Anthropology & Medicine, 2013
Vol. 20, No. 1, 98–108, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13648470.2012.747594

‘My wife, you are supposed to have a rest now’: an analysis of norms influencing men’s role in prenatal care in south-eastern Tanzania
Karin Grossa,b,Ã, Iddy Mayumanac and Brigit Obrista,b,d a Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, Basel, Switzerland; bUniversity of Basel, Basel,
Switzerland; cIfakara Health Institute, Dar es Salaam, United Republic of Tanzania; d University of Basel, Institute of Anthropology, Basel, Switzerland
(Received 27 September 2011; final version received 19 July 2012)
Men as sexual partners, fathers and household heads have a direct bearing on women’s reproductive health. However, little is known about the influence of changing norms and values on men’s role in ensuring women’s health during pregnancy and childbirth.
This study from rural south-eastern Tanzania explores men’s and women’s discussions on men’s roles and responsibilities in prenatal care and links them to an analysis of norms and values at the household level and beyond. Data from eight focus group discussions with men and women were consensually coded and analysed using a qualitative content analysis. Four dimensions of norms and values, which emerged from analysis, bear upon men’s support towards pregnant women: changing gender identities; changing family and marriage structures; biomedical values disseminated in health education; and government regulations. The findings suggest that Tanzanian men are exposed to a contradictory and changing landscape of norms and values in relation to maternal health.
Keywords: prenatal care; male involvement; qualitative; norms; values; Tanzania

Introduction
After a long time of neglect, men’s influence on women’s and children’s health has received much attention in research, development programs and health policies in recent years. Yet as Dudgeon and Inhorn (2004) pointed out, men’s involvement in ensuring women’s health during pregnancy and childbirth is still poorly understood. Most of the existing studies explored men’s roles in and attitudes towards prenatal care in clinical settings (see for example Carter 2002; Muia et al. 2000; Mullany 2006). Studies from Kenya
(Muia et al. 2000), Tanzania (Theuring et al. 2009), Nepal (Mullany 2006), Guatemala
(Carter 2002) and Salvador (Carter and Speizer 2005) provided evidence for men’s concern for their partners’ health and for their positive attitudes towards participation in sexual and reproductive health services. Moreover, a recent study illustrated men’s positive influence on women’s timing of antenatal care (ANC) initiation (Gross et al. 2012). Yet, several authors have pointed out that, as well as low knowledge levels and time constraints, societal norms and hospital policies discouraged men’s participation in prenatal care (Carter
2002; Carter and Speizer 2005; Muia et al. 2000; Mullany 2006; Theuring et al. 2009).
Reproductive behaviours are clearly regulated by norms, values and power relations.
In Tanzania, as elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, marriage and family structures produce and reproduce rigid gender models and ideologies entailing both rights and obligations for men and women and sustaining distinct divisions of labour and power relations.
*Corresponding author. Email: karin.gross@unibas.ch
Ó 2013 Taylor & Francis

