The Haya Lived World-PB: (Body, Commodity, Text: Studies of Objectifying Practice)

At the center of this subtle ethnographic account of the Haya communities of Northwest Tanzania is the idea of a lived world as both the product and the producer of everyday practices. Drawing on his experience living with the Haya, Brad Weiss explores Haya ways of constructing and inhabiting their community, and examines the forces that shape and transform these practices over time. In particular, he shows how the Haya, a group at the fringe of the global economy, have responded to the processes and material aspects of money, markets, and commodities as they make and remake their place in a changing world.

Review :
“The strength of this book lies in its brilliant demonstration that local contexts of practical life and quotidian experience—understood in terms of embodiment, agency, and non–discursive form—may constitute grounds for understanding such global issues as epidemic disease, commoditization, symbolic capital, and the discourse of nationalism.”—Michael Jackson, Indiana University “This is an important ethnography, beautifully written and tightly conceived. It offers stunning ethnographic material and important theoretic reframings of exchange practices. Weiss establishes, the value of a person-centered, historically situated African ethnography and sets a new standard for clarity of exposition of complex contemporary issues in these terms.”—Debbora Battaglia, Mount Holyoke College "The strength of this book lies in its brilliant demonstration that local contexts of practical life and quotidian experience--understood in terms of embodiment, agency, and non-discursive form--may constitute grounds for understanding such global issues as epidemic disease, commoditization, symbolic capital, and the discourse of nationalism."--Michael Jackson, Indiana University "[T]his work stands out as an excellent example of how ethnographic data can be used to contest the primacy of Western philosophical models and as an important tool for examining the ways in which people in this rural African context construct their worldview to understand cultural changes." --Christian T. de Francisco, "Religious Studies Review" "A richly interpretive and theoretically sophisticated account [that] adds a great deal to an anthropology of cultural processes of embodiment and commodification in East Africa." --Philip Setel," American Anthropologist"