The Sport of Cooking

 Last week I found myself watching coverage of the winter Olympics, a conglomeration of sports geographically and financially inaccessible to the Ghanaians I was watching with. I’ve always thought that the Olympics would be more compelling if the competitions engaged the strength and capacity for endurance that a lot of the world’s population employs in their day to day life.  Right now I’m quite fascinated with the sport of cooking.

In Ghana, cooking is a workout. Heart rates accelerate, muscle is built and sweat is induced.  I fancy myself  someone who is decently athletic and who can handle herself in the kitchen.  I am not a contender in the Ghanaian cooking Olympics.  The meals that are prepared (and perhaps preferred) within the home are starchy porridges paired with soups. Making either is not easy. Food is enjoyed in smooth textures and complex flavors that necessitate laborious, tedious, and fastidious cooking.

Grinding

Though blenders are increasingly used in kitchens around Ghana, the traditional mode of blending ingredients for soup involves using a small ceramic mortar and a wooden pestle.  The technique of wrist movement and arm pressure to efficiently and quickly grind things like peppers, garlic, tomatoes, and onions is one that is seemingly intuitive.  And yet every time I give the grinding a go, I feel like a moron.  I feel like that 5 year old me who struggled to figure out the rhythm to pumping ones legs to gain momentum on the swings.   I vigorously move my wrist in a pattern I think is mimicking the technique I so diligently observe while simultaneously reminding myself to apply muscle pressure. When I decide that my arms are too tired to continue, I decide that I’m finished.  I present my results and am faced with kind, yet placating comments about my effort.  My cooking supervisors will point out the tiny membranes of pepper or tomato skin that I have failed to incorporate into the pulse.  And they will then take over and get the job done.

Ghanaian hand takes over Jessica's epic failure at grinding peppers

Ghanaian hand takes over Jessica's second epic failure at grinding peppers and tomatoes

Pounding

Fufu (or kapala as it is known in the languages of the Upper West) is perhaps the dish that is most reliant on the pounding process. (More profound words and thoughts on the importance of fufu in Ghanaian diet found here)

Pounding of kapala takes place in large wooden mortars and long wooden pounding sticks. Pieces of boiled yam are placed in the mortar and in the beginning stage, the pounder/s gently slam the stick down onto the yam to mash it.   Once the whole pieces of yam are no longer visible, the pounder/s begin using absolute full force to slam the pounding weapons down onto the mashed yam.  This is done repeatedly, sometimes with grunting reminiscent of tennis players, until chemistry takes over.  The idea is to slam the yam until it forms a gelatinous texture.  At this point one person continues to pound and another person uses the seconds between poundings to collect and knead the yam dough while adding small amounts of water.  It’s like watching synchronized swimming.......but only if synchronized swimming was terrifying to watch for fear of hand maiming.  I do not even attempt this process for fear of hand maiming or being a hand maimer.

This is a relatively small kapala mortar-a size for a small family 

Finished kapala served in the grinding bowl so as to absorb all of the delicious remnants of garlic and pepper--can't eat out of blender can ya?

Stirring

Other staple foods such as banku or tuo zafi (made from maize flours sometimes mixed with cassava or millet flours) require extensive stirring.  These porridges are thick and made in large quantities.  They are stirred in a particular pattern until the consistency is smooth.  Stirring such vats of flour and water is like being on a rowing machine that sits over a hot fire.  I stir for about 30 seconds and then hand over the paddle like spoon to those with biceps and triceps I covet.

Harnessing the cooking pot with your toes is surely worthy of a medal in and of itself

 

Teenagers are often responsible for cooking the tuo zafi, making my lack of endurance feel even more pathetic

Stirring banku for selling at a streetside food joint

My participation in these cooking sessions, while largely observational, is a nice reminder that eating well requires commitments of time and labor that not everyone is able to provide for themselves or their families. As a grad student, I've had my fair share of boiled peanut and Miller High Life dinners* because I lack the time, energy or brain cells to prepare myself something a little more substantial in the wholesome meal realm.  Though food accessibility issues have been widely integrated into discussions on diet and health, I think there's still a lot of room to talk more about how the preparation of good food can take good time or good money.  Not everyone can afford time saving gadgets or time saving ventures such as pre-washed, pre-chopped vegetables.  Cooking from whole foods can sometimes take whole chunks of time.  And there's value to that in how our food tastes, how our children learn to cook, and how we pass on unique culinary traditions.  

