Jane I. Guyer

Food, Cocoa and the Division of Labour By Sex in Two West African Societies

This paper is an empirical study of the cultural context and historical development of the division of labour by sex in the farming systems of two peoples of the West African cocoa belt: the Yoruba of Western Nigeria and the Beti of South-Central Cameroun. It examines the way in which cocoa as an export crop has been integrated into two different indigenous economies, one in which farming was predominantly a set of tasks for males in the pre-cocoa era, and the other in which farming was womens work.

The Food Economy and French Colonial Rule in Central Cameroun

RECENT studies of the colonial history of African agriculture in areas of white settlement have emphasized the importance of government regulation in promoting growth in the European sector by holding back the indigenous sector.1 Over a fairly short period these policies established the settlers as the dominant class in the agricultural sector, with control over all the important resources, and with superior access to markets. By contrast, in areas where agricultural growth was mainly achieved by the indigenous population, regulation of production and marketing of both export and food crops was much more limited. The result was a level of rural prosperity which either confirmed the traditional elite in their pre-eminent position or created a new group of relatively prosperous farmers.2

The eruption of tradition? On ordinality and calculation

Numerical ordinal rankings (or ratings) are proliferating in the current social and economic world. Many are used to derive and justify relative monetary valuation, by modes of equation and calculation. The article shows how these composite manipulations of order and value tend to produce a parabolic curve: very few at very high value at the top, descending in a curve to very many of very low value at the bottom. The article illustrates the form of this ordinal curve and assesses the metaphors that evoke its persuasiveness. The Great Chain of Being is explored as a source of terminology.

Soft currencies, cash economies, new monies: Past and present

Current variation in the forms of money challenges economic anthropologists and historians to review theory and comparative findings on multiple currency systems. There are four main sections to the paper devoted to (i) the present continuum of hard to soft currencies as an instance of multiplicity, including discussion of different combinations of the classic four functions of money, especially the relationship between store of value and medium of exchange; (ii) the logic of anthropological inquiry into multiple currency economies; (iii) the case of the monies of Atlantic Africa, applying the analytics of exchange rates as conversions to African transactions; and (iv) the return to economic life in a present day Nigerian economy lived in soft currency and cash. The paper identifies five findings that suggest foci for future research. (i) The widespread occurrence of conversions, which bring together ranking principles within transactions. (ii) Several types of positional ranking ranging from simple stepwise ordinal scales to iconic ordinality that creates a parabolic curve of value. (iii) Fictional units of account that serve to mediate both the memorization of nonreductive transactions and their nature as conversions. (iv) The importance of the temporal reach of what constitutes wealth: over the short run, the life span, intergenerational succession, and in (legal) perpetuity (as for corporate and sovereign debts and specified assets). (v) The social niches in which these qualities are brought together in transactional regimes. In conclusion, the paper returns to the exchange function of cash, soft currencies, and new money forms.

Describing Urban 'No Man's Land' in Africa

Cities as elusive, invisible, yet to come. ‘[T]he city is no-mans land’ (Grace Khunou, p. 240 in Mbembe and Nuttall). ‘Lagos is no mans land’ (heard in Lagos by the present writer, August 2010). A picture of a strangely empty and disrupted man-made landscape (William Kentridge, pp. 349–350 in Mbembe and Nuttall), balanced by a dense but also personless urban scene (by the same author, pp. 35–6 in the same text). … The slippage between conventional social scientific terms of runaway urbanization, the teeming human vitality of African cities, and the elusiveness of the titles, sayings and images of these three books, opens up the rich vein for research and writing into which these authors work their ways. Johannesburg. Kinshasa. Pikine (Dakar). Winterveld (a South African urban area outside Pretoria). Douala. Jeddah. The books reviewed here are based on detailed field research in six particular cities. They all juxtapose the categories of ‘metropolis’ and ‘modernity’ to the category of ‘Africa’, all positing the anomaly this move may represent in the categorical social scientific mind. The subtitles immediately indicate a different starting point from the analytics of population, geography and governance. With an approach through ‘tales’ (De Boeck and Plissart) and ‘reading the city’ (Mbembe and Nuttall), the authors indicate an alternative intellectual reach. They start from visual imagery, the language arts and the social mediations through which the lives lived in urban ‘modern’ Africa are expressed, communicated, understood, configured and conserved. Their aims evoked in my mind the modern art – rather than the analytics – of other cities. So here we have ‘circulation’ and vehicles as symbols and sounds without too much attention to traffic (the Lagos ‘go slow’; the accidents); ‘bodies’ without much attention to food or toilet needs or aging; ‘authority’ evaded or permeating rather than personified in mayors, town councils and multitudes of other officials and employees. In the ether of the invisible, what circulates are symbols and expressions; what emanates from bodies is sexual tension, aesthetic sensibility and physical vulnerability (‘bodies in danger’, De Boeck and Plissart, p. 117); what bears down oppressively is constraint and neglect of all kinds. In brief, what strikes the perceptive mind is precisely what bursts out of the conventional forms and has not yet taken a newly conventionalized shape. Through this orientation, all three books bring the humanities and artistic sensibilities to the question of the spirits, souls, inspirations, dangers, images and memories that inhabit the crowded spaces between buildings and people, insects and people, people and people.

