The cattle for land exchange: elderly women's negotiations in the Gwembe Valley, Zambia.

Introduction: This paper examines the relationship between material resources and support strategies for older women and men in the Gwembe Valley, of southern Zambia. In this paper I argue that gender differences in access to resources, and investments in those resources lead to very different strategies in mobilizing support from children. Drawing on four decades of research in the Gwembe Valley, I will show that changes in land value, cattle herding, and production of local beer have lead to women's use of cultural metaphors of "the caring mother" to encourage support from children, while men rely primarily on resource control. In the Gwembe Valley of Southern Province Zambia, older men and women have different methods of encouraging support from their children. During 1994 and 1995 I conducted dissertation fieldwork as part of the Gwembe Tonga Research Project(1), started by Elizabeth Colson and Thayer Scudder in 1956. During my year and a half living with the Gwembe Tonga, I saw women mobilizing their relationships to children by calling on concepts of "mother" and the reproductive experience as evidence for their right to demand support...In the following sections of this paper I will trace the history of men and women's access to fundamental resources, and how they relate to strategies of support. (From introduction)