Once Intrepid Warriors Summary

The Maasai culture in Eastern Africa has a distinct view on how they treat women. Anthropologists have spent years studying them to find out what traditions they still keep to, how they treat women and why they treat women in the particular way they do. The three resources all show how women within the culture are represented within the culture. Each resource tells a different story that helps us understand their traditional ways and their living situation. These resources work together because, firstly they are written by anthropologists who have studied the Maasai culture and secondly because they all show insight into the lives of the Maasai people with regards to women and inequality. Dorothy Hodgson’s book, Once Intrepid Warriors: Gender, …show more content…
The work that Hodgson did was to analysis social and cultural research by examining the relationships between cultural concepts of gender and social relationships of genders within the Maasai people. Hodgson studied for two years located in three different Maasai communities, whilst doing four key research methods. The communities that she stayed in, for both of her research, was Emairete; which was situated on the upper slopes of Komolonik mountains, Mti Moja; which was a village created by the government and Embopon; which was situated in the Great Rift Valley (Hodgson1999). She describes where each community is and what they focused on in their daily lives. She found that there is a certain cultural perspective towards Maasai women by the Maasai men; she realized that the Maasai women are treated and perceived as children. She studied the cultural image of these perceptions and observed as to how it affected social inequality as well as how it affected the economic and political social customs. She found that in terms of education, class and the way women are treated that it has stumped their growth, however in terms of religion women have been able to expand their power and let it grow. Hodgson also looks at the ethnographic research of Linguistics; she found that the association of women and children come from the …show more content…
She was interested in finding out as to why the Maasai people have changed so much, and what they have changed. People started to realize what the Maasai once was, beautiful and free, has now been deteriorating into something else. But still with the change the Maasai men still see women as valueless. And those women still don’t have good education or free will. She had met women, who complained about their husbands treating them poorly, she found that women were forced into labour, or beaten and treated without respect (Hodgson 2001). Women still had no rights to cattle or livestock; women were being laughed at for starting their own business or being independent. Women were still seen as children. Hodgson went to speak to some women that she was working with and tried to help them. Respect is a top priority for the Maasai people, it is the most important part of their culture and yet one of their biggest issues. Hodgson first thought that all these problems that she had come across was because of the lack of development in those areas, the lack of education, health care and shelter. She had many meetings with different people to find out answers. She wanted to find out as to how women became known as property or possessions and are owned by the men around them. Hodgson blames it on the colonization, where men took over and dominated women