On ‘possibility’ A response to ‘How Is Anthropology Going?’

The article originates in a response to discuss ‘How Is Anthropology Going?’. Perceiving a new pattern in the almost 90 years looking backward and forward from my own undergraduate training, I concentrate on the recurrent concept of human ‘possibility’. Its changing referents are traced over four 20-year cycles, starting with Malinowski and Benedict (1920s and 1930s), moving to Gellner’s Thought and Change (1965), Marcus and Fischer’s Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986), Graeber’s Possibilities (2008) and Rabinow’s Marking Time (2008). Particular attention is paid to the temporal horizons implied in the term and the forms of ethical, political and aesthetic agency one can infer from the orientations, tensions and attractions that horizons of possibility have inspired.

The true gift: Thoughts on L’Année sociologique of 1925:

Mauss’s Essay on the Gift was the only article to be included when the journal L’Année sociologique was relaunched after the Great War. Prepared during 1923/1924, it appeared in 1925. The Essay was preceded by Mauss’s eulogy to colleagues who had died since the last edition (1912), including five killed in action and its founder, Émile Durkheim (1917). Hundreds of pages of reviews followed, many written by Mauss himself. This article places the essay back in its original context by exploring the resonance of the whole issue with the Jewish ritual of chesed shel emet (generally translated into English as ‘the true gift’) which takes care of the body between death and burial. The three parts of the paper cover: the empirical method of The Gift (very briefly); the eulogy and the reviews; and the concept of chesed (‘kindness’) in Jewish thought. This reading follows Mauss’s own method of combining empirical profusion with a hermeneutics of consonance.

Percentages and perchance: archaic forms in the twenty-first century

As sequel to an earlier paper on ordinal ranking, this paper focuses on another old, but increasingly widespread, numerical expression, in both technical and public domains: namely, the percentage. It argues that the long and expanding genealogy of use, from descriptive to governmental to probabilistic, gives it persuasive as well as instrumental power, as people come to grips with novel terms of life by drawing on old concepts. The ‘one hundred’ offers a sense of understanding, while in public expressions, there appears to be an increasing vagueness of the specific nature of the one hundred as denominator and a new potential for one hundred to gesture towards an aspirational future rather than any simple description of the present. The second section engages with Helen Verrans approach to number, where she shows how numerical expressions can move from one mode to another through the possibility of expressing both one/many and part/whole relationships. The next section illustrates the applications of percentage in different domains of social life, particularly as proportion in governance (the tax regime) and political philosophy (Rawls on ‘fairness’), both of which orient instrumentally towards a future. The final section describes a current representation of the city of Baltimore in ordinals and percentages, oriented in more clearly expressive, aspirational terms, towards a future whose nature has become indeterminate. The conclusion reaffirms the importance of an ethnographic approach to widely used numerical forms, such as percentage, in all contexts, as they mediate public understanding and aspiration.

“The quickening of the unknown”: Epistemologies of surprise in anthropology (The Munro Lecture, 2013)

My title is from an essay by Nigerian writer Ben Okri, which I draw on to address one aspect of classic empiricism in anthropology that I have found particularly important, namely the element of surprise, or “impression” (Hume), as an instigator to thought. Quickening is the moment when a being gives evidence of its own life and presence. An epistemology of surprise has been widely and frequently practiced in anthropology, as is illustrated from works across many fields and theoretical orientations. Variations in conventions of instigation and completion are traced back through skeptic and enlightenment practices; linked to artisanal, poetic, and artistic processes within the discipline across its history; compared in the imagery in classic works from Africa and Melanesia; and then explored in the recent “radical empiricism” of Michael Jackson and politically inflected works that focus on fragments, gaps, and absences rather than presences. Examples from my own work on political economic “quickenings”—a baffling confusion of referents for a number term in Cameroon, and an arresting Nigerian complaint that “theres no money,” in a globally monetized world—conclude the lecture, showing the wide applicability of this mode of reasoning, which traces a genealogy from Hume and Greek skeptical empiricism.

On the anthropology of the contemporary: Addressing concepts, designs, and practices

Between 2007 and 2014, on his own and in association with Gaymon Bennett and Anthony Stavrianakis, Paul Rabinow has been devoted to the development of an “anthropology of the contemporary.” The project is widely recognized as being original, stimulating, and provocative, within and outside of the disciplinary corridors of anthropology. Only spotty attention has been paid, however, to the overarching integrity of the complex spiral of figuration and refiguration through which it has unfolded. Even less attention has been paid to the overarching integrity of the works that Rabinow inaugurated and has continued to pursue throughout his career—from an original and frequently cited formulation of the relation between tradition and modernity through his more recent articulations of the anthropology appropriate to the relation between modernity and the contemporary. Severally and jointly, the contributors to this forum give attention to both. Anthony Stavrianakis joins Rabinow in a response that engages these contributors, taking the opportunity thus provided to address criticism and to elaborate and to refine an anthropology of the contemporary as they currently understand it to be.