Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-gtxcr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T16:44:27.869Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“We Work Hard”: Customary Imperatives of the Diola Work Regime in the Context of Environmental and Economic Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2013

Joanna Davidson
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

Hard work is a core value among Diola rice cultivators in Guinea-Bissau. This essay explores Diola attitudes toward work in the context of recent changes in their natural and social environment. It asks why Diola maintain a particular work regime even when they admit that it is not actually working for them. The intrinsic characteristics of wet rice cultivation, the tightly woven web of social relations involved in Diola agricultural practices, and the religious ideals with which these practices are linked reinforce one another and serve as powerful drivers of continuity. But given the decreasing viability of wet rice cultivation in this region, Diola work is increasingly detached from the products it is meant to generate. Because Diola farmers remain committed to these work practices in the face of their acknowledged inability to meet subsistence needs, Diola work has become a “paradox of custom.”

Type
Research Article
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , September 2009 , pp. 119 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adas, Michael. 1986. “From Footdragging to Flight: The Evasive History of Peasant Avoidance Protest in South and Southeast Asia.” Journal of Peasant Studies 13: 64–86.Google Scholar
Almada, A. Alvares de. 1964 [1594]. “Tratado Breve dos Rios de Guiné do Cabo Verde.” Edited by Brasio, António. Lisboa: Editorial L.I.AM.Google Scholar
Arens, W., and Karp, Ivan. 1989. “Introduction.” In Creativity of Power: Cosmology and Action in African Societies, edited by Arens, W. and Karp, Ivan, xi–xxix. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.Google Scholar
Atkins, Keletso. 1993. The Moon Is Dead! Give Us Our Money! The Cultural Origins of an African Work Ethic, Natal, South Africa, 1843–1900. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Baum, Robert M. 1990. “The Emergence of a Diola Christianity.” Africa 60: 370–98.Google Scholar
Baum, Robert M. 1999. Shrines of the Slave Trade: Diola Religion and Society in Precolonial Senegambia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Berry, Sara. 1984. “The Food Crisis and Agrarian Change in Africa: A Review Essay.” African Studies Review 27: 59–112.Google Scholar
Berry, Sara. 1989. “Coping with Confusion: African Farmers' Responses to Economic Instability in the 1970s and 1980s.” Working Papers in African Studies no. 141. Boston: African Studies Center, Boston University.Google Scholar
Birmingham, David. 2006. Empire in Africa: Angola and its Neighbors. Athens: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Brooks, George E. 1993. Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa, 1000–1630. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Carney, Judith. 2001. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Carney, Judith, and Watts, Michael. 1991. “Disciplining Women? Rice, Mechanization, and the Evolution of Mandinka Gender Relations in Senegambia.” Signs 16: 651–81.Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1988. “Conditions for Knowledge of Working-Class Conditions: Employers, Government and the Jute Workers of Calcutta, 1890–1940.” In Selected Subaltern Studies, edited by Guha, Ranajit and Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 179–230. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Chazan, Naomi, and Shaw, Timothy M., eds. 1988. Coping with Africa's Food Crisis. Boulder, Colo.: Lynn Rienner.Google Scholar
Chilcote, Ronald H. 1967. Portuguese Africa. Englewood Cliff, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Coelho, Francisco de Lemos. 1953 [1669]. “Duas Descrições Seiscentistias da Guiné.” In Manuscritos Inéditos Publicados, edited by Peres, Damião. Lisboa.Google Scholar
Coetzee, J. M. 1988. “Idleness in South Africa.” In White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa, 12–33. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Cohen, Ronald, ed. 1988. Satisfying Africa's Food Needs: Food Production and Commercialization in African Agriculture. Boulder, Colo.: Lynn Rienner.Google Scholar
Comaroff, Jean. 1985. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Commins, Stephen K., Lofchie, Michael F., and Payne, Rhys, eds. 1986. Africa's Agrarian Crisis: The Roots of Famine. Boulder, Colo.: Lynn Rienner.Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick. 1992. “Colonizing Time: Work Rhythms and Labor Conflict in Colonial Mombasa.” In Colonialism and Culture, edited by Dirks, Nicholas B., 209–46. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Crowley, Eve. 1990. “Contracts with the Spirits: Religion, Asylum, and Ethnic Identity in the Cacheu Region of Guinea-Bissau.” Ph.D. diss., Yale University.Google Scholar
Davidson, Joanna. 2007. “Feet in the Fire: Social Change and Continuity among the Diola of Guinea-Bissau.” Ph.D. diss., Emory University.Google Scholar
Dinis, A. Dias. 1946. “As Tribos da Guiné Portuguesa na História.” Portugal em Africa (2nd series) 2: 206–15.Google Scholar
Fields, Edda L. 2001. “Rice Farmers in the Rio Nunez Region: A Social History of Agricultural Technology and Identity in Coast Guinea, ca. 2000 BCE to 1880 CE.” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Forrest, Joshua B. 1992. Guinea-Bissau: Power, Conflict, and Renewal in a West African Nation. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Forrest, Joshua B. 2003. Lineages of State Fragility: Rural Civil Society in Guinea-Bissau. Athens: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Franke, Richard W., and Chasin, Barbara H.. 1980. Seeds of Famine: Ecological Destruction and the Development Dilemma in the West African Sahel. New York: Universe Books.Google Scholar
