The Importance of Being Modern

Modernity is a topic drowning in theoretical discussion.  Foucalt brought the knowledge and power to the party.  I sense I can trace a lot of what I’m thinking about now to his original thinking.  I hope to read his original thinking (and revisit that of his disciples) when I’m procrastinating with my dissertation (which is not supposed to be about modernity at all) and later on as an unemployed Dr. who can’t write prescriptions and who can’t stomach the idea of tweaking another cover letter. For now I release some pent up thoughts on how I see the quest for modernity shaping people’s lives in the Upper West.  

I’ve spent the week engaging how I most love to engage in and out of fieldwork: talking with old people. In particular I’ve been talking with elder women about changes in dietary practice.  A repeated and telling statement rationalizing perceived change is: “Well, we are trying to be modern now”.  The traditional mixes with the modern here in numerous and consistently observable ways.  People still use traditional medicine alongside Western medicine. People wear contemporary Western styles alongside more local ways of dressing.  Modern and traditional exist on a spectrum here, just as they do everywhere.  However, never in the middle does anyone admit to want to be.  People don’t discuss ways to preserve the traditional as much as they explicitly express the desire to be modern.   

Particular kind of tree bark that is boiled and taken as a tea to improve stomach ailments

Vitamin packed syrup meant to attract the well dressed and modern Ghanaian familiy. 

In the context of the Upper West, the young adult population is only 3 generations removed from initial contact with colonial authorities who justified rule because of the non-modern ways of the local people. Then came an era of post-WWII development where modernity (aka science and technology) was the framework for identifying, defining and solving the ongoing problems of tradition or newly established problems where modernity already derailed.  I can only imagine what it does psychologically to a population to be told repeatedly that your ways of being and doing are wrong and reform is necessary. When I consider how colonial authority was imposed, it’s not too difficult to see why doing things “the modern way” is important to self and peer perception.  Shame might not be a genetic trait, but it’s surely one that has passed from family to family from colonialism onward.

The adage “you are what you eat” is proving pretty resoundingly apt in my current quest to learn about dietary change. What people are often trying to be through their diet is modern. When it comes to what food ingredients are used, certain ingredients from the wild can identify you as someone who is languishing in the land of the traditional.  During one chat, one woman pointed to a tree and said that no one will eat the leaves from that tree anymore because the tree is too public—meaning the tree represents a traditional food source that people can’t risk being seen taking leaves from to cook with.  Modern people don’t get their food from the wild, but from the market even though the wild foods can be incredibly nutritious and trees and bushes don’t charge you for taking the leaves.

"Modern" folks in one of my fieldsite don't eat leaves from this tree.  "Traditional" folks who live in my other fieldsite still do

"Modern" folks are supposed to use Maggi bullion cubes to flavor soups, a modern item that simultaneously sells  modern ways of  what it means to be a woman 

Maggi also discourages using the local (and protein rich) soup flavoring known as dawa dawa

Additionally, the preparation of the modern staple maize porridge is one that requires more expensive extraction of the maize kernel’s shell (or pericarp?? or more??) in the milling process so as to eliminate nutritional components (protein? fiber?) that make the meal more healthful but less aesthetically pleasing to the modern eye. Modern porridge is very pure white in color and very soft in texture. This is the food that will impress guests with your modernity.  If whole grain maize porridge is served--maize that looks slightly brown and is harder-- they will know you are poor and backwards.  This is despite the fact that the whole grain maize porridge is largely considered to be more satisfying and better for the body. Wonder Bread had its day and still lingers in the States.  The same process of technology influencing the aesthetics of food is at work here.  

What’s particularly interesting about the achievement of modernity through diet are the geographical layers that can be analyzed.  People in the fieldsite where I live are striving to be like the people in the nearby urban center Wa.  Associations with certain wild foods or ways of preparing food that are considered too traditional are associated with my other field site, a smaller, more rural community only 5 kilometers away.  Meanwhile, the urban folk of Wa are adopting ways of eating that could be considered less regional and more standardized Ghanaian, with more reliance on food items that come from outside the country.  My assistant and I had a very frustrating go around recently where he insisted that because perfumed Thai rice was the same price as the locally produced rice I should just buy the perfumed Thai rice.  His theory was that the Thai rice, being from the outside, was obviously better than any locally produced product.  Steeped in my “I buy local when I can” zeal, I kept trying to convince him that buying local rice made more sense because it supported the local rice farmers and that I found the local rice to better accompany the local flavors used.  He didn’t buy my theory*. 

