Harvesting Food. Harvesting Fellowship.

Two months ago my research assistants (a married couple) told me fond stories about their home community’s annual yam festival held in September. As a lover of festivals—from my hometown’s Oktoberfest to New Orlean’s lesser known but still fantastic festival that celebrates the mirliton—I eagerly told them we should plan to go.  We did just that a few days ago.  We traveled to a small community just outside of the city Kintampo in the Brong Ahafo Region.  The Brong Ahafo represents an ecological transition zone.  This is where elements of the southern humid forests collide with the savanna of the north.  The region is suited for growing a lot of different crops in 2 rainy seasons.  Perhaps because of this fortuitous agro-ecological setting, this is a zone archaeologically shown to be one of the hotbeds of the origins of agriculture in West Africa.

At the most fundamental level, the yam festival is a celebration of the yam harvest.  It’s a time when yams are ready to come in from the farm and start feeding a household eager to start eating fresh yams.  If you’ve read Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, yams are a centerpiece of that narrative.  The West African yam is a bit of a beast.  It’s not at all similar to the orange fleshed tuber we in the States call a yam. These yams are huge and hairy and the flesh is pretty purely white. If the soil is fertile and the rains consistent, as the Brong Ahafo is fortunate to still experience, these yams can grow to be the size of a baby. 

Worthy of a festival

To continue with this infant metaphor, the yams are cultivated in large mounds that serve as wombs to the growing yam.  In addition to building large mounds, tending to this crop involves staking the mounds so that the yam foliage has something to grow up and mulching so as to keep the sun from penetrating the mound too much. It’s a crop that many farmers consider to be the most labor intensive.  It’s also a foodstuff that many people consider to be their favorite. The West African yam is eaten steamed with various stews, fried as any tuber is fried, as well as pounded excessively into a dish that is perhaps the most ubiquitous of the West African staple meals—fufu. At the start of the yam festival, it is tradition to eat the yam lightly mashed with shea oil, salt and onion.  Once this has been consumed, people turn to fufu. I was served two fufu meals in the span of 45 minutes.

The mounds where the yams grow

And that's how you peel a yam

Mashed yam

Pounding yam for fufu--the mortars are shorter and the pestles longer than the ones used in the Upper West

My first fufu meal--served with a pumpkin seed soup and giant pieces of smoked fish from the nearby Black Volta river

The festival also represents important economic customs. The festival marks the time when farmers can start selling yams at the market.  This, I speculate, is a mechanism that helps ensure stable yam prices for farmers and consumers.  The economic purpose of the festival is also seen in each farming household  paying yams as tribute to the chief in thanks for the use of the land.  As is the case throughout Ghana, customary land rights are still widely employed in agricultural communities.  If you can farm and use the land well, you are given access to the land free of charge, minus a few token yams.

What became pretty evident to this festival lover was that the yam festival was about harvesting fellowship just as much as it was about harvesting food. People from the community who now live elsewhere return home to celebrate.  The festival marks social reunions and social traditions.  As we waited for a car to take us to the community, the station was quite abuzz, much like an airport on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.  I got to witness my research assistants reunite with their friend who recently had a baby.  I further witnessed extended families having meetings to discuss how their social unit will give thanks to the land for another harvest.  

My friend's friends reunite and meet a new friend

Though we missed the most official social element of the yam festival, the chiefs dressed in their chiefly regalia to mark the start of what is a five day festival, my departure was marked with an exchange strengthening social and economic bonds.  The families of my assistants brought me a goat, a chicken and a basin of yams that I’m guessing weighed 100 pounds.  As an outsider (reportedly the first outsider to attend the yam festival), my friends’ families were honored that I came to participate in the festival.  The gifts were their way of showing that honor.  However, as an employer of their children in an economic context where securing any kind of steady pay is challenging, I’m sure these gifts mark thanks for my ability to employ their children.  As uncomfortable as such gifts may make me feel (I can’t enjoy being held responsible for a goat’s impending death, nor do I enjoy being a temporary employer),  to deny such tributes would be perhaps the most culturally insensitive thing I could do.  So, my screaming goat and squawking chicken and I boarded a cramped vehicle and rode back to the Upper West, one of us more satisfied than the others. 

Privilege and the Privileging of Emotions

“In privileging the emotions elicited by fieldwork I want to convey to my audiences that in ethnography, the anthropologist is the instrument.”

Eric Gable

I’m at that point in my fieldwork where I suspect I should be feeling sad for my nearing departure.  I don’t feel sad about leaving.  I try to savor daily moments that I genuinely enjoy in my settled life here—such as 10 year old Jeremiah gliding past my house on a bicycle with his feet up on the handlebars as he screams “Good morning Jessica Mwinikubu”.  Mwinikubu is my given Wale name.  I will equally miss shouting “Good morning Jeremiah Mwinikubu,” a return greeting that no matter how routine it becomes is one that makes him throw his head back in laughter because Mwinikubu is not his given Wale name. This I will miss dearly even though Jeremiah draws reprehensible images of me. 

Snapshots of daily life such as these are ones that I will comfortably file away in my brain bank.  They will be memories that I will savor for a long time.  But, I don’t feel sad to be leaving.  I feel damn ready. The emotions of fieldwork have sucked me dry.  And as Eric Gable recently asserted in a piece titled The Anthropology of Guilt and Rapport: Moral Mutuality in Ethnographic Fieldwork, these emotions are part of the ethnographic experience.  They exist in my journal but they deserve to exist outside my journal as well because they do more than explore my feelings and reactions. The emotional drainage I am contending with on a daily basis in my fieldwork experience speaks to how global relationships are interpreted and negotiated.

