The multiple meanings of moongo : on the conceptual character of doorways and backbones in K ilimanjaro

Abstract

By means of ‘connective analysis’, this article explores the multiple meanings of moongo among the C hagga‐speaking people of R ombo district, K ilimanjaro region, which resemble neglected meanings of the vernacular terms translated as ‘lineage’ elsewhere. These meanings were eclipsed by an analytical move that privileged ‘the political’ at the expense of other relations. By suspending the question of politics, it is shown how moongo is central to bridewealth exchanges and reproductive relationships, which provides new impetus to classic anthropological discussions of the house‐property complex. The result is to treat moongo as a concept in its own right, which enunciates and concerns how persons and houses are transformations of each other and effects of particular relationships.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.