Cowboy Rice from the US of A.  The US also floods its subsidized Jazz rice in the Ghanaian market alongside Thai and Vietnamese rice.  Local rice struggles. 

Local rice

I don’t suggest that Ghana has no need for modern consumer goods from around the world or technologies that can enhance productivity or provide essential services. The point is that it is disconcerting to see that alongside the access to such modern goods and ways of consuming, is the assumption that it is better simply because it comes from the outside and that anything locally produced must be inferior. 

As if this aspect of becoming modern weren’t exasperating enough to witness, the efforts to become more modern here are costly.  I do a lot of uncomfortable shifting in my seat as I listen to how being modern inevitably results in further integration into a cash economy, largely on the consumer end.  People have plenty of opportunities to be modern through what they buy, but incredibly limited opportunities to be modern through how and what they earn. Historical memory and contemporary world membership encourages modern consumption, but jobs that help support such a modern lifestyle are minimal and require levels of formal (and expensive) educational attainment that farmers don’t and can’t have.  That is why tertiary education is now priority for everyone here and why school fees sometimes trump food needs.

So in addition to feeling pulled into modernity, farmers are often forced to become more modern in their attempts to close this discrepancy between “things one must have” and “ways to earn money to have those things”.  Though elders are prone to categorize all change as that which occurs to be less traditional, a lot of dietary change is not due to choice.  Beans are a food item that my observation and interviews assert as not cast into the traditional category. People describe plenty of interest in wanting to eat more beans.  However beans have fallen long by the wayside in the diet because beans are more expensive than other foodstuffs.  Women would be inclined to cook more beans and less rice if they weren’t compelled to balance food needs with school fees or health insurance or small business activity that keeps their purchasing capabilities afloat. 

Similarly, there would probably be more beans in the household if men weren’t so prone to favor of the commercial crop appeal of groundnuts.  The standard argument is that commercial crops lead to higher income and the ability to purchase rather than grow diverse food stuffs.  But that argument is based on the idea that an equitable commodity chain exists and farmers are getting fair prices for their crops.  That often doesn’t happen in many places in the world and isn’t happening here.  Men sell groundnuts to buy fertilizer, an outside technology that is just as often described as necessary for keeping up socio-economic appearances as it is for soil enhancement.  Men need fertilizer because maize is a very nutrient hungry crop and won’t grow here without fertilizer.  Men direct attention to maize rather than focus on the more traditional (and higher protein and less nutrient needy) grains millet and sorghum because it has a faster maturation time.  Faster maturation time is needed to get food into a house that is hungry because cash is tight and farming challenged by changing rainfall patterns. Maize also has more earning potential on the Ghanaian market.   Men don’t sell groundnuts to buy beans.  Men sell groundnuts to ensure that the cheaper maize porridge can consistently be eaten 2-3 times a day at the cost of a more diverse diet.

Recently harvested maize to put an end to the really food insecure JuneJuly period in this household

Groundnut harvest--a good harvest.  This will make a dent on the cost of ag inputs for next year as well as school fees.

Sorghum foreground and millet background--indigenous grains that are losing out to greater ecological and economic forces. 

The citizens of the Upper West are still trying to prove themselves through the achievement of modernity that they are both pushed and pulled into. The templates and processes that guide this push and pull are produced by the outside progenitors of what it means to be modern. This is pretty exasperating to witness and makes my brain want to explode, especially since many people who reside in places that determine what is modern think that the templates and processes are malfunctioning. As Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman get Westerners to forage for their food and buy local food to sustain local economies, Ghanaians contend with a historical legacy that deems such actions backwards and membership in a contemporary world that still benefits from exploiting rather than enhancing livelihoods.  This region can now boast of being more modern, but it can also boast of having a less diverse diet.  That is whack.

*He also didn’t get why I felt guilty for buying a pair of $2 red knock off Tom’s in Scotland. He didn’t get why I should feel guilty for having to buy cheap goods made by cheap labor when I should be celebrating my ability to buy a pair of shoes so cheaply.  Unfortunately he also failed to see the irony of wearing knock off Tom’s in Ghana, a place where authentic Tom’s are supposed to be improving people’s lives.  And so that’s why I tag it on here.

