Chapungu: The Bird That Never Drops a Feather: Male and Female Identities in an African Society

Abstract

"Chapungu: The Biard That Never Drops a Feather: Male and Female Identities in an African Society" by Anita Jacobson-Widding is reviewed.

Chapungu: The Bird That Never Drops a Feather. Male and Female Identities in an African Society. Anita Jacobson-Widding. Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1999. 525 pp.

In this theoretically rich and ethnographically detailed book, Anita Jacobson-Widding provides a classical anthropological study of identity formation for Manyika males and females in eastern Zimbabwe. Drawing on various theoretical streams of psychological, cognitive, and symbolic anthropology, and on 21 months of fieldwork in villages in Mutasa and Nyanga districts and in the city of Mutare through three trips between 1984 and 1996, Jacobson-Widding explains the ethical construction of the self, the conflicting gender and kinship ideologies of equality and hierarchy, and intrafamily dynamics of the Manyika, who are conventionally classified as one of the subgroups of the Shona.

Premising her ethnography in part as a reconfirmation of the importance of "culture" to anthropological inquiry in the face of what she calls "postmodern criticism" over the last 15 years, she anchors her analysis to a long cultural tradition dating to the time of the precolonial Zimbabwe state of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, impressively symbolized by the ruins and objects of the ancient city called Great Zimbabwe, about 200 miles south of her field sites. The stone-bird found in the ruins called chapungu has been taken as a national symbol of the postcolonial nation of Zimbabwe (present, for example, on its national flag) and is taken by Jacobson-Widding as a key symbol for the male personality ideal and its ambiguities for most Manyika men today.

The ethnography is divided into three sections. The first section lays out the tensions amongst what Jacobson-Widding identifies as three cultural models of gender relations. She argues that the explicit model of male superiority is embedded in the hierarchical relationship between husband and wife and symbolized by the phallic symbol of the stiff and erect chapungu bird and the posture that Manyika males tend to adopt in public occasions. Although most academic studies of Zimbabwe emphasize the patriarchal nature of gender relations, she suggests that there are two other models in tension with this one.

The second model is performed during rain ceremonies where, as amongst other groups in the region, there is an emphasis on equality between brother and sister in an androgynous representation of fertility. Jacobson-Widding supports her argument here through a symbolic analysis of cultural classification systems of colors and numbers, ritual women songs, royal incest in ancestral ideology of the unilineal clan system, amongst other domains.

The third model of gender relations is a muted one, one that expresses a male fear of women as the dominant, aggressive partner that threatens his self-control. She locates this both in the Shona version of Omaha kinship terminology that places men in an inferior position to his male in-laws at the very time in which he is demonstrating his male authority by becoming married and having legitimate sexual relations and, especially, in the changing interrelationships and interactions between a boy and his mother. This muted structure, particularly in terms of the latter relationship, is the main focus of the last two sections of the book.

Through detailed ethnographic descriptions of family interactions, self-presentations, the telling of rungano (which she translates as "fairy tales") and localized interpretations of the social landscape in a Nyanga district Communal Land, Jacobson-- Widding layers an argument of gender identity formation that centers on the mother's (Batesonian) "transcontextual double binding" of her son. Focusing on the symbolism of ritual pollution, domestic architecture and routines, differential weaning practices, and motherly interactions, particularly of praise and anger, toward sons and daughters in combination with the valuation of sexuality and erectness for a male's sense of autonomy and self-control leads her to suggest particular cognitive and psychological effects within male identity formation amongst the Manyika, pivoting around the fear of aggressive women, archetypically the mother. As Jacobson-Widding concludes this section, for a boy the mother "steals what supposedly constitutes his male identity, his capacity to `stand up' and fend for himself, his autonomy and independence, his lust for life, his vitality and agency-all the features associated with the ideal of male identity" (p. 339).

The third and final section elaborates on these effects in terms of differential perceptions of personal identity, emotions, and role fulfilment for men and women. Based on her ethnographic examples, including a description of generally passive behavior of boys in contrast to active behavior of girls, and the use of theories of a variety of psychological (and anthropological) authors, she argues that the type of affective relationships Manyika boys have with their mothers can prevent the development of a personal identity of what Erickson called "selfsameness," a secure sense of self. Whereas "Manyika girls tend to develop a consistent personal identity ... which seems to persist" (p. 432), Manyika boys tend to develop "cognitive confusion" (p. 434), a "fragmented self" (p. 435), which leads to an unfulfilled desire of many men, a sense of emptiness at the heart of their moyo ("heart"), the dominant trope for Manyika/Shona sense of self. On the basis of this presumed cognitive universal of identity formation, Jacobson-Widding argues the tensions and contradictions among the three models of gender relations imparted as cultural models and through interaction with significant others mean that Manyika men tend to have a "deficient sense of personal identity" (p. 483).

As someone influenced by what she calls "postmodernist" criticism, I was not always convinced by Jacobson-Widding's explanations. Her presumption of substantive cultural uniformity of stable ethnic identities like "Manyika" and "Shona," going back at least seven centuries, goes against the grain of much recent social historical and ethnographic literature on the complicated colonial and postcolonial imagining, discourses, and practices of ethnicity, culture, and tribalism. This literature is not even addressed, even critically, and the important work of Professor Terence Ranger on these topics in the area of her research is noticeable in its absence. Moreover, the main theoretical point that Manyika male identity is "deficient" in light of her analysis of cognitive and identity formation steeped in western theories can undermine her great, and I think important, emphasis on taking other cultural understandings seriously. Here, a psychoanalytical evaluation of a cognitive defect for most males of an identified culture trumps her attempt to demand that a cultural approach should also be valued in the literature on identity formation. Furthermore, the occasional use of the terms traditional and modern to differentiate domains of life by degree of contact with western social forms is somewhat surprising given the important critiques of these terms in anthropological and Africanist works over the past decades.

Nonetheless, despite these misgivings and theoretical skepticism, I think Chapungu is an important and rewarding book for a number of audiences. For students of the region, the ethnography provides much insight into family dynamics, rituals, quotidian activities, and symbolism, greater than most ethnographies of Zimbabwe, let alone southern Africa. Jacobson-Widding explicitly writes the book with an abundance of (engaging) ethnographic detail so readers can come to alternative conclusions, if they so wish. Africanists interested in identity formation, cognition, fertility rituals, and gender will find a great comparative resource in Chapungu. Finally, the author's theoretical sophistication, syncretism, and critiques are of interest to psychological, cognitive, and symbolic anthropologists involved in these topics on a theoretical level or in other localities. In Chapungu, Jacobson-Widding has given us a richly layered ethnography speaking to many audiences at once.