfy the evidentiary palates of most of her audience. Ethos-readers in particular may find the distinctions Pietilá draws between "self" and "person" a bit caricatured and perhaps even somewhat simplistic, but they are probably wise given that her potential readership will certainly include people—in particular, many social anthropologists—for whom psychologically oriented anthropology is of only marginal concern. Whatever the case, her moves to occupy a middle ground here have one especially interesting result: the aforementioned focus on that key precipitate of the dialogical play of gossip, reputation—a figure in which the more intimate concerns of the self and the more social concerns associated with the person are intertwined.

Pietilá's fluid shifts between theory and data, along with the occasional insertion of a fascinating aside, make her book eminently readable. It easily recommends itself to a range of possible audiences: middle- to advanced-level undergraduates, graduate students, academics, and knowledgeable others whose interests lie in African studies, gender, gossip and reputation, dialogism, and the morality of exchange. In these areas and others, Pietilá's book has many important things to say, and it says them rather well.