Judith Carney

Manufacturing dissent: work, gender and the politics of meaning in a peasant society.

This article addresses the changing nature of farm work in a peasant society in The Gambia, West Africa. The practice of farm labour has been transformed in the most palpable way by the advent of radically new technical and social relations of production associated with mechanised double-cropping of irrigated rice. Technical change, agricultural intensification and a new labour process are, however, all built upon the bedrock of household production, since peasant growers are socially integrated into the new scheme as contract farmers, specifically as contracted sharecroppers. Family labour continues to be the dominant social form in which labour power is mobilised, but under conditions directly determined and shaped by the contractors, namely project management. Irrigated double-cropping of rice production is particularly labour-demanding and makes expanded claims on customary structures of domestic labour recruitment. These new economic practices subject the culturally dominant representations of work, labour obligations and property rights—the constituents of custom and tradition— to the test of social practice. In our examination of Mandinka rice growers we suggest, following T. J. Clark, that ‘society is a battlefield of representations on which the limits and coherence of any given set are being fought for and regularly spoilt’ (Clark, 1984: 6). The introduction of a new production regime has converted rural Mandinka society into a contested social terrain; the primary struggle is a contest over gender and the conjugal contract in which property, or more accurately constellations of property rights, is at stake. By seeing economic life as, among other things, a realm of representations, we argue that the struggles over meaning and the manufacture of symbolic and material dissent in central Gambia—a proliferation of intrahousehold conflicts, juridical battles over divorce in the local courts, renegotiations of the conjugal contract—are the idioms of what Burawoy (1985) calls production politics.

The genome sequence of African rice ( Oryza glaberrima ) and evidence for independent domestication

The cultivation of rice in Africa dates back more than 3,000 years. Interestingly, African rice is not of the same origin as Asian rice (Oryza sativa L.) but rather is an entirely different species (i.e., Oryza glaberrima Steud.). Here we present a high-quality assembly and annotation of the O. glaberrima genome and detailed analyses of its evolutionary history of domestication and selection. Population genomics analyses of 20 O. glaberrima and 94 Oryza barthii accessions support the hypothesis that O. glaberrima was domesticated in a single region along the Niger river as opposed to noncentric domestication events across Africa. We detected evidence for artificial selection at a genome-wide scale, as well as with a set of O. glaberrima genes orthologous to O. sativa genes that are known to be associated with domestication, thus indicating convergent yet independent selection of a common set of genes during two geographically and culturally distinct domestication processes.

Disciplining women? Rice, mechanization, and the evolution of Mandinka gender relations in Senegambia.

The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the Center for Research on Economic Development, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, which partially supported the 1983-84 field research in The Gambia; the Institute of International Studies of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Ford Foundation for Wattss research in 1985; and the Institute for Development Anthropology, which provided critical follow-up support for Careys 1987 fieldwork. The following individuals also provided invaluable assistance while working in The Gambia and in preparing this essay: Oussainou Baldeh, Sara Berry, Michael Burawoy, Chris Elias, David Gamble, Gillian Hart, Lucy Jarosz, Ivan Karp, Peter Little, Julia Morris, Pauline Peters, Modi Sanneh, and John Sutter.

Women's Land Rights in Gambian Irrigated Rice Schemes: Constraints and Opportunities

This paper discusses the significance of gender-based conflicts for thefailure of Gambian irrigated rice projects. In particular, it illustrateshow resource control of a gendered crop, rice, shifts from females to maleswith the development of pump-irrigated rice projects. Irrigation imposes aradically different labor regime on household producers, demanding thatthey intensify labor for year-round cultivation. Yet, the Gambian farmingsystem evolved for a five month agricultural calendar, in which women wereaccorded specific land and labor rights. The need to restructure familylabor, specifically skilled female labor, to meet the cultivation demandsof pump irrigation is crucial for understanding the pattern of gender-basedconflicts in Gambian rice schemes. The case study illustrates thatirrigation involves more than technology transfer. Appropriate irrigationdemands sensitivity to the social structure of household production systems. The paper concludes by emphasizing the centrality of gender issuesfor improving food security in sub-Saharan Africa.

