Pietilä Tuulikki. Gossip, Markets and Gender: How Dialogue Constructs Moral Value in Post-Socialist Kilimanjaro. Women in Africa and the Diaspora series. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. xi + 241 pp. Maps. Photographs. Illustrations. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $45.00. Cloth.

Tuulikki Pietila. Gossip, Markets and Gender: How Dialogue Constructs Moral Value in Post-Socialist Kilimanjaro. Women in Africa and the Diaspora series. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. xi + 241 pp. Maps. Photographs. Illustrations. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $45.00. Cloth. The seemingly ubiquitous market is the setting of Pietila's study of everyday talk and negotiated morality in contemporary Tanzania. It is told in ethnographic detail against the backdrop of the creative and sometimes contradictory social relations of businesspersons and traders in the Kilimanjaro region (both women and men) . Pietila is interested in everyday conversation, stories, even gossip and rumor, which reveal not simply a changing economic reality but a public conversation. Public dialogue is concerned with the morality of markets, market women, and businessmen. She subtly shifts our focus of analysis from the actual economic changes that market liberalization and globalization have brought to the ways that people debate, challenge, and construct individual and collective morality in response to these changes. Pietila brings comprehensive order to the Himo market in Kilimanjaro without sacrificing complexity, in describing both the organization of the market and the structure of negotiation and economic transactions. She provides scrupulous accounting of the possible moral meanings of each of the various steps of a seemingly simple transaction such as the bargaining between a trader and a customer. Her goal is to use everyday conversation as a tool for blurring the lines between the market economy and the "moral economy." While the literature on economic relations in so-called noncapitalist societies tends to see these two economies as distinct, Pietila's interest is in how traders in Kilimanjaro draw on concepts and language from kinship and domestic spheres to bring the "moral economy" into the marketplace. In this case, Chagga experiences are informed not only by the market economy but also by the history of Tanzanian socialism; everyday conversation and gossip reveal uneasiness with the perceived corruption and individualized wealth accumulation under postsocialist regimes. At the same time, conversations in the market, especially among and about women traders, are part of the renegotiation of gender roles in contemporary Tanzania as well as ways to build, shape, and contest moral reputations. Pietila's particular interest is in the morality of women and men, and what everyday stories and discourse reveal about gender relations, and (to a lesser extent) age, class, and other important social hierarchies. She argues that women traders use idioms of motherhood, kinship, and patronage to bring "stable sociality and reciprocity to the market" (48). In this way, women traders use what appears to be casual talk, such as gossip and joking, to construct and preserve the moral reputations of entrepreneurs in the context of rapid economic change. …