Issues of gender and justice surround us daily. Dorothy Hodgson’s new book, Gender, Justice, and the Problem of Culture: From Customary Law to Human Rights in Tanzania, provides a textured analysis of the changing relationships between law, custom, gender, marriage, and justice among the Maasai in northern Tanzania. Hodgson’s book grows out of her enduring engagement with these issues since she first began conducting field research among the Maasai in the mid-1980s. The Maasai of northern Tanzania comprise roughly 300,000 people who share the Maa language and an economy of livestock and herding. Since the late nineteenth century, the Maasai have been under pressure from colonial and postcolonial authorities to transform themselves into “modern” legible participants in the colonial and national economies. Gender, Justice, and the Problem of Culture is Hodgson’s fourth book drawn from her research on the Maasai, and it should be mandatory reading because it demonstrates how important historical change is to the contemporary contests over gender and justice.

Gender, Justice, and the Problem of Culture consists of four core chapters with a strong conceptual introduction and a short conclusion. At the core of Hodgson’s argument are the tensions between law and justice and between local and colonial/national/global forces as the Maasai grapple with change and their place within Tanzania. As a historically-minded anthropologist, Hodgson understands that culture is socially constructed, mutable, and determined by those who invoke it. The law is shaped by culture. Even if it invokes universal principles, law is shaped by the particular context in which it emerges. One of Hodgson’s important interventions is to demonstrate that even as British colonial officials were collaborating with Maasai elders in creating customary law (as opposed to the indigenous law that preceded the colonial encounter), they were imposing particular British understandings of what constituted equity and of what practices were considered repugnant. When postcolonial Tanzanian urban elites invoked “universal” human rights discourse, they were drawing on ideas particular to Western Europe and North America during the twentieth century. Colonial officials and postcolonial elites drew on these different legal regimes to justify the social engineering of Maasai societies, especially in regard to marriage patterns, female genital mutilation (FGM), and economic development.

Various groups of Maasai responded differently to these efforts at social engineering. How they did so forms the narrative of the core chapters in the book. “Deluged” by waves of marital disputes, especially in the late 1940s and 1950s, colonial officials sought to codify Maasai marriages in order to render them legible. Codification simplified complex and fluid forms of Maasai household structures by enshrining the male household head’s authority and making bridewealth the foundation of “proper” or respectable marriages. This process undermined the core of enkanyit, which was the Maasai concept of mutual or moral respect. Here Hodgson invokes a Maasai concept of culture that is somehow timeless and which serves as a deep well from which Maasai dissidents draw to condemn violations of the moral order and to restore justice. The postcolonial Law of Marriage Act also provided aggrieved women and daughters with other instruments to access in the struggle for moral respect. Hodgson provides a fascinating discussion of a dispute she observed in which a daughter sued her father in a national court for the right to marry the man of her choice. She won the case but weakened the moral order of her community.

Maasai women also had the power to draw on olkishoronto, which is a form of collective action to punish violations of the moral order. Women used this to punish men accused of adultery, for example, but they also used it to protest postcolonial development plans that alienated Maasai land for use as private hunting concessions, which threatened to further impoverish Maasai communities in the name of national economic development. Hodgson clearly celebrates these aspects of Maasai culture that provide women with tools to resist breaches of their moral order. But does culture so understood also limit debate about how to deal with practices such as FGM? Drawing on universal human rights discourse, postcolonial urban elite women launched campaigns to prohibit FGM in the name of “progress.” Hodgson sees the anti-FGM campaigns as a problem of power, not culture, in which these elites attempt to speak for the poor. Listening instead to Maasai women (which women?), Hodgson quotes them as arguing “these are not our priorities” (121). Instead, Maasai women’s priorities are political and economic empowerment in the face of increasing impoverishment. However, since Maasai women are also concerned that their daughters be marriageable, they are thus complicit with the continuation of FGM. Across the border in Kenya, Nice Leng’ete, a young Maasai woman, has launched a campaign to end FGM that has helped at least 15,000 Maasai girls avoid being ritually cut (Jina Moore, “She Ran From the Cut, and Helped Thousands of Other Girls Escape, Too,” The New York Times, Jan. 13, 2018). Anti-FGM campaigns are clearly about power, but also about those who wield culture as a tool of power.

Unresolved in Hogdson’s excellent new book is the fuller discussion of the relationship between law and justice. Hodgson is strongest on how law can cause injustice, but she is less clear on how law and courts can be an instrument of political and economic empowerment in the face of impoverishment and oppression. Precisely because of these big issues, Hodgson’s Gender, Justice, and the Problem of Culture speaks to a wide range of disciplines and should find pride of place in our curricula.