When Sharing Really is Caring

I’ve traveled away from my field site twice.  The first time I returned, the community gatekeeper (a man who serves as a liaison between community authorities and outsiders such as myself) asked me where his bread was.  I laughed his request off.  Later, my research assistant pulled me aside and said that bread is, in fact, expected of returned travelers. Irritated by this anticipated but belatedly learned cultural transaction, I substituted a box of tea for the bread and made a mental note to not forget the bread next time.  Given the community gatekeeper’s political pull, I budgeted future bread costs as an insurance premium against the potential sabotage of my research efforts.   

Apparently my research assistant also made a note.  He made a note that anthropologists are inherently eager to learn about culture and are not, in fact, culturally clairvoyant.  Upon my most recent return from travels, my assistant pulled me aside to let me know that because Ramadan had started it would be a very nice token if I would recognize the community’s celebration by providing a bag of sugar so as to gift people with an item valued for its sweet contribution to the sour porridge taken to break the daily fast. I think this was suggested because it was correctly presumed that I did not possess the knowledge or skill to prepare my own porridge and engage in the nightly porridge exchange that occurs at sunset, when porridge made in one home is sent to another home and vice versa.   So, two weeks ago I returned to the community laden with a 50 kilo bag of sugar for the community and 2 loaves of bread for the community gatekeeper.  I spent the afternoon of my return making the rounds and paying it forward.  I even acquiesced to my assistant’s assurance that the most appropriate thing to do would be to deliver the sugar to the Imam before Friday prayers so he could announce that I brought the community a bag of sugar.

Sugar for all!

I do not enjoy feeling pushed into sharing when such sharing is seemingly more about accumulating public and political esteem.  This is sharing that seems not so much about enacting care. This is sharing that I find annoying.  It’s interesting that I’m invited and/or expected to participate in public distributions of material goods as an act of sharing, but what I find more interesting is sharing that does seem more about mutual caring.

Collective farm labor is emerging a relevant context of such sharing within my research. One of my field sites, one that can be described as less integrated into the wage labor economy proffered by a nearby urban center, is reliant on collective farm labor.  Men of a similar age cohort form groups of 5-10 that work as a rotating unit to plow and weed members’ farms.  The other field site, a community that is more integrated into the wage labor economy, has fairly effectively disintegrated this custom.  With more community members spending their time in wage labor jobs (largely in construction work), there is less time to devote to collective work as well as more cash to compensate for that lack of time.  Attitudes about shared labor may also be changing.  One man in this field site recently reported that he helped a friend on his farm and was unexpectedly paid.  Though its conjecture on my part to suggest that cash integrated into this equation was a way to buy out a reciprocal act, the negation of the reciprocity is worthy of attention.

As the share economy buzzes its way through the media in the US, elements of the share economy fizzle in Ghana.  This death is painful to watch because share economies, as they most fully exist, are about more than eliminating cash.  They are about building and sharing knowledge as well as social relationships.

Women at work in their own collective planting efforts

As I continue to learn about the causes and consequences of distress as it relates to mental health, I’m finding that people present a lot of worries and a decent amount of poor mental health symptoms.  However, very few people report actually acquiring worry sickness, a context specific illness that is similar to conditions of anxiety or depression. In inquiring as to the ways that people manage to avoid getting worry sickness—how they avoid letting their worries dictate their mental health—I’m learning that social spaces are crucial.  Men identify farming collectives as not only sources of labor, but as sources of empathy and shared experience.  Collectives are social units that help motivate individuals to think beyond their futile thoughts.  For farmers who have invested all of their economic, social and physical resources in their crops, when those crops suffer in a drought and that drought coincides with an existing phase of pretty severe food insecurity, futility is an easy mindset to fall into.  Farmers express that the collegiality and shared experience of fellow collective members can help ameliorate those feelings.  Every time I hear a man share his experience with enduring the financial and ecological constraints of farming so as to at least attempt to feed his family for at least part of the year, Johnny Cash’s Worried Man streams through my head.  Here in this corridor of Ghana, collectives, in part with other social spaces, help ease the worried man syndrome that Johnny sings so true. 

Another common way that men gather to talk about the serious and non serious are tea spots such as this one, where the hanging wire mesh stove is used to heat water for shots of strong, sugary green tea. 

Farmers under distress are not unique to this part of Ghana. India continues to endure a higher than normal rate of farmer suicides associated with high levels of debt acquired through the purchase of expensive inputs. Farmers who fail to pay such debts back due to their inability to successfully navigate an economic system that is built off of their exploitation are unable to face the shame of failure that should not be theirs to bear.  A similar situation is also captured in the ethnography Troubled Fields, a holistic analysis of how the effects of the political and economic reforms that resulted in the 1980s farm crisis resulted in increased mental health issues and suicide rates amongst men operating family farms in Oklahoma. Given such precedence, it will be distressing to watch how illnesses and behaviors associated with the distress of constrained farming  manifest beyond the worried man syndrome as things like collective farming in rural Ghana go by the wayside.

