At the center of this subtle ethnographic account of the Haya communities of Northwest Tanzania is the idea of a lived world as both the product and the producer of everyday practices. Drawing on his experience living with the Haya, Brad Weiss explores Haya ways of constructing and inhabiting their community, and examines the forces that shape and transform these practices over time. In particular, he shows how the Haya, a group at the fringe of the global economy, have responded to the processes and material aspects of money, markets, and commodities as they make and remake their place in a changing world. Grounded in a richly detailed ethnography of Haya practice, Weiss’s analysis considers the symbolic qualities and values embedded in goods and transactions across a wide range of cultural activity: agricultural practice and food preparation, the body’s experience of epidemic disease from AIDS to the infant affliction of “plastic teeth,” and long-standing forms of social movement and migration. Weiss emphasizes how Haya images of consumption describe the relationship between their local community and the global economy. Throughout, he demonstrates that particular commodities and more general market processes are always material and meaningful forces with the potential for creativity as well as disruption in Haya social life. By calling attention to the productive dimensions of this spatial and temporal world, his work highlights the importance of human agency in not only the Haya but any sociocultural order. Offering a significant contribution to the anthropological theories of practice, embodiment, and agency, and enriching our understanding of the lives of a rural African people, The Making and Unmaking of the Haya Lived World will interest historians, anthropologists, ethnographers, and scholars of cultural studies. “The strength of this book lies in its brilliant demonstration that local contexts of practical life and quotidian experience—understood in terms of embodiment, agency, and non–discursive form—may constitute grounds for understanding such global issues as epidemic disease, commoditization, symbolic capital, and the discourse of nationalism.”—Michael Jackson, Indiana University “This is an important ethnography, beautifully written and tightly conceived. It offers stunning ethnographic material and important theoretic reframings of exchange practices. Weiss establishes, the value of a person-centered, historically situated African ethnography and sets a new standard for clarity of exposition of complex contemporary issues in these terms.”—Debbora Battaglia, Mount Holyoke College "This is an important ethnography, beautifully written and tightly conceived. It offers stunning ethnographic material and important theoretic reframings of exchange practices. Weiss establishes, the value of a person-centered, historically situated African ethnography and sets a new standard for clarity of exposition of complex contemporary issues in these terms."--Debbora Battaglia, Mount Holyoke College Brad Weiss is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary. The Making and Unmaking of the Haya Lived World Consumption, Commoditization, and Everyday Practice By Brad Weiss Duke University Press Copyright © 1996 Duke University Press All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-1722-7 Contents Acknowledgments, 1 An Orientation to the Study, Changing Perspectives, The Lived World, Commoditization, Historical Perspectives: An Overview, Contemporary Perspectives: The Late 1980s, A Précis, I Making the World, 2 "Evil Flee, Goodness Come in": Creating and Securing Domesticity, 3 Hearthplaces and Households: Haya Culinary Practice, 4 Mealtime: Providing and Presenting a Meal, 5 A Moral Gastronomy: Value and Action in the Experience of Food, II The World Unmade, 6 Plastic Teeth Extraction: An Iconography of Haya Gastrosexual Affliction, 7 "Buying Her Grave": Money, Movement, and AIDS, 8 Electric Vampires: From Embodied Commodities to Commoditized Bodies, 9 Conclusions: The Enchantment of the Disenchanted World, Notes, 1 Introduction, 2 Creating and Securing Domesticity, 3 Hearthplaces and Households, 4 Mealtime, 5 A Moral Gastronomy, 6 Plastic Teeth Extraction, 7 Money, Movement, and AIDS, 8 Electric Vampires, 9 Conclusions, References, Index, CHAPTER 1 AN ORIENTATION TO THE STUDY * * * Changing Perspectives From plateau atop the escarpment in the Muleba District of Tanzania one can look out over a long slope to the valley below. This valley presents a vast hilly expanse, a field of broad savanna plains interspersed with rocky outcrops and compact villages, whose verdant flora stand out sharply against the surrounding terrain (fig. 1a and b ). The sloping face of this escarpment leads down beyond the valley and villages to the western shores of Lake Victoria. In the Haya language ( oluhaya ) Lake Victoria is Lwelu, "the great out-