Landscape Legacies of the African Diaspora in Brazil

Geographers have been reticent on the role of the African diaspora in the contouring of Brazils biological and cultural landscapes. Whereas paradigm shifts have occurred in regards to environmental stability in the tropical realm and the pristine nature of pre-Columbian landscapes, these have not translated to a rigorous reassessment of the geographical position of Africans and their descendants as active agents in landscape evolution. In this article, we briefly examine the historical development of black diaspora scholarship outside of geography. We review the contributions of geographers and others to understanding the floristic homogenization of the Atlantic world set in motion by European exploration and colonization. Finally, by highlighting recent findings on the dynamic role of forced African immigrants in the process of landscape transformation, we hope to stimulate further geographical inquiry, improve pedagogical materials and advance in a modest way a recovery of the African contribution to the making of the Americas.

Resiliency and change in common property regimes in West Africa: The case of the Tongo in the Gambia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone

West African rural communities frequently create rules and conventions to define rights of access and conditions of use to natural resources of great use and exchange value. One such example, the tongo, is an oscillating common property regime that regulates seasonal access to vegetation and wildlife located within village commons and on individually appropriated lands in many areas of The Gambia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. This ensures that a particular resource, such as fruits from domesticated and wild trees or grasses used for thatch, reach full maturity before being harvested by the community at large. While it often is concluded that these institutional arrangements are declining, this article adopts a historical perspective in showing that these regimes are much more resilient and flexible than commonly assumed. The authors suggest that the tongo is a foundation for working with African indigenous knowledge and institutions to develop an alternative, yet distinctly African, approach to resource cons...

Revealing Gendered Landscapes: Indigenous Female Knowledge and Agroforestry of African Shea

ResumeL’arbre a beurre (Vitellaria paradoxa) est une espece qui pousse dans la region Soudano-Sahelienne de l’Afrique et joue un role crucial dans les ecosystemes et la vie des peuples de la savane. Les noix de karite representent une des rares denrees regionales, dont l’extraction, la transformation en huile et la commercialisation sont soumises au controle exclusif des femmes. Cet article place l’ecologie historique et politique du karite dans le contexte de la globalisation du produit; il met en lumiere trois periodes distinctes: precoloniale, coloniale et contemporaine. S’appuyant sur des travaux de terrain, ainsi que sur des sources historiques, ecologiques et biogeographiques, les auteurs explorent les systemes indigenes complexes de connaissance, organises selon les sexes qui gerent la selection, la conservation des arbres a beurre et la transformation en huile des noix de karite. L’emphase est mise sur le role des femmes dans l’agrosylviculture du karite, et sur le sens de cette connaissance distr...

Rice and memory in the age of enslavement: Atlantic passages to Suriname

This article examines the geographical corridors for the establishment of rice in seventeenth-century Dutch Guiana. One corridor of introduction is associated with the expulsion of Dutch planters from Brazil in 1644, whose slaves reestablished longstanding subsistence preferences with their exodus to the colony. Another corridor links its introduction to the African Gold Coast, where rice developed as a commodity during the 1600s. The oral histories of maroons offer an additional perspective on rice beginnings in South America, attributing its diffusion to the deliberate efforts of enslaved women.

Indigenous soil and water management in Senegambian rice farming systems

Considerable attention has focussed on the potential of indigenous agricultural knowledge for sustainable development. Drawing upon fieldwork on the soil and water management principles of rice farming systems in Senegambia, this paper examines the potential of the traditional system for a sustainable food security strategy. Problems with pumpirrigation are reviewed as well as previous efforts in swamp rice development. It is argued that sustainability depends on more than ecological factors and in particular, requires sensitivity to socio-economic parameters such as the labor demands of the food security strategy, the sexual division of labor, and food pricing policies.

African rice in the Columbian exchange

Most studies of the Columbian Exchange have not appreciated the significance of Africans in establishing plant domesticates in the Americas. African plants traversed the Atlantic as provisions aboard slave ships and slaves proved instrumental in their establishment in the New World as preferred food staples. This paper identifies the diverse crops domesticated in Africa, the intercontinental plant exchanges between Africa and Asia that occurred in the millennia before the Columbian Exchange and the role of African indigenous knowledge in establishing rice in the Americas.