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Accepted Paper:
Tourism and marriage migrations in a postcolonial world. Anthropological study of Maasai-European long-term intimate relationships
Elżbieta Wiejaczka
(Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland)
This presentation is about marriages of Maasai men and European women who live in Tanzania. It concerns their economic strategies, Gender relations, relations with the extended family and hope for the future.
Paper long abstract:
Over the past decade Zanzibar has become a very popular holiday destination. In just five years, the number of tourists has almost doubled. At the same time many Maasai from mainland Tanzania migrate to Zanzibar for work purposes. These men find a job in the tourism sector, which means they are in regular contact with tourists. These meetings often result in developing closer relations with female Europeans. Some of them turn into long-term relationships, which sometimes end in marriage and often result in a change of one partner's place of residence, i.e. emigration of Maasai men to the tourists' countries of origin or the decision of women to live in Tanzania. My presentation concerns couples who have decided to live in Tanzania. I will discuss, among others, what kind of economic strategies they adopt; what actions are European partners taking for the benefit of the Maasai community that they live in; how children are brought up as well as how gender relations are shaped in the aforementioned relationships and how the spouses envision the future. I will present how the partners' performing of masculinity and femininity is changing. Maasai community is patriarchal, but relations with women from the Global North seems to be an alternative to gender relations understood in this way. I rely on my own ethnographic field research carried out in mainland Tanzania.