*I seriously miss these dinners

There is a Season

To honor Pete Seeger’s recent passing, I title this blog after his pretty swell retrofitting of the Book of Ecclesiastes into a pretty sweet song. He was an anthropologist of song.

If you’ve ever commented to a teacher that they made a good career choice because they get the summers off, I bet you were very poorly received--especially if such a comment was made to my father.  Farming is another profession prone to critiques of time spent lollygagging.  This is not so true. 

The dry season is opportune for putting new fencing up around gardens that people keep around their homes.  Fences are essential for keeping out roaming goats, sheep, pigs, and anthropologists prone to tactile methods of observation. 

Anthropology is well adapted to documenting how economic and social activities change throughout the year.  We’re long term researchers and  enmeshed in the communities we’re researching.  One of the principle methods of anthropology is observation.  When I’m not asking people questions, I’m constantly scanning my surroundings and looking for things, actions, and behaviors that will tell me something about life in the rural Upper West during the dry season.  The things that I see are just as important as the things that I ask about--sometimes more so.  If I ask people what they do during the dry season they will sometimes respond that they do nothing because they are not farming.  This is not so true. I've observed a lot of this "nothingness" that is happening. 

Just as teachers spend their "dry seasons" working on things like curriculum, professional development, and lesson plans, the dry season for farmers is about hustling. 

If you are the head of a large family that likes to eat a lot of fufu, it's necessary to have new mortars that can withstand the pounding.   The dry season is the season for making new mortars as is shown here. 

The dry season is, perhaps, mostly about building.  People are refurbishing existing house structures and building new ones. 

Such building is always time and labor intensive.  If people are using local materials to build mud brick, the first step in the process is to make the bricks. This involves digging deep holes, hauling water, mixing mud, hauling the mud to a brick making station, and then giving the bricks an opportunity to bake in the sun. 

The next step involves assembling.

For households transitioning from mud brick to cement brick, the process is not only time and labor intensive, but also quite expensive.  One bag of cement costs approximately $10.  This bag of cement will form 30 cement blocks.  30 cement blocks can build about 1/3 of a one wall for a small room.  Money for building cement block homes comes from different  strategies. Some farmers are selling their recent groundnut harvest (aka peanuts, the only viable commercial crop for farmers here) even though groundnut prices are currently quite low.  Others are doing day labor in Wa, a large town about 10 kilometers away and one that is booming in size because of the growth of a university.   They spend the day  shovelling sand into a dump truck to be used in the construction industry.  They earn about $4-7 for their day labor. They then spend some of that money on buying  cement for their own homes as well as save some for the cost of inputs for farming. These cement block homes are often works in progress for years. Think about this the next time some media outlet demerits some African's home as a "shack." 

For 3 years a farmer has been selling his groundnut harvest to put up this house.  

The dry season is also about gathering stuff from the bush (countryside).  Men have more time to go hunting and fishing during the dry season. Women have more time to spend gathering firewood, burning charcoal and gathering wild foods. All such activities are vital to procuring income and enhancing food security.  These are the things that I need to know about so that I can understand the bigger picture of household management--how people make decisions about how to earn and spend money throughout the year, not just during the farming season. Farming is never the only story for farming families. 

A dam where fishing occurs with weighted throw nets as well as set up catch nets. 

Demonstration of a bird trap

The stems of the vogaa flower (collected from a tree).  The flowers are used in the preparation of soup. Like so many of the soup ingredients here (especially okra), the ingredient is said to be nice because it makes the soup slippery. Slippery soup works well for the staple starchy porridges that are consumed here.  The slippery soups coat the porridges very well, ensuring that you get the flavor of the soup with every bite of starch. 

