Sacred Rice An Ethnography of Identity, Environment, and Development in Rural West Africa

Sacred Rice explores the cultural intricacies through which Jola farmers in West Africa are responding to their environmental and economic conditions given the centrality of a crop--rice--that is the lynchpin for their economic, social, religious, and political worlds.

Based on more than ten years of author Joanna Davidson's ethnographic and historical research on rural Guinea-Bissau, this book looks at the relationship among people, plants, and identity as it explores how a society comes to define itself through the production, consumption, and reverence of rice. It is a narrative profoundly tied to a particular place, but it is also a story of encounters with outsiders who often mediate or meddle in the rice enterprise. Although the focal point is a remote area of West Africa, the book illuminates the more universal nexus of identity, environment, and development, especially in an era when many people--rural and urban--are confronting environmental changes that challenge their livelihoods and lifestyles.

Joanna Davidson is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Boston University.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Sacred Rice
Chapter 1. A Rice Complex
Chapter 2. Ampa Badji and Nho Keboral
Chapter 3. "We Work Hard"
Chapter 4. Cultivating Knowledge
Chapter 5. Of Rice and Men
Chapter 6. Transgressive Segregation Revisited
Chapter 7. Jopai, and the Limits of Legibility
Chapter 8. Conclusions: Structural Uncertainty

Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index