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Gender roles in Tanzania have been influenced by major political transitions and an economy that is increasingly driven by neo-liberal economic values. In the context of labour-migration in the mid-1950s, men were increasingly assigned the role of main bread-winners and household authorities, while women were responsible for the reproductive activities at home. Studies, particularly from urban areas in Tanzania provided evidence that the economic crisis that hit Tanzania hard in the 1980s and 1990s and neoliberal reforms forced women into productive labour as men struggled to generate sufficient income to feed their families (Lugalla 1995; Silberschmidt 2001; Tripp 1992). While stressing women’s increased burden of work, it was debated whether women’s economic income also resulted in greater autonomy, decision-making power and independence from their husbands (Creighton and Omari 1995; Tripp 1992). Although women’s newly acquired roles certainly created tensions and inequity within many families and households, findings from a study on women’s health practices in Dar es Salaam showed that women still stressed the importance of financial as well as practical and moral support from their husbands when it comes to secure family health (Obrist 2006). It can be assumed that besides economic aspects gender relations are also influenced by norms and values that are attached to ‘modern’ lifestyles and diffused by the mass media (Frederiksen 2000) or that derive from women’s rights debates in the legal system (Rwebangira 1994).
What this literature clearly shows is that global processes such as urbanisation, modernisation and socio-economic as well as political transitions resulted in changing gender roles and the transformation or even breakdown of social institutions in Tanzania (Dilger
1999; Silberschmidt 2001; Tripp 1992). Although all these trends have direct implications for men’s roles, identities and sexual and reproductive practices, men’s involvement in and attitudes towards prenatal care have not been investigated under this perspective. In order to fill this gap this paper investigates men and women’s discussions about men’s roles and responsibilities in prenatal care and links them to a literature-based analysis of changing norms and values at the household level and beyond.
Methodology
Research design and methods
Interest in this topic was triggered by data from qualitative and quantitative studies on women’s access to antenatal care (ANC) and malaria prophylaxis in rural south-eastern
Tanzania (Gross et al. 2011, 2012) and critical reflections of the second author who has grown up in the Kilombero Valley and now lives there as a young father and an anthropologist. Based on this interest, eight focus group discussions (FGDs) were organised in
April 2009. FGDs were chosen as the main methodology as they are particularly suitable to uncover social norms and their ambiguity (Bloor et al. 2001). A discussion guide in
Swahili was developed on the basis of insights from the literature and from the studies on prenatal care conducted in 2007 and 2008 including case studies of women who recently became mothers and were living with or without the child-father.
Participants of the FGDs were invited to describe men’s responsibilities towards pregnant women; factors underlying men’s neglect of these responsibilities; differences in men’s support of married versus unmarried pregnant women, including adolescents; differences in men’s support compared with the past; and men’s involvement at ANC clinics. The group discussions were recorded with the informed consent of the participants and lasted on average 90 minutes. They were conducted in two villages of the Kilombero district, Mchombe and Mkangawalo, in separate age (under/over 35 years) and gender groups by a male and a female research team including the two first authors and three

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local research assistants trained in qualitative data collection. Each group consisted of 8 to
14 married and unmarried participants1 with an average of 10 participants, involving a total of 85 participants. The participants had been selected with the help of the village leaders. Although the researchers had defined an ideal group size of 8–10 participants and an age limit of 35 years to divide the two age groups, some groups finally included a higher number and older or younger participants than foreseen.
Data management and analysis
The recorded group discussions were transcribed by research assistants but not translated into English. As IM is a native Tanzanian and KG fluent in Kiswahili it was possible to work on the original Kiswahili text. Citations used in the text and difficult text segments where the European author encountered problems were translated by the Tanzanian author into English and were jointly discussed.
The transcripts were managed and coded using MAXqda2 software (VERBI Software, Marburg, Germany). Data were analysed according to Mayring’s (2007) qualitative content analysis and involved ‘consensual coding’ (Schmidt 2005): guided by the research questions, each of the two main authors coded the text segments inductively into categories and sub-categories. Codes and their allocation were then compared and discussed. A joint code catalogue was developed that guided the subsequent individual data analysis of all group discussion data. The congruency of assigned codes and findings was continually compared and discussed alongside the data analysis process. Finally, findings from the data analysis were compared within and between gender and age groups used for the group discussions.
Local setting
The area constitutes of a fertile rural landscape that is regularly flooded by the Kilombero
River during the rainy season from December to April. Rice together with maize and cassava build people’s main staple food. Men obtain additional income from casual labour or fishing, while women sell local brewery or farm products (Hausmann Muela 2000).
Commercial and trading activities have increased in the area since the construction of the
Tanzania Zambia Railway (TAZARA) by the Chinese in the 1970s that connected parts of the Kilombero district with Mbeya and Dar es Salaam but also due to improved road conditions (Hausmann Muela 2000). Despite these opportunities the majority of people still live under poor conditions.
Findings
Deriving from the data analysis, four dimensions of influence of norms and values at different societal levels emerged that men and women perceived to bear upon men’s roles in ensuring their pregnant women’s health: changing gender roles; changing family and marriage structures; biomedical values; and government regulations.
Changing gender roles
Ideas about the gendered division of responsibilities permeate the realm of pregnancy and childbirth. In the group discussions, both men and women expressed expectations regarding men’s role in ensuring women’s health during pregnancy that reflected a shared set of norms and values and were strongly linked to gender roles.

