An Ethnography of Hunger

Kristin Phillips

Description

In An Ethnography of Hunger Kristin D. Phillips examines how rural farmers in central Tanzania negotiate the interconnected projects of subsistence, politics, and rural development. Writing against stereotypical Western media images of spectacular famine in Africa, she examines how people live with—rather than die from—hunger. Through tracing the seasonal cycles of drought, plenty, and suffering and the political cycles of elections, development, and state extraction, Phillips studies hunger as a pattern of relationships and practices that organizes access to food and profoundly shapes agrarian lives and livelihoods. Amid extreme inequality and unpredictability, rural people pursue subsistence by alternating between—and sometimes combining—rights and reciprocity, a political form that she calls "subsistence citizenship." Phillips argues that studying subsistence is essential to understanding the persistence of global poverty, how people vote, and why development projects succeed or fail.

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Subsistence Citizenship

PART I: The Frames of Subsistence in Singida: Cosmology, Ethnography, History

Chapter 1 Hunger in Relief: Village Life and Livelihood

Chapter 2 The Unpredictable Grace of the Sun:

Cosmology, Conquest, and the Politics of Subsistence

PART II: The Power of the Poor on the Threshold of Subsistence

Chapter 3 We Shall Meet at the Pot of Ugali:

Sociality, Differentiation, and Diversion in the Distribution of Food

Chapter 4 Crying, Denying, and Surviving Rural Hunger

PART III: Subsistence Citizenship

Chapter 5 Subsistence versus Development

Chapter 6 Patronage, Rights, and the Idioms of Rural Citizenship

Conclusion: The Seasons of Subsistence and Citizenship

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Self-Help
• Public Policy
• Social Science
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Rural
• Coerción
• Singida
• Maize
• Great Depression
• Geography
• Voluntarism
• Market
• Entitlement
• Dependency
• Development studies
• Self-Reliance
• Self-help (disambiguation)
• Commodification
• Kinship
• Rural area
• Reciprocity
• Ethnography
• General officer
• Gift
• Exchange
• Drought
• Food
• Cereal
• Coercion
• Anthropology
• Ujamaa
• Central
• General
• Money
• Agriculture
• Identity
• Landscape
• Arjun Appadurai
• Singida (région)
• Patronage
• Beer
• Abderrahmane Sissako
• Microsoft Exchange Server
• Liste des vaisseaux de Star Wars
• Campagne
• Parliament
• Sorghum
• Chinua Achebe
• Grain
• Millet
• Amartya Sen

