Thinking about George Bailey in Ghana

As someone working within the sub-field of economic anthropology, it’d be ridiculous to overlook aspects of gifting and exchange during fieldwork.  Since tis the season, these are some rudimentary thoughts on how these elements of economy (for better or worse termed the “informal” components of economy) are part and parcel of Ghana and how they can really get the goat of an American anthropologist.

I owe the inspiration for this blog to a friend and fellow anthropologist  who totally gets the annoyance of being asked for things and who made me laugh over the fact that anthropology hadn't yet ruined my perspective on It's a Wonderful Life.  She pointed out to me that the ending is not all that wonderful because the conniving antagon/capital/ist is left to continue his plundering.  She, too, is blogging her way through fieldwork in Ghana.  Her blog is here and it is stunning.  

It is inevitable that at least once in any given day in Ghana a stranger will make a request of a gift from me.  Sometimes people want me to buy them food as I’m buying food.  Sometimes a child leaves a note on my bike requesting football shoes.  Sometimes the security personnel at the Kotoka International Airport in Accra ask me for the Ghanaian made and readily available chocolate that they saw as my bag was searched.   The requests can be incredibly polite, beginning with the Ghanaian English preface “Please, can you….?”  Sometimes the requests sound incredibly rude to my Midwestern American ears.  "Give me your phone" is a statement I find difficult to relativistically digest. 

Never do I not find this annoying.  When it’s a day of never ending requests, I come very close to cartoonesque meltdowns.   As an outsider, as someone consistently viewed as having more money than almost everyone in Ghana, I see these requests as an attack on my minimal means. Such requests only exacerbate my frustration over my inability to communicate my own incredibly minimal financial position in the world.  My own relative poverty is almost always on my mind (how am I ever going to pay off my student debt??) even as I conduct research with people with much less power to overcome their own poverty. As such, sometimes I react to requests by middle class town folk by pontificating that when cost of living ratios are taken into consideration, I am, in fact, poorer than them and am in no position to be giving away my things.  Though such speeches make me feel better, they rarely resonate.  Most Ghanaians continue to see their country as existing in absolute rather than relative poverty and the US as existing with absolutely no poverty. These speeches also miss what I suspect is the greater point of gifting in Ghana. 

This would be George Bailey's trogan
(a trogan is a slogan put onto diesel mini-vans that serve as public transit in Ghana and that are known as tro-tros)

When I return to my thinking rather than reacting brain, it becomes a bit clearer that such requests are not so much about the item, but about making some form of social connection with me.   I know that my status as an American does make me a unique target for requests (that are sometimes genuinely wanted or hoped for), but this is not the full story. There are different rules for ownership and usage of property in Ghana. As can be seen in the social protocol to invite people to share your food, the mantra often seems to be “what’s mine is yours.”  This implies a cyclical system of sharing.   It’s not necessarily about the equality of the exchange but the ability to meet someone’s immediate need or desire and the knowledge that your own future need or desire will be reciprocally met. As such, I hope people are often just wanting to incorporate me into local ways of being and doing. 

It's important to note that such aspects of economy do not categorize Ghana into some “traditional” economic system.  The country is, very much, capitalistic to the core.  Ghana wouldn’t be the envy of floundering economies if capitalism wasn’t fueling economic growth.  Economic systems don’t progress from informal to formal or from traditional to modern.  Charles Piot’s ethnographic work that is set in next door Togo demonstrates that exchanging within the Kabre society is not residual of tradition, but rather a feature of modernity. He argues that colonial era policy (ie taxation) made exchange with family and friends a more feasible way to engage in necessary transactions for food or services so that  monetary income could be diverted to the new demanding state. 

The gifting symbols of Christianity as they appear in Accra in early November

Formalities abound at this machine shop in Wa.  Don't even think about trying to barter. 

As the month of December is so good at reminding me, I come from a culture where gifts are demarcated for particular events and reciprocation is simultaneous. Perhaps that is why one of my favorite films is It's a Wonderful Life (a film I would like to point out, that is also beloved by everyone's favorite new it director David O. Russell). I love the story it tells of a good life as one experienced through everyday good deeds that are returned to you when you need help most. It's a story of how informal economy meets formal economy in America. 

But perhaps a more compelling ending, and one that suggests the necessity of overarching social change rather than individual problem solving, is the one brought to us by Saturday Night Live.  This ending suggests that if we focused a bit more on cultivating an economy based on reciprocity rather than capital gains, life could be a bit more wonderful for all. 

Poor Man's Pizza Sauce and Fowl of the Bourgeois

Value is a concept that anthropologists spend a lot of time thinking about.   The social and economic value of food production and food consumption is something this anthropologist thinks a lot about. How do people decide the value of food?  How does the value of food change from one context to another?   When and why does the social value of food trump the economic value? 