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Although pregnant women in Tanzania are officially exempted from all costs (Ministry of Health and Social Welfare 2008), ANC and delivery implies a variety of direct and indirect costs incurred at the ANC clinics for diagnostic tests and drugs, for the preparation of supplies needed during the delivery such as gloves, plastic sheets and cloths, for the delivery itself, and for the transport and hospital stay. As for other critical health matters (Muela
Ribera and Hausmann-Muela 2011), men perceived the provision of financial means required before and during childbirth as part of their responsibility as household heads and
‘breadwinners’. Women first reproduced the local gender model by expressing their expectations towards men as providers of financial means. However, lamenting at a later stage that men were often unwilling or unable to cover the costs occurring during pregnancy and childbirth, they provided evidence that gender models rarely accurately reflect male–female relationships as they are enacted in daily life (Ortner and Whitehead 1981).
Even when you tell your husband that in the clinic they told us to have clothes with us [at the delivery], for example five pairs of vitenge [cloth] or five pairs of khanga [another kind of cloth], or to have an umbrella for the child or to have a nappy or any other thing, for example gloves, some men refuse. They say, ‘I can not provide all these things’. (Female, FGD6)

Both male and female participants identified poverty and economic hardship as major barriers for men to ensure their women’s health during pregnancy and delivery. In contrast to the past,2 men were perceived – and perceived themselves – as increasingly incapable to fulfil expectations towards their social roles as providers of financial means:
Men are escaping [responsibilities] these days because life is tough for a person to bear another burden. (Male, FGD1)

The steady decline of men’s assured status as breadwinner and provider of the family and women’s increasing incorporation into the informal sector and self-dependency triggered by economic crises, unemployment and lack of income-earning opportunities has been described extensively for the urban context of Dar es Salaam (Silberschmidt 2001; 2005; Tripp
1992). Statements like the one of this man, however, suggest that these phenomena also prevail in this rural setting. Similar to Silberschmidt’s (2001), Lockhart’s (2005) and Obrist’s
(2006) descriptions from urban Dar es Salaam and Mwanza of women’s increasing awareness that they can stand on their own, female participants from Mchombe presented themselves not only as successful entrepreneurs who are able to earn their own money but also as mothers who do not depend on men’s support to raise their children.
Myself, I have my money I don’t ask my husband, not one day. [. . .] I am planning the household budget with my own money. He has his work. Even regarding the children, I say, I have them all from one man, isn’t it that they are all mine? (Female, FGD8)

Expressing delight about the increased possibilities to be financially independent by growing and selling rice or running a small business, the women kept silent about the burden of increased responsibility, vulnerability and conflicts with their partners that may go along with their empowerment and economic independency. By raising their children without the personal and financial support from the children’s father, they demanded the custody of their children that according to the local patrilineal custom belongs to the father’s family through the transfer of bride wealth. Literature, but also the authors’ own observations, show however that unmarried as well as separated mothers may lack ties

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with the child father’s relatives or even with their own family, and therefore not have access to resources (Muela Ribera and Hausmann-Muela 2011).
Gender ideologies also go along with a clear division of productive tasks between women and men. According to local gender models domestic tasks such as cooking, cleaning, washing clothes and fetching water belong to women’s duties. Men living together with a woman are not expected to perform household tasks. However, both male and female participants agreed that to ensure their pregnant women’s health men are supposed to help them in particular during the later stages of pregnancy with heavy work on the farming fields and in the household, such as cutting and carrying fire woods, fetching water and washing clothes. Crossing traditional gender boundaries may, thus, be socially acceptable during this period and men’s involvement is interpreted as being a caring partner and father (see also Carter 2002). At the same time, both men and women gave examples of societal disdain discouraging or ridiculing men’s attempts to help their pregnant women with household activities. Similar to what Mullany (2006) reports from the Nepali context and Muia et al. (2000) from Kenya, participants mentioned phrases and idioms in
Kiswahili that have been coined for husbands who are viewed as too supportive or involved with their wives.
If you are helping your wife a lot, others pass by saying, ‘ah, Mister X has become a ‘mume bwege’ [a foolish husband] these days, he takes care of everything’. This might influence men’s fear to be called a ‘mume bwege’. (Male, FGD4)
If young men are sitting here at the cross-road, they might pass and see that a man is doing household work, maybe to fetch water at the well. Once he passes that group they say, ‘Ah, these days our friend has become bushoke [bewitched by his wife in order to make him compliant]’. Yes, that is how it is. (Female, FGD7)

