Passageways of cooperation: mutual help in post-socialist Tanzania

Abstract

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 267This paper will examine the patterns and discourses of sharing and cooperation as well as broader moralities and freedoms that are reproduced in Kuria mutual help groups. It is based on 32 months of ethnographic field research in Tarime and Serengeti districts of Mara region that investigated local patterns of cooperation and the emerging modes of personhood within the novel associational environments.2 The study argues that the systemic dynamic of Kuria cooperative groups should not be sought in the additive accumulation of material wealth or undisputed reproduction of social solidarity, but rather in historically defined processes of extending one’s self through social ties of interdependence. Such relational dynamics of informality also illuminate the emerging public spaces and socialities in globalizing Tanzanian communities. The paper is structured to provide an overview of different forms of Kuria cooperation in historical as well as contemporary perspectives, and situate these in a broader framework of culturally relevant exchanges and moralities. The first part of the study discusses the social organization of Kuria mutual help, analyzing its connections with descent and age organization and other variables relevant for its mobilization. It explores transformations in local mutual help forms and discusses the dynamics of contemporary Kuria work and savings groups that proliferate in commercializing local communities. Tendencies toward greater formalization of work reciprocities and the emergence of new categories of peers are explored. The evolution of Kuria mutual help is placed in the context of comparative ethnographic evidence of recent transformations of collective work in Africa. The second part of the study examines the construction of Kuria persons through public collective activities, situating these within the transformed materiality of socially significant exchanges and transfers. Socially relevant forms of savings and accumulation that affect mutuality and their historical transformations are explored. Changes in gendered savings and work profiles are also discussed. The study also examines novel forms of cooperation in community peacekeeping, revealing Kuria vigilantism as another important associational area of the local informality