essay
Dancing women and colonial men: the NWAOBIALA of 1925
'Wicked' women and the reconfiguration of gender in Africa • Portsmouth, N.h. • Published In 2001 • Pages: 109-129
By: Bastian, Misty L..
AbstractBrief abstract written by HRAF anthropologists who have done the subject indexing for the document
Bastian has written an account of the Igbo Woman's War of 1929. The war, really a market riot, involved older married women attacking younger unmarried women in the marketplace and stripping them naked. The riot stemmed from the NWAOBIALA movement in which bands of women ritually swept public spaces. Sweeping was both a common domestic chore and part of an annual purification rite to appease the earth god who influenced fertility. The movement was interpreted by colonial officials as a conservative movement about sanitation and the evils of prostitution. Bastian's interpretation is more complex and sees the movement as a reaction to an overall loss of women's power. An expanding market economy and construction of new roadways and railroads bypassed women's traditional control of bush roads, markets, and their daughters' labor.
- SubjectsDocument-level OCM identifiers given by the anthropology subject indexers at HRAF
- Gender status
- External relations
- Political movements
- cultureCulture name from the Outline of World Cultures (OWC)
- Igbo
- HRAF PubDateThe date HRAF published the document
- 2003
- RegionThe area the document pertains to
- Africa
- Sub RegionThe more specific area the document pertains to, which is located within the Region
- Western Africa
- Document TypeMay include journal articles, essays, collections of essays, monographs, or chapters/parts of monographs
- essay
- Evaluation
- Creator TypeThe type of person writing the document, e.g. Ethnographer, Missionary, Archaeologist, Folklorist, Linguist, Indigenous Person, and so on.
- Ethnologist
- Document Rating A ranking done by HRAF anthropologists based on the strength of the source material on a scale of 1 to 5, as follows: 1 - poor; 2 - fair; 3 - good, useful data, but not uniformly excellent; 4 - excellent secondary data; 5 - excellent primary data.
- 4: Excellent Secondary Data
- AnalystThe HRAF anthropologist who subject indexed the document and prepared other materials for the eHRAF culture/tradition collection
- Ian Skoggard ; 2001
- Field DateThe date the researcher conducted the fieldwork or archival research that produced the document
- not specified
- Coverage DateThe date or dates that the information in the document pertains to
- 1925-1930
- Coverage PlaceLocation of the research culture or tradition (often a smaller unit such as a band, community, or archaeological site)
- Owerri, Imo State, Nigeria
- NotesAdditional notes
- Misty L. Bastian
- Includes bibliographical references (p. 128-129)
- LCCNLibrary of Congress Control Number
- 00040882
- LCSHLibrary of Congress Subject Headings
- Igbo (African people)