For Thanksgiving I really wanted to purchase a turkey, have it smoked and take it with me to my Thanksgiving celebration in the Eastern Region. However, when $75 was quoted as the cost of a turkey and turkeys were referred to as “the fowl of the bourgeois” I decided that a turkey was not to be had for Thanksgiving.  $75 represents my budget for 1 month of food and other basic necessities in the Upper West.  My budget reflects my ability to partake in my Hobnob addiction.  The folks with whom I do my research have much lower food budgets, one that does not include packaged oaty biscuits. 

These birds could be yours for $225

Turkeys are not a commonly raised fowl in Ghana.  I’ve been told that they are ridiculously difficult to take care of here, thus the high price tag.  Free range, small-scale turkey production is the only kind of turkey production in Ghana. The social values that stand behind the production of the bird are never presented an opportunity to separate from the economic value.

I’m not sure what the going rate for a Butterball is these days in the States, but it’s safe to say that the scale of the industrialized food system that tends turkeys in the States can produce a fowl for much less.  In the American food context, those who can’t afford to purchase a heritage turkey reared by a small-scale farmer buy Butterballs even if their preference is to support the social values represented by the heritage turkey.

In a country where there are hundreds of renditions of spicy tomato stews/gravies used as a condiment at almost every meal..........may the US please introduce the merits of pizza sauce?  

I’ve seen a lot of food products in Ghana that make discerning the contextual value of turkey look like a piece of cake.   How these products even end up on shelves is a dissertation in and of itself.  The most baffling item I’ve seen is a jar of Kroger brand pizza sauce selling for $7. In a land where starchy porridges and rice are the daily go to foods, pizza sauce is not a staple food item and is definitely not produced in Ghana.  It's likely that this pizza sauce is a commodity geared toward the ex-pat community desperate for some semblance of food familiarity.  It could also be an item craved by Ghanaians who've spent a chunk of time abroad and developed quite a taste for pizza. In  the US, such sauce would probably cost $2 or less and be the provision of someone on a budget. The economic value of the good is what attracts some customers.  However, in the increasingly hyper-conscious American food culture, it is the social value that is so unattractive to other customers. In the circles where Mark Bittman is a reigning guru,  Kroger pizza sauce would bring shame as it would be judged as lacking all of the aesthetic properties of food as well as representative of all that is wrong with the American food system.  

For Ghanaians unfamiliar with pizza making, such sauce is an ingredient inducing curiosity and presents a way to feel, perhaps, more worldly and socially mobile or flexible. I definitely have purchased my fair share of ingredients from international grocery stores in the US for reasons of intrigue and a desire to expand my culinary horizon.   If purchased, a pizza sauce transaction reflects capability to spend on one item what could purchase enough high quality and diverse foods sourced from local ingredients that would feed a family for a couple of days. 

Where the social value of food in Ghana perhaps becomes even more convoluted is in purchasing staple foods that are sourced and processed out of country. Peanuts (groundnuts as they are known here) grow all over Ghana and are eaten all over Ghana. From a streetside vendor you can buy a canister of groundnuts for about $3.  They are nicely roasted and left unsalted and are almost always pretty reliably fresh. At a supermarket, if you want to pay for the global supply chain that is Planters, you can buy the equivalent amount of groundnuts for $10.  These groundnuts are guaranteed to be very un-fresh but masked with preservatives. But with them comes a Western brand and Western technology. The social prestige that comes in buying Planters trumps the loss of money.

There’s a passage in the awesome novel Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie that is the very essence of what I’m trying to get at--how food can meet certain social desires.  The scene takes place in a restaurant in Lagos and a middle-class couple is ordering food.  The female half of the couple has spent a significant amount of time in the US and questions the origins of the potatoes that are used to make the chips that will accompany her sandwich. 

“Are your potatoes the frozen imported ones, or do you cut and fry your potatoes?”

The waiter looked offended.  “It is the imported frozen ones.”

As the waiter walked away, Ifemelu said, “Those frozen things taste horrible.”

Her partner replies with this brilliant statement:

“He can’t believe you’re actually asking for real potatoes. Real potatoes are backward for him.  Remember this is our newly middle-class world.  We haven’t completed the first cycle of prosperity, before going back to the beginning again, to drink milk from the cow’s udder” (444)

Shoprite is a South African grocery chain.  This is the newest branch in Accra and the golden halo seems to indicate heavenly approval.