Who is the Anthropologist?

Two summers ago during a prelim research trip I found myself donning the tourist hat at a hippo sanctuary located about 15 miles from my field site.  My fellow tourists-in-arms were a German family.  As we were getting ready to load the canoes that would provide our river safari, there was a moment that the anthropologist in me loved so much.  As we stood on the river bank waiting, some women disembarked from a canoe with the wares they were taking to sell at a local market.  Upon solid ground and close proximity, we became the objects of intense observation.  Or rather the Germans became the objects of intense observation. For the Germans were decked out in ridiculous river safari ensembles.  They were in head to toe synthetic fabric and looked as foreign as they possibly could. I can only imagine how those women were internally postulating about why the Germans were wearing the clothes that they were.  And a game I’ve named Who is the Anthropologist? was born.  

Because I’m so eager to see and learn here, it’s easy to forget that Ghanaians are just as curious about me.  One of the hazards of living in the community where you do research is that it’s incredibly difficult to refuse visitors to your house when you’ve spent all day inviting yourself into their homes to ask them questions about their lives and observe their activities.  So I find myself hosting a daily entourage of children who walk into my room to see all the bizarre possessions I’ve brought with me and what I do with them.  Thus far, my decrepid Dell laptop is the item that draws the most excitement.  Kids who haven’t even been in my house will see me around town and shout out “laptop!” and mimic typing and make computer noises.  Nevermind that my next door neighbor has a TV and DVD player. 

And here in the land of way too many plastic bags, my box of aluminum foil is also quite intriguing.   

My behaviors, too, are inciting local theory building.  In visiting with the local assemblyman last night I learned that many people are concerned that I don’t have intestines.  This concern emerges from the fact that I don’t consume the standard amount of local foods, the amount locally perceived to be substantial and sufficient to filling the belly.  Fufu (yam that has had the holy hell pounded out of it to become highly starchy and gelatinous) is served in portions the size of an American football.  I find it physically impossible to consume that.  When I only eat half of the football it seems that people are assuming that my body can’t process food properly.   I wonder what they think I’m doing in the latrine everyday.  They see my daily walk there.  

And then there’s the interpretation of how foreigners look.  Whenever I’m with another white woman it’s not unusual to be asked if that woman is my twin.  It matters not that hair colors are different or facial features incongruous. I brought a Memory game with me to play with kids.  Interestingly, they are able to match items that they’ve probably never encountered (like a rotary telephone or a dog house) but are unable to correctly match the white people (and it’s only white people in the game) represented. 

The absolute best, however, is how Ghanaians perceive the sound of foreigners. There is a tendency for Ghanaians to initiate conversation with a foreigner by talking in a high pitched, Mickey Mouse voice.  Though highly annoying, I use such opportunities to entertain myself.  I respond to such cartoonish conversation initiations with my best Leonard Cohen meets Tom Waits impersonation. 

It’s always nice to be reminded that I, too, am under the cultural interpretation microscope.  

The Global System (Or How a Merrill Lynch Golf Jacket Ends Up Being Worn By a Farmer in Ghana)

A story  in the New York Times from late September continues to irk me and bring out my inner Yosemite Sam.  I finally have the fieldwork metaphor try and explain why this piece is so damaging to how we think about Africa as a place and its position in the world.  

Following the Westgate Mall attacks in Nairobi, East Africa correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman stated that Nairobi presents an excellent context for watching the expansion of Africa’s middle class.  He elaborates:

“…new office blocks are rising above the tin-shack slums, new bistros are popping up all over the place and taxi drivers are getting on Facebook. It’s essentially Africa joining the world.”

This is a very problematic way of reporting on Africa.  First of all, we should not be surprised that Kenyans performing drudgerous work know how to use the internet and are inclined to participate in social media.  As a blogger for the site Africa is a Country recently snarked in reaction to a different Times piece (one bellowing the wonders of how artists in Kenya use the internet as a means to create and share), “If a Kenyan DJ uploads a mixtape to soundcloud and the New York Times isn’t around to hear it, does it make a sound?” 

