The streets of Kankossa's busy daily market often ring with laughter as female vegetable vendors joke with each other and passersby. This joking comes at a time when gender roles are shifting in Mauritania since it has become challenging for many men to provide for their families, causing women to take on roles as significant income earners. Likewise, as slavery has diminished over the last century, Ḥarāṭīn, a group consisting of ex-slaves or descendants of slaves, have been negotiating their places in the polity. To gain insight into the shifting social order, this article analyses examples of joking by Ḥarāṭīn market women who in this way engage with issues of gender and the social hierarchy. The social space of the market is a critical setting for such practices since it both facilitates their occurrence and also gives women's words weight because they are spoken in the presence of an audience. While jokes are always ambiguous, women's joking in front of others in this space makes their jokes bite, thus enabling them to give voice to deeply personal anxieties and make sense of changes in the social order.
Abstract:This article examines the malaḥfa, a veil that has long been popular in Mauritania, using the scholarship of materiality to analyze how it and the wearer co-constitute each other. This approach demonstrates how the malaḥfa’s particular form and fabric provide women with certain constraints and possibilities; women activate these qualities to exercise agency, be it in redefining their positions in the social hierarchy, exercising control in their relationships, or asserting authority over others. Focusing on the malaḥfa’s materiality illustrates how such garments can be central to women’s agency and power, and demonstrates how women shape the broader social hierarchy.
Women in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania have significantly influenced their country’s social, economic, religious, political, and artistic realms. How they have done so has been affected by the country’s nomadic past, severe droughts, history with slavery, and rapid urbanization following independence. Women have participated in trade, influenced politics, made decisions for their families, shaped their marriages, and contributed to religious scholarship. Mauritanian women have also exercised significant power as compared to some of their counterparts elsewhere in the Muslim world, being able to initiate divorce, speak publicly, and act as heads of household. Despite such influence, their gender has also disadvantaged them, making it difficult to access many of the opportunities that are available to men. Likewise, women’s varying social ranks, socioeconomic statuses, ethnicities and regional locations have affected their abilities to maneuver and assert power.
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