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E-book The Scarcity Slot : Excavating Histories of Food Security in Ghana

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Penilaian

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Have the people of Africa always starved? Most people have never heard this question posed. So ingrained is the idea of “Africa” as a scarce place that the con-tinent has become synonymous with need in popular thought.1 Preoccupied by images of hungry children and drought-ravaged landscapes, we have come to expect that we will find food insecurity in every time and place in the continent. But even the casual visitor to an African country observes something much dif-ferent: people surviving despite the odds stacked against them. This book aims to challenge expectations of scarcity by investigating empirical realities of resilience in the culinary and agricultural history of Banda, a region of west-central Ghana that invokes an altogether different narrative of African food security.The quotes above, both from pioneers in the study of food, index two different imaginaries of African food scarcity and reveal the crux of the challenge ahead. Audrey Richards (1995 [1939]) pioneered the study of foodways from an anthro-pological perspective, and her work remains an exemplar for its methodological sophistication. These methods allowed her to recognize that maize (corn) was not considered food to the Bemba, even if it met their caloric needs. This obser-vation would be unremarkable except that it concerns Africans, who are often conceptually stripped of the ability to make choices about what they eat. People thought to be teetering on the edge of survival are rarely accorded the “luxury” of choice. This kind of mentality is clear in Alfred Crosby’s conception of the Colum-bian Exchange. Maize, the same plant the Bemba eschewed in favor of indige-nous grains, is accorded by him the role of savior in insuring sufficient calories for African bodies. Africans are portrayed as incapable of developing appropri-ate crops themselves. In contrast to Richards’s empirically rich narrative, Crosby’s synthesis provides no data to support his suppositions about Africa. We might jus-tify Crosby’s misdeeds as a thing of the past—he wrote The Columbian Exchangein the early 1970s, although a revised edition was published in 2003—and he was certainly no card-carrying Africanist. Yet many of his assumptions continue to haunt literature on the Columbian Exchange to this day (see chapters 2 and 3).In this book, I argue that people in Banda were very much capable of feeding themselves in the centuries and millennia before Europeans took interest in the continent, and indeed afterwards, when livelihoods were reconfigured in the wake of Atlantic trade and colonialism. That this is not the story that is usually told about African peoples and places relates to the space between empirical realities and expectations of the continent, where implicit assumptions of a scarce Africa tend to go unquestioned. The goal of this book is to interrogate and ultimately repurpose this space into a critical zone of inquiry into African food history.To introduce this endeavor, we need to consider why scarcity is the domi-nant paradigm through which we understand African foodways. To some the answer may seem obvious, since the highest prevalence of undernourishment in the world—one in five people—is found in the African continent. But to emphasize this statistic at the expense of the reverse—four in five people are not undernourished—acts to limit recognition of the tremendous ability of people to survive despite widespread poverty.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

304.2 LOG t

Penerbit

USA : University of California Press., 2020

Deskripsi Fisik

246 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780520975149

Klasifikasi

304.2

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Human Ecology, Antrophology

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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