My overarching issue with this reporting is that an emerging middle class in Africa and Africa “joining the world “are two very different things.  There is something going on in Ghana with class, though I’ve yet to come across a convincing definition of a new Ghanaian middle class.  I rather suspect that more people are inching into the wealthy category and more people are falling behind, creating an average that looks middle class.  

This is the size of the new houses that are going up in wealthy neighborhoods in Accra

This is what new apartment complexes look like in wealthy neighborhoods in Accra

This is where advertisements for new up-scale apartment buildings are put up--on existing middle class apartment buildings that show no signs of expansion. 

But more importantly, Africa has always been, and every person on this continent retains active membership in the world. 

Maybe Mr. Gettleman never had a world history class that talked about the trans-Sahara trade that was the economic feature of West African societies prior to European contact. That seems pretty worldly to me. Maybe he forgot about the slave trade.  The forced movement of people from one continent to other continents also seems pretty indicative of worldly transactions.  And then there’s colonialism, and the current era of development that many label as neo-colonialism. There is a lot of external presence inside Africa, and Africa has a lot of presence outside of itself. 

This narrative is so nefarious is because it negates to acknowledge just how globally interconnected this continent has been for a long, long time before Facebook became a thing, let alone a metric for measuring a common man’s place in the wider world.  By equating economic and technological strides with integration into the world, it can be assumed that Africans who are not able to access such resources (or who have no interest in accessing such resources) are, by default, not part of the world.

The farmers who I work with don’t have Facebook accounts.  But they’re sure as hell integrated into a global system that harnesses them into positions of minimal power.  As producers and consumers, they are at the mercy of a global market system that undervalues the goods they produce.  One farmer in my site of study is always wearing an oversized warm up jacket with the Merrill Lynch bull emblem, an item of clothing he inevitably got through the prolific used clothing markets in Ghana.   The fact that this jacket has traversed from the shoulders of a wealth manager prone to golf to the shoulders of a farmer prone to plowing his own fields because he can’t afford to hire the service of a tractor.…………that, to me, pretty much explains how farmers in Northern Ghana are members of the world even though they don’t eat at bistros or log onto Facebook.  

Hoes used by farmers in the Upper West for plowing and weeding

When I asked this farmer of the Merrill Lynch warm up jacket if he thought the price he was paid for his cashew harvest was fair, his response was, essentially, that beggars can’t be choosers.  He got paid $7 for a cashew harvest that will probably go on to gather $14 from the middle man who has the means to get the nuts to the processor.  The processor will go on to charge more, the distributor will charge more and the supermarket will charge more.  And Merrill Lynch will go on to work to ensure that those at the top,  who win the most, can keep on winning the most.  Then they will kindly donate old golfing jackets that can serve as work gear for farmers in Ghana.  That’s our global system that ensures that all people are part of the world, just not equitably integrated into it. 

Baggage

As all of the Groupons for gym memberships putrify my inbox, here’s a thematic posting on weight and health.

One of the ways I gauge the power of my own cultural context is body image. I do a fairly good job of ignoring it in the States, but in Ghana it emerges with full force because Ghanaians tell it like it is.  Over the past 2 weeks I have been told by 3 different people that I am getting fat.  Well actually 2/3 of the sample said fat.  1/3 indicated that I was getting plumpy.  Even if people were not commenting upon it, my snugger jeans have told me the truth.  I arrived in Ghana at the lower end of my weight spectrum and have now crept up to the higher end.  No big deal.  But to have it pointed out in such bluntness is punching my psyche in the face. 

This is a compliment in Ghana.  While we may pass pleasantries in the US by congratulating someone on weight loss, Ghanaians suck up by telling someone they look plumpy. For here, to have some meat on your bones is to show that you are taking good care of yourself.  A friend told me that people sometimes go to the pharmacist for pills that will make them gain weight.   Personally I am finding that switching to a starch and oil heavy diet, (with further supplement provided by reliance on Coke and HobNobs to make the toils and foils of fieldwork feel less bleh), is working wonders.   Though I try wholeheartedly to embrace the Ghanaian ideology, I can’t shake the American ideology when I’m faced with interpreting comments that make my weight gain publicly acknowledged.   Maybe when Jennifer Lawrence no longer has to serve as the ambassador for female weight and body image issues I’ll be able to embrace being plumpy.

