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.