When Scelza started doing fieldwork with the Himba in 2010, women would ask her why she didn’t have men coming to her hut. “Well, I said, ‘You know, I’m married.’ And they said, ‘Yeah, yeah, but that doesn’t matter. He’s not here.’ So then I tried to explain that my marriage was a love match, because then I thought they would understand. And they said, ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s okay, it’s okay. He’s not going to know; it’s okay,’” she recalls. “They really hold a very different idea in their heads about love and sex, that it wouldn’t be a bad thing at all for me to say, on the one hand, that I
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Reasons why I think affair is not the right word: it implies that it's considered a large transgression.