60 Ghana Cedis (about 20 US bucks) for this derriere enhancing undergarment. 

It’s not that Ghanaians are promoting obesity or are immune from health issues that stem from too much weight and too little activity.  There’s a strong public health discourse to bring awareness about the non-communicable diseases (NCDs) that are on the rise in Ghana, including hypertension and diabetes.  People are concerned about maintaining a weight that reduces their risk for disease.  For those not involved in physically demanding jobs, intentional exercise is practiced and more cautious consumption adhered to.

Words from the Ghanaian Ministry of Health at a park where inevitably people will be playing basketball and some really great volleyball (not a popular sport here)

Ad for a walkathon promoting heart health in Accra, the largest urban center in Ghana and thus an area of the country where heart disease is more of an issue to do urban lifestyles

It’s that the weight you do (or don’t carry) in Ghana does not come to define you as individually in charge or weakly willed.  Food is not something that instigates emotions such as shame or is associated with characteristics such as will-power. When I eat with women in Ghana, never do we engage in the kind of self-congratulatory or self-loathing language reifying or vilifying our food intake that pads dining conversations in the States.  Here you aren’t what you eat. It is acknowledged that being self conscious about my weight whilst I pursue research on food insecurity is incredibly tacky. I regularly deride myself for my toolishness. But it’s hard to shake your cultural baggage, and sometimes you don’t even realize your cultural baggage until it is challenged in paradoxical ways.

"More Cowpea!"

If you eat black eyed peas for good luck on New Year’s Day, you are participating in a tradition linking American foodways to West African foodways via the trans Atlantic slave trade. For the past 7 years I have lived in (and eaten my way through) New Orleans and Georgia. Now I am residing in a region of Ghana that was lucrative for looting humans to sell into the Dutch and Portuguese slave markets that fed the plantation systems in the Americas.  I’m always seeking and contemplating the connections between these two settings.  Though I’m pretty convinced that the vibe I felt at a parade in Accra is the same vibe I felt when watching a Second Line in New Orleans, vibes are a little too subjective. Food is definitely a more objective connection to make. 

As a Stateside vegetarian, I’ve a bit of an affinity for legumes. The black eyed pea that we know in the States is one of many types of peas fitting in the category of cowpea. So a black eyed pea is a cowpea but a cowpea is not necessarily a black eyed pea.

Cowpea at market in Wa

 The cowpea is indigenous to Southern Africa and spread outwards to West and East Africa as well as Asia.  The cowpea is still important to farming and culinary practice in Ghana.  As a cultivar, cowpeas are important for fixing nitrogen in the soil.  For this incredibly variable climate, it’s also a relatively resilient crop to rains that can either be lacking or too intense.  As a food, cowpeas are an important source of protein for households that can only afford to integrate small amounts of meat into their diet. Cowpeas are eaten boiled and whole with rice to produce waakeye (a dish that must be a cousin to Hoppin’ John) and with fried plantain to produce a dish known as red-red.  The dried bean is also ground into a fine flour that is used to make fried bean cakes called kosi that make for a filling breakfast alongside a millet based porridge.   Even the leaves of the cowpea plant are used, consumed both by people (as a tasty leafy green in soups) and by livestock.  

Making kosi (note the antiquated US aid oil can in the background.....perhaps it is soy oil)

So in addition to being delicious, cowpeas fit comfortably into the local agro-ecology and promote food security for small scale farmers in Ghana.  That’s why it’s a bit frustrating to see and hear incessant buzz about soy.  Soy beans are being pushed fast and furious as the crop du jour that will end poverty for all Ghanaian farmers who partake in its cultivation. Soy is already grown in Ghana, but neither prolifically nor very profitably as it does not compose a substantial part of the local diet.  

