Heike Becker

Davies (1987:102) argues that the male-female reversal served as a visual and pos­sibly psychological contrast between girlhood and adult (married) womanhood where the sanctioned period of liberty was complementary to the “serious and re­sponsible” position of women in marriage. It then was first and foremost a stage of liminality, where the young women stripped off preliminal (girlhood) and postliminal (adult womanhood) attributes. The complementarity of male and fe­male which earlier observers attributed to Kwanyama society (Davies 1987, based on the observations of the Powell-Cottons in 1937), may have been lost along with the possibility of gender inversion. That current forms of gender power have become naturalised as a primordial fact, seems another likely repercussion of the disappearance of gender inversion from Owambo cultural practice.