Sacred Rice was published in the same year as several other important works on the Guinea-Bissau/Senegal region, such as Robert Baum’s West Africa’s Women of God (Indiana University Press, 2016) and Patrick Chabal and Toby Green’s edited volume, Guinea-Bissau (Hurst Publishers, 2016). This intersection of interdisciplinary scholarship will have a significant impact on our understanding of the region for decades. At the same time, Sacred Rice contributes to the anthropological literature on commodities and trade, ranging from Mintz’s study of sugar (Sweetness and Power, Viking-Penguin, 1985) to David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House, 2011). Davidson opens her book with the comment that “I still find myself, more than a decade after my first Jola rice harvest, returning again and again to rice, not only as a central organizing feature of Jola social life but as the ‘thing’ that mediates their encounters and exchanges . . .” (4). The book’s central question, then, is, “How are Jola farmers responding to changes in their environmental and economic conditions given the centrality of rice” (9)?
Based on ten years of ethnographic and historical research, the book focuses on one family’s trials and tribulations to showcase the implications of a changing climate and disappearing resource base in northwestern Guinea-Bissau. Rice is a hallmark of rural Jola identity, and as such, its insufficiency affects villagers’ core sense of the world. Davidson’s introduction outlines this “new” story of rural Africa, capturing complex forms of adaptation, ingenuity, frustration, fear, and deprivation.
Chapter 1 sets the stage of the Jola rice complex—the system through which rice is produced, marketed, and consumed. Orzya glaberrima, a West African rice domesticate first identified in the 1970s, was part of West Africa’s agricultural repertoire for thousands of years. Colonial and postcolonial policies encouraging cash crops undercut a more tradition agrarian life and challenged this well-developed rice knowledge and technological assemblage. Nevertheless, the cultural significance of rice, the so-called Green Revolution, and the existence of few alternatives in rural areas kept the Jola rice complex intact into the 1990s, when Davidson first arrived in the central Jola village of Esana.
Chapter 2 introduces Davidson’s central interlocutors, Ampa Badji and Nho Keboral. The latter is described by Davidson as “a terrible informant in the conventional anthropological sense” (52) because, like most villagers, he rarely had a spare moment to speak to her. In response, she improvised the solution of giving “them each a small tape recorder and long list of questions” (54)—an approach that yielded compelling life stories of initiation, independence, migration, illness, childbirth, and kuji-kuji (to make a living like a chicken scratching in the dirt to survive). Even Ampa Badji, a teacher educated in the Catholic mission, identifies himself first and foremost as a rice farmer, since “Being a rice farmer was not . . . [considered] an occupation, nor even a vocation, but was ontologically bound up with what it meant to be a Jola person” (49).
Later chapters take up the gendered social divisions among the Jola, whereby men maintain knowledge over irrigation and initiation while women control rice seeds, planting, and childbirth (chapter 5), as well as the cultural significance of work more broadly. “Jola work was a complex of values that cuts across economic, religious, and social domains,” says Davidson. “For Jola, to be a living human being was to work” (97). Nevertheless, as local knowledge is gradually eroded and devalued and Jola face increasing precariousness, confusion and uncertainty are injected into their lives. The availability of cheap imported rice, an unstable government, and environmental insecurity have forced them to reorganize their priorities, pushing the Jola youth to pursue schooling and migration as livelihood alternatives. As Nho Keboral says, “That’s the only thing we wish for the future of our children: that they don’t stay here” (174). Increasingly, Davidson notes a sense of “futility rather than nobility when [Jola are] talking about their own work” (57).
“Rice requires a certain kind of work, which in turn makes a certain kind of person,” Davidson notes in her conclusion (191). But while the reader is left wondering whether global forces are somehow unmaking Jola society and personhood, she also closes on a note of optimism, reminding us of their persistent agency and creativity: “Some things get accentuated, some things challenged, and some things find new expression” (195).
