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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...