Fieldwork Without Borders

I’ve crossed a lot of borders of late: Ghana-Burkina Faso-Ghana-UK-Turkey-Ghana.  In a touristic (and anthropological) sense, it’s easy to perceive borders as nodes of red tape.  What’s more challenging is interpreting why these nodes are structured (or unstructured as the case may be) the way they are and how these nodes are negotiated by social actors. Ghana has a pretty notorious reputation for being a challenging beaurocratic context for obtaining and maintaining a visa.   I’m convinced that it’s a system that is intentionally convoluted so that an informal economy can build around the management of the confusion.  In my most recent visa renewal effort I made the decision to take action like a Ghanaian would take action against red tape; I called a friend who had a friend who works in the immigration office.  And then I did the exact opposite of what the large poster board at the immigration headquarters messaged--I handed over a little extra money for the processing of my visa.  I used informal formalities to becoming illegally legal.  Perhaps most telling about the extent to which this is the norm is that my friend kindly enacted, but slightly smirked at, my request to put the extra money in an envelope so that it didn’t appear visible. That slight smirk relayed how unnecessary this step actually was.

I’ve also had experiences that make me inclined to think that the red tape is not just about the development of an informal economy that helps underpaid government workers.  I think it’s also about making sure the outsider gets a taste of their own medicine.  It’s retributive.  Ghanaians desiring to go to the US must endure an endless (and in most cases hopeless) process to obtain a visa to the States.  The US embassy in Accra always has a line of Ghanaians waiting outside the embassy building to have an opportunity to sit down inside with an embassy official to face questioning on why they want to go to the States and who will vouch for them.  Unless they have a large bank account in combination with a powerful connection in the States, their request for a visa will inevitably be denied. Even for Ghanaians who have never attempted to obtain a visa, the narrative of the experience is one that runs strongly and structures Ghanaians’ understanding of their position on the world stage.  

Posters such as this one are prolific in enticing Ghanaians to part with money for a service that promises to get them a work or student visa to the states. 

This makes me think that the experience I had of being illegally detained and verbally harassed by a Ghanaian immigration officer was a way to remind me of my position on the world stage.  I can only interpret this diatribe as a frustrated Ghanaian wanting to remind me, a US citizen, of my ability to move about the world.  I felt profiled by the immigration officer.  And it was a pretty wretched feeling.  Anthropology prides itself on participant observation—doing the best you can to live and feel the experience of the society you are trying to integrate into.  This was participant observation I did not sign up for and the medicine was pretty bitter. But it is still relevant data for my attempts to understand the social and economic climate of this country. 

Borders don’t simply represent different nations. Borders represent different political, social and economic opportunities.    Our world is one in which historically, and contemporarily, borders are often physically imposing places that protect one population’s resources from another population’s resources.  Sometimes that protection is warranted against acts of aggression, as is the case with the remnants of a wall built in Gwollu in the Upper West Region of Ghana.  This wall was built in the early 19^th Century to protect the inhabitants of Gwollu against slave raiders.   Sometimes these physical boundaries are really more about reactions to a neoliberal age that creates great disparities.  These disparities push populations to seek better opportunities. This is why thousands of Central American children are waiting for “processing” at the US/Mexico border.  

Gwollu wall built to protect against slave raiding

I think as well of the hundreds of Muslim Ghanaians who legally traveled to Brazil for the World Cup but have just applied for asylum to escape what they are calling religious persecution in Ghana.  Though they claim that their persecution is tied to religious differences within the Ghanaian Muslim community, I’m not so sure this tension even exists, let alone does it serve as the most pressing factor pushing these Ghanaians out of their home context. Religious persecution is a much smarter card to play on the international stage than the political economy card.  Ghanaians want to leave Ghana because of structural violence—an instable economy that includes a deflating national currency, no job opportunities, and rising fuel, electricity and water costs that leave the majority of the population struggling to get by.  The region of Brazil that these Ghanaians have applied for asylum is an area known to have plentiful employment opportunities that have attracted many foreign workers. 

These are issues that not only affect the Hondurases and Ghanas of the world, but also the so called developed nations.  In Scotland, where I recently traveled, discourse is building towards a vote for independence from or ongoing dependence on the UK.  The debate, from what I was able to gather, is one largely centered around improving Scotland’s socio-economic indicators that are seen as oppressed by UK leadership.  Instead of feeling pushed out of their homes and across other national borders, Scotland has an opportunity to redefine what its borders with England mean in terms of political and economic authority.  If contemporary Scotland can mimic the social protection services of the days of yore (see photo below), Scotland might have a knack for creating a more equitable and healthy life for all of its citizens without its citizens having to flee to another place.

The tagline for wooing Scots to vote yes for independence