Sharing Guy's Journey

Thoughts, comments, observations, reactions, enthusiasms

Masai Mara (8): Maasai Dances (Women)

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It is interesting to note that with the women’s dancing, there is much more gentleness and fluidity, so once more those preconceptions sneak in and apparently are part of every culture. The women line up and begin singing soft, sort of squeaky tunes (no one the same, I gather) and the cacophony is pretty amazing. But it’s not loud, and it all seems to come together.
And of course this is nothing special for the little ones, and if they feel like walking across the field to join their mamas, why not?
The so-called “story” of this dance is something to do with a maiden in a nearby community who has been taken (or will be taken) in marriage with one of the men of the manyatta, and the performance we see here is a welcoming ceremony of sorts to the young woman, to bring her into the community of women who already live in the manyatta. Again, it’s very fluid, as I hope you can see from the photographs in Mr. Guy’s Masai Mara (8) Album, and as the women’s dresses float in the breeze as they move, it is a lovely thing to watch.

Guy St. Clair is the Series Editor for Knowledge Services, the new series (2018) from Verlag Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin. The series subject is knowledge services, the approach to managing intellectual capital that merges information management, knowledge management (KM), and strategic learning. Guy also teaches in the Post-Baccalaureate Studies Program at Columbia University in the City of New York, where his course is Managing Information and Knowledge: Applied Knowledge Services. With Barrie Levy, he is the author of The Knowledge Services Handbook: A Guide for the Knowledge Strategist (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020). He is also the author of Knowledge Services: A Strategic Framework for the 21st Century Organization (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016).

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