Gable, Eric. 1997. “A Secret Shared: Fieldwork and the Sinister in a West African Village.” Cultural Anthropology 12: 213–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glantz, Michael H., ed. 1987. Drought and Hunger in Africa: Denying Famine a Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Guyer, Jane I. 1978. “Women's Work in the Food Economy of the Cocoa Belt: A Comparison.” Working Papers in African Studies no. 7. Boston: African Studies Center, Boston University.Google Scholar
Guyer, Jane I. 1983. “Anthropological Models of African Production: The Naturalization Problem.” Working Papers in African Studies no. 78. Boston: African Studies Center, Boston University.Google Scholar
Hart, Keith. 1982. The Political Economy of West African Agriculture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawthorne, Walter. 2003. Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400–1900. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann.Google Scholar
IRIN. 2006. “Famine Warning Issued in South.” Integrated Regional Information Network, Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, United Nations. www.irinnews.org.Google Scholar
Lauer, Joseph J. 1969. “Rice in the History of the Lower Gambia-Geba Area.” Master's thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison.Google Scholar
Linares, Olga. 1970. “Agriculture and Diola Society.” In African Food Production: Systems, Cases, Theories, edited by McLoughlin, Peter F. M., 195–227. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Linares, Olga. 1981. “From Tidal Swamp to Inland Valley: On the Social Organization of Wet Rice Cultivation among the Diola of Senegal.” Africa 51: 557–95.Google Scholar
Linares, Olga. 1985. “Cash Crops and Gender Constructs: Thejola of Senegal.” Ethnology 24: 83–93.Google Scholar
Linares, Olga. 1987. “Deferring to Trade in Slaves: Thejola of Casamance, Senegal in Historical Perspective.” History in Africa 14: 113–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Linares, Olga. 1992. Power, Prayer and Production: Thejola of Casamance, Senegal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Linares, Olga F. 2002. “African Rice (Oryza glaberrima): History and Future Potential.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) 99: 16360–365.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lobban, Richard, and Forrest, Joshua. 1988. Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Guinea-Bissau. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press.Google Scholar
Lopes de Lima, J. J. 1836. “Memoria dos Felupes.” Jornal de Sociedade dos Amigos das Letras 3: 68–69.Google Scholar
MacQueen, Norrie. 1997. The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa: Metropolitan Revolution and the Dissolution of Empire. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Mark, Peter. 1978. “Urban Migration, Cash Cropping, and Calamity: The Spread of Islam among the Diola of Boulouf (Senegal), 1900–1940.” African Studies Review 21: 1–14.Google Scholar
Mark, Peter. 1985. A Cultural, Economic, and Religious History of the Basse Casamance since 1500. Stuttgart: F. Steiner.Google Scholar
Mark, Peter. 1992. The Wild Bull and the Sacred Forest: Form, Meaning, and Change in Senegambian Initiation Masks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
McLaughlin, Abraham, and Purefoy, Christian Allen. 2005. “Hunger Is Spreading in Africa.” Christian Science Monitor, August 1.Google Scholar
Moore, Sally Falk. 1978. Law as Process: An Anthropological Approach. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Netting, Robert McC. 1993. Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Ong, Aihwa. 1987. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Parkin, David J. 1994. Palms, Wine, and Witnesses: Public Spirit and Private Gain in an African Farming Community. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press.Google Scholar
Pélissier, Paul. 1966. Les Paysans du Sénégal: Les Civilisations Agraires du Cayor à la Casamance. Saint-Yrieix, France: Imprimerie Fabrègue.Google Scholar
Pickering, Kathleen. 2004. “Decolonizing Time Regimes: Lakota Conceptions of Work, Economy and Society.” American Anthropologist 13: 85–97.Google Scholar
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 1993. Labor's Lot: The Power, History and Culture of Aboriginal Action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Sodikoff, Genese. 2004. “Land and Languor: Ethical Imaginations of Work and Forest in Northeast Madagascar.” History and Anthropology 15: 367–98.Google Scholar
Taborda, António da Cunha. 1950. “Apontamentos etnográficos sobre as Felupes de Suzana.” Boletim Cultural de Guiné Portuguesa 5: 187–223.Google Scholar
Taussig, Michael T. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Temudo, Marina Padrao, and Schiefer, Ulrich. 2003. “Disintegration and Resilience of Agrarian Societies in Africa: The Importance of Social and Genetic Resources. A Case Study on the Reception of Urban War Refugees in the South of Guinea-Bissau.” Current Sociology 51: 393–416.Google Scholar
Thomas, Louis Vincent. 1959. Les Diola. Parts 1 and 2. Dakar: Memoire de l'Institut Français d'Afrique Noire.Google Scholar
Thomas, Louis Vincent. 1963. “Essai sur Quelques Problèmes Relatifs au Régimes Foncier des Diola de Basse-Casamance (Sénégal).” In African Agrarian Systems, edited by Biebuyck, D., 314–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Thompson, E. P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Thompson, E. P. 1993. Customs in Common. New York: The New Press.Google Scholar
Weil, Peter M. 1973. “Wet Rice, Women, and Adaptation in The Gambia.” Rural Africana 19: 20–29.Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar