Goodbyes Brewing

Professor Kerner's departure from Machame, Tanzania in 1984, was marked by the ceremonial drinking of mbege, locally brewed beer. Here the lineage elder, after having taken a drink himself, passes the beer gourd to Professor Kerner and her "adoptive" family.

Professor Kerner's most recent field research (summer 1999), took her to Tanzania to continue a project on women's cooperatives and micro-enterprises in the ThirdWorld. This piece of research is part of a larger comparative project which also took her to Tanzania and Kenya in 1990-91 and the Fiji Islands in 1995. Small-scale businesses, funded by rotating credit associations, are new pet projects for women in Development divisions of multilateral and bilateral aid agencies. Prof. Kerner is interested in discovering whether the claims that such micro-enterprises significantly boost maternal/child health, investment in children's education, and promote women's autonomy in the home and community are justified. With support provided by a Gebbie Foundation grant for collaborative undergraduate research, she was able to take along a Wheaton undergraduate, Libby Bixby '02, to work as her research assistant. With the training Libby received in Tanzania that summer, she was able to go on to conduct research at the Rhode Island Food Bank and at a number of women's cooperatives in Ecuador during her sophomore and junior years.. Libby is currently pursuing a Master's in International Relations at the University of Maryland.

Professor Kerner is also working on a collaborative monograph on the subject of memory and material culture in the history of Kilimanjaro (Tanzania). Her work on Chagga initiation carvings was presented at invited conferences at Northwestern University (1994) and Cambridge University (2000), and most recently at the African Studies Association meetings in New Orleans (2004).