Changing family and marriage structures
Men, and especially women, associated lack of male support during pregnancy strongly with pregnancies out-of-wedlock, a phenomenon that according to them has increased compared to the past. Influenced by the researchers’ interest in inquiring the groups of women who least benefited from men’s support, the participants’ discussion focused in particular on men’s support towards two categories of pregnant women: women in extramarital relationships that were often referred to as ‘small house’ or ‘second house’
(nyumba ndogo or nyumba ya pili) by the participants, and unmarried girls.
Both male and female participants agreed that pregnant women who were married or for whom marriage plans existed were much better placed to receive the support needed to ensure good health from their partners compared with uncommitted pregnant women.
Yet, they disagreed about the reasons. While women made reference to the priority of claims of married women, men rather stressed poverty and the secrecy surrounding these relationships. The costs of living seem to have increased and life is very difficult. To support a woman besides your wife is not easy. If a man plans with his wife to do this and this, then it is not easy to decide to redirect his resources to a lover. (Male, FGD1)
It is different for the women who live in the ‘second house’, because I live together with my wife. In case she does not feel well she will tell me anytime and we can decide whether we should go to the health facility or not. But the situation is different for a woman staying away from the man: in case there is a problem the man will not be around. (Male, FGD4)

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A major concern of all participants of the group discussions constituted pregnancies among young girls – a condition that was associated with high health risks. This is not surprising as adolescent sexual activity and the increasing number of teenage pregnancies has become a widely debated moral and health problem in Tanzania and other SubSaharan countries (Obrist van Eeuwijk and Mlangwa 1997; Silberschmidt and Rasch
2001). As in other parts of Tanzania, men and women associated these trends with the decay of traditions and social norms surrounding family and marriage and with changing family structures (Dilger 2003; Setel 1999). In particular, elderly participants interpreted the increased number of pregnancies out-of-wedlock among young girls as a result of eroding parental authority and lineage control over children’s sexuality and the breakdown of traditions such as initiation rites. Young people were described as having lost their respect and morality, and instead following new lifestyles, thereby contrasting youth’s behaviour with the social construction of an idealised past (see also Dilger 1999).
In the past, not many women became pregnant out-of-wedlock. First, they were living in clans. Even a man who would decide to approach a woman would have been disciplined
[. . .]. These days a man can have up to ten women. In the past, traditions and norms were considered a lot. (Male, FGD2)

Men were criticised by elderly participants of causing young women’s pregnancies and then running off and denying fatherhood and care. However, criticism was particularly related to young girls’ material avidity. Elderly participants blamed girls’ desire for makeup, hair styling and nice dresses, in the context of peer pressure and poverty, to be responsible for the increased number of pregnancies among young unmarried girls. Dilger
(2003) and Wight et al. (2006) reported similar moral discourses of commoditisation and modernity blaming young girls from Northern Tanzania. The school, and in particular sexual education in school, was perceived as another factor changing girls’ attitudes and entailing their precipitated sexual debuts during school time (Wight et al. 2006).
When a girl goes to school she sees her friends putting oil in their hair etc. At home, she does not even have soap. If she is deceived by a man, she will agree, she knows, maybe she will get soap. But what a surprise, she will get pregnant and be left alone. (Female, FGD8)
In the past, girls cared for themselves and put themselves in proper conditions [. . .]. Now you see young girls below 14 years – who are 12 years old – already having sex with 70 years old men. [. . .] Often they are given education on this [sexuality] that they do not yet understand and the result is often pregnancy. (Male, FGD2)

Several scholars show that in the past strict norms regulated women’s sexual respectability and women were expected to remain virgins until marriage (Dilger 2003; Lovett 1996;
Silberschmidt 2001; Wight et al. 2006). Although these norms are reported to be less restrictive today (Wight et al. 2006), participants still believed that women’s sexual reputation influences men’s support and health care during pregnancy and delivery.
If a girl mingles around – today she is dating Bakari, tomorrow Hussein – no one will accept the responsibility for the pregnancy. This is the reason for unmarried women to lack proper care and support. (Male, FDG1)

Participants also associated the increased number of pregnancies out-of-wedlock with the transformation of marriage as an institution. In the past, marriage required arrangements