I am a US citizen.  I have to deal with how Ghanaians understand what that means for my own well being as well as how it relates to their own well being. Simply put, because I am from the US of A, I am the regional delegate for Western wealth and Western power. My “But I’m a poor student!” card doesn’t work here.  Just as Africa is a homogenous unit of warfare, epidemics and starvation in the Western imagination, The West, for people whose lives are so far removed from it, is a homogeneous unit of ideal, equitable, and comfortable living.  Try as I might to incorporate some world systems and dependency theory into my dialogues with people to explore the nuances of the movement of wealth and power, my mere presence in Ghana betrays me.  I do posses a degree of privilege.  I’m privileged to travel to places relatively easily.  I’m privileged to be pursuing an advanced degree. How can someone who can find the means (even if it is through 3 years of research design and grant writing) to get on a plane to Ghana not be seen by Ghanaians who don’t possess the same opportunities as privileged? 

There’s a reason why Bill Gates works as a philanthropic overlord and doesn’t work on the ground.  I’ve always presumed that reason was because Bill Gates probably doesn’t want to live without indoor plumbing.  Now I’m more inclined to think that really he’s just very smartly avoiding the prospect of daily confrontations that very uncomfortably acknowledge global inequalities.  How would Bill Gates deal with living in a community where he would be expected to part not with excess wealth that exists in fantastical and intangible amounts, but rather the very possessions on his body?  How would he contend with being someone who is directly confronted with his privilege by people who live day to day?  I imagine it would be awkward. I try to make the encounter super awkward in my head so I have something to laugh about.  I need something to laugh about. 

I’ve written before about how exasperating it can be to be asked for things on a daily basis.  I believe that some of the asking is born out of standard social protocol for establishing reciprocal relations.  I’ve been involved in some of these reciprocal relationships.  Some of the asking is also to just get my goat in a friendly, joke driven way that does help build rapport between outsider and insider. But most of the requests do not fit into these categories. Daily requests-- for my sandals, for my clothes, for my camera, for Peace Corps volunteers, for fertilizer, for my plastic storage container, for my earrings, for adopting children, for medicine, for visas to any country that is not located in Africa, for my rubber bucket, for the cold soda that is often the only thing my oft nauseated stomach can stomach—are requests to remind me that the identity I apply to myself, as an anthropologist, is not the identity by which I am seen. I am not seen as an inquisitive ethnographer.  I am seen as a delegate of the West, a place that people understand through our Western films, our Western philanthropy, and our Western institutions.

I ask people questions to try and make a case for the consequences of global inequality.  They, in turn, ask for my shoes as a way to acknowledge global inequality.  With gratitude for Eric Gable’s assessment of his own ethnographic experience in Guinea Bissau, I am starting to see how these interactions are a way for my interlocutors to attempt to guide my research by enlisting sympathy, an interaction Gable describes as building moral mutuality between outsider and insider.  Moral mutuality, he affirms, is a condition instilled via the coproduction of shame, anger and guilt--emotions that seem to be the only ones I’m getting dealt in fieldwork. I do not feel like I’ve built many genuine relationships with my fellow community members via the more presumed emotional routes of rapport or empathy.  That I’m not getting this feeling as an anthropologist is uncomfortable.  It’s profoundly uncomfortable to be the spokesperson for the privileged world in my attempt to be the spokesperson for the have nots.

But I think I should be grateful for it.  If I wasn’t made to feel so damn guilty and so damn angry every day, perhaps I would lose sight of the institutions and actors that are more culpable in perpetuating a world of gross inequity.  If I was running high on rapport and felt that I was understood to be the mostly well intentioned, if not a somewhat self serving PhD student, it would perhaps be easier to forget about the actions of the International Monetary Fund, an entity that is more responsible for the movement of wealth and power than a data hungry PhD student. But because I’m irate, I’ve got quite the eye on the IMF, an institution that has recently reintegrated into the Ghanaian economy.  Ghana  once the star player of the “Rising Africa” narrative, is now set to be bailed out by a loan by the IMF, a loan that will inevitably chain the country  not only paying back the loan, but tailoring the national economic policies and institutions to fit the neo-liberal paradigm favored by the IMF.  (Richard Peet’s Geography of Power: The Making of Global Economic Policy, a very accessible and tight book that explores how and why the IMF and the World Bank do what they do and is helping me think on how these processes should be interpreted as I start to analyze my fieldwork experience as it relates to a bigger picture.)

If I ever meet Bill Gates I’m going to politely greet him and politely answer any questions. Then, just as I feel the transaction has politely finished, I’m going to politely demand his watch.  It’s not that I actually want or need his watch, or that I think by having his watch the world is suddenly made more equitable.  The point is not that rich people should bequeath their luxury to the less fortunate. The point is to make people squirm a bit and to feel like an instrument.   Squirming is perhaps the best verb to describe my fieldwork experience.  The squirming is making me think. If we were all made to do a little more squirming, I’m fairly sure we’d start having more honest conversations about the ways that we can bring more equitable conditions to places like the Upper West Ghana, not to mention Ferguson, MO.