When the Light Is Fire (ePub)

A host of international organizations promotes the belief that education will empower Kenya's Maasai girls. Yet the ideas that animate their campaigns often arise from presumptions that reduce the girls themselves to helpless victims of gender-related forms of oppression. Heather Switzer's interviews with over one hundred Kenyan Maasai schoolgirls challenge the widespread view of education as a silver bullet solution to global poverty. In their own voices, the girls offer incisive insights into their commitments, aspirations, and desires. Switzer weaves this ethnographic material into an astute analysis of historical literature, education and development documents, and theoretical literature. Massai schoolgirls express a particular knowledge about themselves and provocative hopes for their futures. Yet, as Switzer shows, new opportunities force them to face, and navigate, new vulnerabilities and insecurities within a society that is itself in flux.|
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction. "Girls are the most powerful force of change on the planet": Situating Schoolgirlhood
Chapter 1. "Now is not like before. The world has changed": Maasai Education in Cultural and Histor
Chapter 2. "I see that when I am in school, I will have a good life": Producing and Performing Schoo
Chapter 3. "The medicine for fire is fire": Negotiating Schoolgirlhood
Chapter 4. "We are not enkanyakuai. . . . We are just girls": Embodying Schoolgirlhood
Conclusion. Becoming "People Who Use Both Hands"
Notes
Works Cited
Index|Heather Switzer an assistant professor of Women and Gender Studies in the School for Social Transformation at Arizona State University.