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7 Liking Only Those in Your Eye Relationship Terms, Statuses, and Cultural Models

1. There is no necessity for statuses to have names, although many do. They are recognized, both by observers and community members, according to members meeting criteria set out in understandings that may, but need not, include their being labeled in speech. Those who follow the understandings that are called "etiquette" in English are labeled as "polite" in English, and this is a status label. So far as I know, there is no commonly used label of a comparable sort in the Swahili language as used in Old Town, although the term "mpole" is used this way by members of at least some other groups who speak Swahili as a second language. Nevertheless, those Swahili who are considered to follow the understandings concerning proper greetings, what to say on getting and giving gifts, and so on are categorized together. They have

expectations associated with them when that category is taken as a salient one for them, and these do not apply to those not in this category. [BACK]

2. I am both called and referred to as "Professor" in Old Town by all but my closest friends, who still use that title in reference but call me "Marc." During the fieldwork period, there had been no anthropologist working in Old Town, but there had been several historians and linguists. The idea that I was a student of Swahili society was taken to mean that I wanted to know about history, folk tales, proverbs, and language. [BACK]

3. "Multiplex" and "simplex" apply to relationships. Extending the concepts to statuses has the difficulty that, as noted, the statuses in multiplex relations can be involved in simplex relations. Even though the reverse is not true, it may be that confusion is possible from speaking of "multiplex statuses" instead of "the statuses involved in multiplex relationships.'' The economy in the less strict usage, however, justifies the risk. [BACK]

4. A fair number of late-middle-aged and elderly Swahili women have spent their lives in the rather strict separation of the sexes ( tawa ) followed in this community and have never ridden a bus. Some of them call buses "Kenya" because the bus company operating within Mombasa is the Kenya Bus Company and has been for many years. When referring to the country, I have heard an elderly woman say "Kenya, si gari, nti" (Kenya, not the vehicle, the country). [BACK]

5. Multiplex relationships can, of course, supersede simplex relationships, and the statuses appropriate to the simplex relationship may not be employed. I got on a matatu (a jitney bus) with a Swahili friend and the conductor did not ask my friend for his fare as he did everyone else. When I asked what happened, my friend told me that the conductor had been his pupil in school and never asked him for a fare. Even in these situations, however, the mutual identification is unavoidable if more complex. [BACK]

6. During British rule, there were members of the Swahili community who held positions in the colonial administration. In addition to teachers in the government schools, Old Town men were employed in the native administration where they served under Britons but had substantial authority of their own. Their ranks were kadhi (judge in Islamic courts), mudiri (administrator of the second rank either supervising minor areas or being assistant administrators in larger ones), and liwali (top administrators in major areas so that there was a liwali for Mombasa and a superior one for the Coast Province). [BACK]

7. The similarity of "general expectations" to legitimacy as a basis for political power is intended. "Compliance," I wrote regarding legitimacy, "is motivated by the belief (which may be only vaguely formulated) that at some time in the future . . . [the locus of legitimacy] will satisfy the compliers' expectations" (Swartz, Turner, and Tuden 1966:14-15). [BACK]

8. While interviewing a group of high school girls, I said that although men of their own community had told me that girls and women were less rational than boys and men, I did not necessarily share that view. Hands shot up all over the room, and several girls heatedly said that it was God's will that girls and women be less rational than men but that that did not mean they were less intelligent or good. Why, they asked, was I denying what was obviously true, part of God's plan, and a perfectly honorable state for females? [BACK]

9. The dialect of the Swahili language spoken in Mombasa, Kimvita, is one of the several dialects spoken in different Swahili communities along the coast. The Swahili spoken throughout Kenya as well as in Tanzania, Uganda, the eastern Sudan, northern Mozambique, and elsewhere is not viewed by the Swahili people as the true and proper version of their language. It is true that most non-Swahili who speak the language learned it in later childhood or adolescence as a lingua franca. It is the first language of the Swahili themselves whose version has not been subject to the decisions of the colonial Interterritorial Swahili Committee, which regularized the grammar and ruled on proper usage beginning in the 1920s and continuing until independence. [BACK]

10. Adult men, over 30 or so, fought with weapons in the few accounts I have of their fighting. The traditional walking stick, bakora, was used as a weapon (see chap. 3), and at least some men carried a knife. Younger men are reported to fight with their hands when they fight, but this is also rare. [BACK]


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