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and bride price negotiations between the elders of the two families. The transfer of the bride-wealth by the prospective husband’s family not only compensated the bride’s family for the loss of her productive and reproductive services and gave the husbands’ lineage claim to the children born by the wife, but also established a contractual bond between the two lineages. Moreover, marriage as a social institution contributed to the maintenance of social control (Clark, Kabiru, and Mathur 2010).
Once you started to menstruate, you were put inside until your spouse was found and you got married. This spouse, whether you saw him before, whether you loved him or not, you had to marry him. (Female, FGD7)
In the past a boy did not go to desire a girl except if he was chosen. ‘If you, my son, want to get married to Mwambike’s daughter, I go there as your father, not you’. Therefore, the father goes over to talk to the father of the girl. If the plans are accomplished, the father goes over and delivers [the bride price]. When he finished delivering the bride price, the girl was handed over. But these days, it is completely different. Even if you make a little sound to attract a woman’s attention [ukipiga uluzi], she stops and says ‘what’s up, brother?’ (Male, FGD4)

Similar to what Clark, Kabiru, and Mathur (2010) describe from urban Kenya, participants highlighted the shift from large multi-generational families to nuclear families, and the decreased power of the extended family in arranging marriages. They argued that while in the past a married couple could rely on help from a wide network of family, friends and relatives, parental responsibilities now rest with fewer people and men are, thus, forced to depend on their own resources.
Now it seems that men are involved very much in caring for their wives when they are pregnant, that is different to the past. In the past, services like these [of the men] did not exist.
When the woman was pregnant I could tell either my mother or my father who were responsible for the negotiations with the woman’s parents and all the preparations up to the delivery
[could be done] because they were very close with her. Therefore, my own contributions were very small. (Male, FGD4)

Biomedical values and health education
Congruently with the recent emphasis of the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare
(2003) on men’s involvement in maternal health, men reproduced expectations about their responsibilities to accompany pregnant women to the ANC services, to support them at home and during delivery and to get tested for HIV.
In the past, when I went to the farming field with my pregnant wife she was the one to carry the luggage and on the way back she was carrying the hoe, fire wood and a child. Now things have changed. Now I am the one to go to the farming field while my wife stays at home. If my wife gets pregnant I tell her ‘My wife, now you’re supposed to have a rest’. This is because of the education that has been provided: ‘Dear husbands, the pregnant woman is supposed to be cared well until her delivery’. (Male, FGD4)
If you have not yet both been tested, there is an order [amri] that is implemented. Not only the woman is requested [to get tested], even the man who caused her pregnancy. (Male, FGD3)

These statements nicely reflect the normative and authoritative forces that the biomedical system imposes on men, similar to other societal institutions such as family and kinship, as well as men’s internalisation of health education messages. Biomedical knowledge can, thus, be understood as an ‘authoritative knowledge’ in the sense of Brigitte Jordan

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([1987] 1993) that is gradually internalised, accepted and actively and unselfconsciously produced, reproduced and demanded in everyday practices by an increasing number of people. Whether men were able to put public health expectations into practice also depended on the health system itself. Men generally showed great willingness to acquire reproductive health knowledge and be more involved in ANC. At the same time, many expressed their frustration of being excluded from the ANC services (see also Mullany 2006).
In fact the reproductive health education is still at a low level for men. We are not well involved because when we go to the clinic we end up testing for HIV/AIDS and stay out . . . I think we also need health education that is usually given to pregnant women when they come to the ANC clinic. (Male, FGD1)
They should be sensitized, I mean, they should be educated. Some of them have never been to school, so even if they are told by their wives ‘I have been told this and that’ they might not listen compared to a man who has a better understanding of it. (Female, FDG5)

As this second statement shows, not only men but also women were positive about involving men in reproductive health education, as they expected such education to result in an improved health communication between men and women.