Soy is not being pushed as a food crop in Ghana (or elsewhere in the new soy colonies that are already very expansive in South America) but as a commercial crop for processing into oil as well as animal feed that can quench an increasing global desire for meat.   The idea is that there is a global demand for soybeans and if small farmers in Ghana are able to meet that demand they will walk away with cash in their pockets that can be used to buy all needs (including food).  

In theory this sounds great.  In reality, it never really works out that well for the small-scale farmer. For at least the past 40 years, anthropologists and other social scientists have shown how this idea has failed to profit the people proposed to profit.  The reasons for failure can begin at production (when farmers are not given access to the inputs they need to produce the crop) or at harvest (when the market is so un-regulated that buyers are able to grossly under-pay or when the supposed demand is no longer there and the farmer is left with a commodity crop that is not consumable).  

The US is a prime harbinger of how scaling-up does not necessarily work out that well for most parties involved. We’ve already seen what happens when agriculture becomes more about a supply chain than about food that nourishes people.  This is why we hardly have any family farms left in the US.  Small farmers don’t profit in a farming system that is all about links in a chain.   Corporations processing the crops profit.  And those who profit can buy out the “failing” farmer. In the meantime, our food becomes really cheap, but at the cost of a diverse, fresh and nutritious diet.

Salvation soy projects are already unfolding across Northern Ghana. In visiting a community selected to participate in such a new agricultural venture, a major hurdle to success was already prevailing.  Two different varieties of soy were given to farmers.  One variety was not as drought tolerant as the other and the dried out shells of the soy burst, producing an audible popping sound and a visible shooting bean. Farmers who were given this variety decided that the only way the crop was salvageable was to harvest the plants whole and put them in a pile.  In a pile, the burst pods would at least provide an accumulation of beans in one spot rather than exploding all over the field.  However, because the farmers who were harvesting in this manner did not put a tarp down to capture the popped beans, they became vulnerable to demands of the buyer (a processor) looking for a pristine product.  Soybeans captured on the ground are soybeans that are likely to be mixed with detritus such as small stones and dirt.  Such sullied beans do not make processors happy because it messes with their system of efficiency.  So while small scale farmers are smart, adaptable and open to experimentation, they are not always equipped with foresight for all of the potential problems that can undermine their foray into commodity production. 

Soy plants piled to collect exploding beans

Production of soy in Ghana may or may not be of benefit to farmers here.  No matter what the outcome,  emphasis on soy is detracting farmer knowledge from important indigenous crops like the cowpea that are capable of growing in this increasingly variable climate and are enjoyably consumed in multiple, nutritious forms. If we get to make a wish for what kind of luck we’re seeking in our black eyed pea consumption, I’m hoping that there can be more praise for agricultural bio-diversity, and not just for the context that we individually live and consume in.  In the US, we’re starting to honor our diverse agricultural heritage by refining our knowledge of and palettes for the varieties of fruits, vegetables, and livestock that fell out of fashion when our farms turned into mono-croppers and all of our produce started coming from California. Just as we start to realize that our food system really doesn’t work out that well for us, we push the same kind of models across the pond. As citizens trying to re-define our own food system, we should acknowledge that people everywhere have the right to honor their own interwoven agricultural and culinary heritages.  Just because people are poor does not mean that the best and longest lasting solution to their poverty is integration into a global commodity chain that may boom now but bust in the near future.  

If I could re-write a catchphrase, it would be “More cowbellpea!”  It’d be awesome if some celebrity would make it their cause.

Should you be inclined to read some more in-depth anthropologicalness….

Troubled Fields by Eric Ramirez Ferrero is an ethnography that explores how the 1980s farm crisis came to fruition through political and economic means and how the crisis negatively affected farming communities and farm families in Oklahoma.

Silent Violence by Michael Watts is an ethnography that shows how a shift from subsistence to commodity farming in Northern Nigeria failed to procure wealthier farmers and instead produced hungrier families.

Though I haven’t read their work, Judith Carney and Jessica Harris are scholars who have written about the linkages between crops/food in Africa and the American South. 

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.