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 29 août 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253038395
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF HUNGER
FRAMING THE GLOBAL BOOK SERIES
The Framing the Global project, an initiative of Indiana University Press and the Indiana University Center for the Study of Global Change, is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Hilary E. Kahn and Deborah Piston-Hatlen, Series Editors
Advisory Committee
Alfred C. Aman Jr.
Eduardo Brondizio
Maria Bucur
Bruce L. Jaffee
Patrick O’Meara
Radhika Parameswaran
Richard R. Wilk
AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF HUNGER
Politics, Subsistence, and the Unpredictable Grace of the Sun
Kristin D. Phillips
Indiana University Press
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
© 2018 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Phillips, Kristin, author.
Title: An ethnography of hunger : politics, subsistence, and the unpredictable grace of the sun / Kristin Phillips.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2018. | Series: Framing the global book series | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018013046 (print) | LCCN 2018025310 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253038401 (e-book) | ISBN 9780253038364 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253038371 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Subsistence economy—Tanzania. | Food security—Social aspects—Tanzania. | Food security—Political aspects—Tanzania.
Classification: LCC HC885.Z9 (ebook) | LCC HC885.Z9 P61593 2018 (print) | DDC 339.46096782—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018013046
1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19 18
To Jim, Burke, and Marcus
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Note on Language and Translation
Introduction: Subsistence Citizenship
Part I: The Frames of Subsistence in Singida: Cosmology, Ethnography, History
1 Hunger in Relief: Village Life and Livelihood
2 The Unpredictable Grace of the Sun: Cosmology, Conquest, and the Politics of Subsistence
Part II: The Power of the Poor on the Threshold of Subsistence
3 We Shall Meet at the Pot of Ugali: Sociality, Differentiation, and Diversion in the Distribution of Food
4 Crying, Denying, and Surviving Rural Hunger
Part III: Subsistence Citizenship
5 Subsistence versus Development
6 Patronage, Rights, and the Idioms of Rural Citizenship
Conclusion: The Seasons of Subsistence and Citizenship
Bibliography
Index
Preface
In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. . . . Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. . . . Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Moans are good. She must never say anything about herself in the dialogue except to speak of her (unspeakable) suffering.
Binyavanga Wainaina, How to Write about Africa
6-Day Visit to Rural African Village Completely Transforms Woman’s Facebook Profile Picture
2014 headline from satirical newspaper The Onion
T RENCHANT CRITIQUES OF the Global North’s representations of the African continent mark our new millennium. Often articulated as satire, such critiques—of literature, film, travelogues, Western media, academic and aid-industry publications, and more recently, social media—poke fun at projected ideas of “Africa” as utterly primitive, desperately hungry, hopelessly broken, or wholly unspoilt. Such pervasive (yet contradictory) images highlight the personal insecurities, political and economic agendas, superficiality, and what Stephen Ellis (2011) aptly referred to as a singular “unoriginality” that undergirds so many representations of African contexts to Western publics today. Tongue-in-cheek, these satires present readers with the most hackneyed and effective tropes they might employ to reduce Africa to a single country, and a billion Africans’ lives to—what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009) calls—a “single story.”
A 2012 article in the satirical newspaper The Onion mocks the way in which media depictions render “Africa” not merely a site of death, dearth, and disaster, but itself the explanation for them:
Africa, which affects upwards of 40 million new residents annually, has only grown more deadly over the years. According to WHO figures, many of the afflicted die from Africa or Africa-related complications before they even reach the age of 5. In addition to the staggering number of deaths attributable to the persistent, destructive Africa, roughly 1 billion individuals are now said to be living with the highly lethal continent, and for most there is little hope of recovery. . . . Additionally, graphic images of violent military crackdowns, vicious border disputes, and outright slaughter confirm that large parts of Egypt, Sudan, and Somalia have once again collapsed into full-scale Africa. 1
When “Africa” itself is made the agent of communicable disease, dearth, natural disaster, and even war—then who needs an understanding of history, politics, culture, the global economy, or even science to explain what goes on inside its fifty-plus countries? In these depictions of Africa ridiculed by the Onion piece, Africa has become the empty, yet only, explanation for itself.
Hunger (and in particular rural hunger) is very much a part of this single story about Africa—that simultaneously constructs and asserts African deficiency, passivity, timelessness, and victimhood on the one hand, and Western righteousness, modernity, heroism, labor, and beneficence on the other. That hunger is part and parcel of this single story makes writing an ethnography about hunger in Tanzania a project fraught with the risk of reproducing this unimaginative and problematic repertoire of ideas. Yet, just as there is not a single story of “Africa,” there is no single story of hunger. Just as there are many faces of “Africa,” there are many faces of hunger. And just as the continent we call Africa has many interwoven pasts, many interlocking presents, and many possible futures, so hunger has its diverse roots, manifestations, and trajectories. Through contextualizing and historicizing hunger in one district of rural central Tanzania—where seasonal food crises undermine , more than they kill—this book aims to contradict some of the stereotypes. It underscores that African hunger is not a natural fact. It is not ahistorical or unchanging. It does not neutralize human agency. It is neither universally manifested nor uniformly experienced. The book seeks to complicate other stereotypical ideas—to give quintessential images a past and a present, a history and a context, confirmation and qualification. To paraphrase Adichie, the problem with many stereotypes is not necessarily that they are not true, but that they are incomplete.
Hunger, if understood from the dictionary definition to be a severe lack of food, is not easy to study ethnographically. If hunger is indeed the absence of food, the non-act of not eating, the reduction of body mass, the interminable wait for assistance, then it is no wonder that so many media outlets resort to the universal sign for hunger, that cliché of international telecasts—the bloated child, the blank-faced mother, the fly on the face, the outstretched hands. As if a lack of food or water eliminated the need for labor and effort and human interaction, instead of exponentially increasing it. As if deprivation, in its eons of history, actually had the power to interrupt time, halt action, cease sociality, or stop life. It is telling, as Alex de Waal has written, that “English definitions of famine . . . leave the affected people as agents out of the causal scheme altogether. . . . These are essentially conceptions we could only apply to other people’s societies: if a famine were to strike our own, it would be conceptualized in a different way, probably as a time of dearth, but also as a heroic struggle against the destruction of our way of life” (de Waal 1989, 32).
The idea of this book then, is to examine hunger in the Singida region of rural central Tanzania, as if in relief, by attending to the concepts of food, power, and sociality with which hunger is in relation and opposition. It resists the erasure of life and agency from chronically food-insecure communities (all too often the hallmark of hunger images that are produced in the West) even as it refuses to deny hunger and suffering (which is a tendency of attemp