National level: legal guidelines
This research showed that gender roles and family issues in the villages are still coined by the patriarchal system characteristic for many ethnic groups. However, single statements, such as the following blunt overstatement of a male participant, provided evidence for men’s awareness and critical evaluation of the increasing acknowledgment of women’s rights by political authorities compared with the past.
In the past, a pregnant woman did all work, she cut wood, did all work at the household. The man was pursuing his own businesses. If he went to the beer clubs for drinks, he came back home at night, and made a lot of chaos without caring whether his wife was tired. He woke her up to provide him with some food because she had to follow his orders. She waited until he would have finished, removed the dishes, and then she went back to bed. Now these manners do not exist anymore. If you treat the girls brutally today, you will very soon find yourself seeing the village leader at the council. If you are found to have done even a small mistake you will sit in. (Male, FGD3)

Although the Tanzanian Sexual Offences Special Provision Act amended in 1998 prohibits sexual intercourse with girls below 18 years of age, declaring it as rape in order to protect women’s health (Rwebangira 1994) it might actually have counterproductive consequences for young women who have fallen pregnant. Participants of the group discussions agreed uniformly that particularly school-girls’ chances of being supported by the child’s father and his family are very small, as the men risk being jailed for over ten years. Men who impregnated a teenage student were therefore expected to escape out of fear of being caught.
If you cause pregnancy to a student you will better be found dead than alive. If you will be caught you will be in trouble. If possible you need to disappear and go to a region where people of this village do not go to, then you will be safe. So, it is very dangerous to cause pregnancy to a secondary or primary school girl. (Male, FDG1)

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Conclusion
So far studies on male involvement in prenatal care have mainly concentrated on clinical settings (such as, for example, Carter 2002; Muia et al. 2000; Mullany 2006; Theuring et al. 2009), while barriers at the community level have still been little investigated. Acknowledging the guiding role of norms, values and power relations on daily (health) practices, we argue that understanding their influence on male involvement in maternal health is an important step towards the planning of appropriate and applicable interventions. The findings of this study show that Tanzanian men are exposed to the contradictory and changing landscape of norms and expectations in relation to maternal health. As in other regions, customary concepts of gender roles and family structures are still of importance for family life in Tanzania (Silberschmidt 2001; Wight et al. 2006); men are still depicted as and present themselves as heads of the household and providers of wellbeing.
In fact, several customary norms enhance men’s role in ensuring their wives’ health during pregnancy. In particular, marriage provides women with demandable rights towards their husbands’ or even his extended kin’s support. Interventions on male involvement should, thus, not be limited to the health system. Implemented at the community level, interventions have shown the potential to propagate, on the one hand, norms and values that positively effect men’s involvement in maternal health, and, on the other hand, to trigger social change of norms and values that constrain male involvement (Mushi,
Mpembeni, and Jahn 2010).
At the same time, interventions on male involvement will continue to fail if they ignore the influence of structural processes such as modernity, migration and economic decline on men’s roles (Dilger 2003; Wight et al. 2006). Poverty, women’s intrusion into the informal economic sector and the high number of informal unions have resulted in changed gender and power relations articulated in moral discourses (Dilger 2003; Tripp
1992). These dimensions provide, on the one hand, possibilities for men to dodge responsibilities. On the other hand, from the men’s point of view, they constitute real obstacles to satisfying ‘modern’ expectations towards their role as caring partners and fathers, obstacles raised by the biomedical and juridical system and disseminated through mass media and (health) education.
Relying on FGDs, this study reflects men’s and women’s representations of norms, values and expectations related to men’s roles during pregnancy but cannot conclude on men’s reproductive practices in relation to pregnancy. Although practices are guided by norms and values it is well known that they do not necessarily follow fixed gender models. They are rather the product of moral stances and negotiations in day-to-day life
(Ortner and Whitehead 1981). In order to get a clearer picture of men’s reproductive practices in the context of changing societal norms and values, observational studies that account for the dialectic of structure and practice are urgently needed.

Acknowledgements
This study was funded by the Commission for Research Partnerships in Developing Countries
(KFPE) and the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute in Switzerland.
The authors thank all the women, men and authorities who made this study possible. Special thanks go to the three research assistants, to the members of the MARG, and finally to the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and inputs. Ethical clearance was granted by the
Tanzanian National Institute for Medical Research as part of the ACCESS Programme
(NIMR/HQ/R.8c/Vol.I/66). Conflict of interest: none.

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Notes
1.
2.

It is noteworthy that whereas almost all men were married, more than a third of the women were unmarried.
Participants often contrasted the present (Kiswahili: sasa hivi) with the past (Kiswahili: kipindi cha nyuma or zamani). While it is not clear to what point in time they referred, the past was usually used to describe a period when life was easier and people lived in harmony. As Dilger
(1999) describes it elsewhere, the social construction of the past represents not only an idealisation of the past but also a means to criticise the existing conditions.

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