It seems that it's not only what food you buy in Ghana that presents an opportunity to explore the social and economic value of food, but where you buy it. In 2002 there were maybe a handful of what would be labeled by Western standards as a grocery store or supermarket. As of today, there are now at least 15 of these large, enclosed, fixed price stores in Accra. Shopping at such stores is a good way to earn some social prestige.  In observing the purchases made by many of the customers in Shoprite, it seems that many are buying items that could be procured at any standard shop such as a Coke or a small package of biscuits.  Supermarkets such as Shoprite are places that invite people in for a shopping experience incredibly different from the typical open air market--that thing we have only recently re-discovered in the US  and think of as a way to be more socially engaged in our food system. As long as the security guards are not too harsh in their profiling of entering customers, it is a social experience anyone can partake in. 

Only the wealthy may walk away with carts of bizarre foreign foods, but the aspiring middle class can purchase a Coke (surely a prestige item of the recent past) securely enclosed in the branded and distinctively yellow Shoprite plastic bag and yearn for the day that they, too, can buy those frozen, imported potatoes even though they are a lackluster substitution for the local fried yam (seen below with one Ghanaian cook's rendition of tomato stew which rocks this ketchup loving Midwesterner's world and surely trumps any Kroger tomato product). 

Food meets our social desires just as much as it meets or biological need. 

Fieldwork. Is. Slow.

I have to take it as a sign, that after my first failed meeting in the community of my fieldwork, I came across this guy.  Meet the official mascot of Team Jessica:

This approximates the pace I feel I’ve fallen into. 

Fieldwork. Is. Slow.  Fieldwork is meant to be slow.  But I’m battling some powerful demons that really want things to be going fast.  Though anthropology is unique in its in-depth approach to research, because it exists in the universe of academia, it is not removed from the pressures (one might say obsession) with the capability to quickly gather, analyze and publish data.  Add on top of that an increasingly indebted graduate student who is eager to have a real job and earn a salary above the poverty line, and a difficult scenario unfolds. 

I desperately want to do my fieldwork and to do it damn well.  However, my reality is always breathing down my neck.

I spent my first two weeks in Wa working on understanding how food insecurity is institutionally understood and addressed in the Upper West. I conducted interviews with NGOs and other bodies involved in food and farming interventions as well as went out of some field trips to the communities where they work.  Such work is vital to ethnography.  It provides context to the more particular description of the experience of food insecurity that I will demonstrate through my data collection.  Once I felt good about my integration into the institutional context of food insecurity, I took the steps to get myself into the empirical context.

The community where I will be living and working is a community I identified in preliminary fieldwork two years ago.   In my 2 preliminary field seasons I have met with and gained the repeated approval of the local presiding chief as well as the members of the community.  In conferring with my colleagues in Wa  about the most appropriate manner to finally get myself re-integrated into the community for the year ahead, I was told that I should hold a community wide meet and greet.  Team Jessica had in mind a focus group that would kick off her data collection.  Team Jessica thought that two previous meet and greets got the job done and that the community would very well remember me.  However, when I recall that it is common practice in Ghana to officially welcome someone into a room after they have been gone for a 5 minute errand, I caved to the meet and greet idea.   Having grown up in a small town, I know that adhering to the local social protocol and not being a pushy outsider is the best way to make a good and sustainable community entrance.    I sent word to the chief to organize a meeting. When I arrived on the morning of the meeting, I noticed that men were walking out of town with their farming tools.  That was not a good sign.  That indicated that people were not going to be hanging around for my meet and greet but rather going to their farms to work.  It turns out that the chief had failed to deliver the message for the meeting.  The meet and greet was a bust. It was the perfect beginning to what will, I'm sure be more busts.  It was also the perfect situation with which to feel all the more excited to board a bus for Accra to spend the Thanksgivingukkah week with a friend and attend the traditional engagement ceremony of friends. 

I thought a butternut squash would be a good substitute for pumpkin for procuring pumpkin pie.  However, said butternut squash was, in fact, a spaghetti squash.  Pie left the feasting picture, but donuts entered. These fabulous fried pillows of dough are called sufganiyot and are the official donut of Hanukkah.  They are 100% made from scratch-from the golden apple jam filling to the powdered sugar topping. 

Grated sweet potatoes for latkes 

Bread crumbs smothered in butter, oyster mushrooms, shallots and garlic and ready to be drenched in homemade stock

Engagement ceremony dancing.  

And now It’s  December and I’m 2 months behind my “official research schedule” and doing my best to be ok with that. Though I officially got nothing accomplished in my week away, I’ve returned to the Upper West with a renewed sense of grit and moxy.   It was a week vital to my mental health. I finally got to sink my teeth into the novel Americanah and got to do so in a beautiful house in the beautiful mountains of the Eastern Region where the sunsets are a stunning background to an early evening Earl Grey and the breezes are equally delicious. When I wasn’t reading, I was cooking delicious food and talking  through fieldwork follies with my anthropologist-in-arms comrade and friend.  And I got to take a hot shower.  It’s not just the hot part that is exciting about that statement.  It is also the shower part.  Never underestimate the power of a functioning shower head. 

This be fieldwork in Ghana.