The Shame

The hardest part about fieldwork is acknowledging that I exist as a willing, eager and accepting anthropologist integrating into a new context, but also as a human undeniably still part of my own, non detachable cultural context.  I call this The Superhero Syndrome.  I blame the origin of this syndrome on the superhero ethnographers who integrate themselves into their books as individuals who give 110% to their field site and are void of any discomfort.  They do things like learn to play local instruments in their spare time and are fluent enough in the local language to make jokes.

I do things like read my Kindle in my spare time. I’ve read an alarming amount of books.   

My inefficiencies in mastering different tones in a tonal language are the joke in my rudimentary language skills. In Wale, the words for breast and sleep are the same.  I like to bid people adieu in the evening by telling them to “breast well”.

When I compare myself to this mythological creature, one mostly created in my head, I feel like a failure.  I call the primary emotional ailment of this syndrome The Shame. 

The Shame creeps in when I decide to sit inside the minibus waiting to fill up with people rather than wait outside under the mango tree with the men.  The Shame creeps in even though it is raining outside and being inside the minibus makes more sense than sitting under the semi-protection of the mango tree.   The Superhero ethnographer would be out there with the men, being drizzled on and would not have to ignore emotional exhaustion about suggested betrothals or requests to take children back to the US with her.  Nothing breaks through the culturally relativistic armor of a superhero.

Avoiding interactions with men that are irritating and sad.

The Shame creeps in when I find myself hideously uncomfortable and bored in my participant observation activities and yearning for my ipod. The Superhero ethnographer would find 8 hours of groundnut harvesting as intellectually stimulating and enriching as any other method of data collection.  And she wouldn’t whine about the biting ants or have to use a 5 year old as her metric for successful rate of harvest.

My pal Mazu-helps prove the theory that all 5 year old children will eat more of what they harvest than put in the bowl for taking home

The Shame creeps in when I deny the omnipresent children access to my room.  The Superhero ethnographer wouldn’t intentionally leave her door without an outside handle in order to prevent those 10 and under from barging in whenever they want.  The Superhero would have an open door policy and wouldn’t need time to read or write in her journal about her failures as an anthropologist because she’s not a failure and doesn’t ever need to be alone.  This Shame is paradoxical because it also emerges when I do decide to goof around with kids instead of focusing on my research questions.

My pal Fadila trying to break in

The Shame creeps in when I decide that I need to work on managing my data rather than collecting more.  The shame marches in when I decide to blog rather than collect data.

Entering data.  Not collecting it. 

The Shame creeps in when my 10 year old pal Jeremiah draws a picture of me (under my commission) and in the resulting image he shows a woman carrying water on her head—a woman with the face that is inexplicably reminiscent of a chicken.  I feel shame because I feel like he has captured the true me—the anthropologist who does not collect her own water but rather pays girls in small change or bananas to fetch water for her.  He knows my shame.  That’s why my face is that of a chicken.  The superhero ethnographer would master heading her water from the borehole to the house so that it wouldn’t be an activity that could potentially take 2 hours of the day.

Me as a chicken heading water from the borehole

The Shame creeps in when I decide to eat biscuits for dinner rather than go over to my landlord’s house for what will most likely be maize porridge and orka soup, a meal I can’t pretend to like.

The Shame creeps in when I have to meet my research assistant teary eyed because my BBC app just informed me that Robin Williams committed suicide. The Shame tells me that I shouldn’t be emotionally attuned to the suicide of a comic when I’m in the midst of people doing their best to not let their own worries about food and money get the best of them. The Shame creeps in even though I am a researcher researching mental health and he suffered with one of the most complicated mental health issues in the world today.  

The Shame is a stupid and very minor demon in my head that I eviscerate through journaling and an ongoing attempt to make mindfulness and meditation more of a practice in my life so that when I return to the grad school climate, where fiercer demons exist, I can be more vigilant. I’m not failing at anything in fieldwork other than harvesting the same amount of groundnuts as those who should be my true gauge for success--14 year olds. I’m a human, not a superhero.  We’re all humans, not superheros and being human is hard.  I don’t know what demons existed in Robin’s head and how they got there and why they wouldn’t go away.  But I hope that with the death of someone who made a decent living making people laugh, something he seemed destined to do, we turn a new page in integrating discussions on the complex genetic, psychological and cultural causes of depression to a healthier place.   Russell Brand recently wrote a piece in The Guardian honoring Williams.  He questions:

Is it melancholy to think that a world that Robin Williams can’t live in must be broken?  To tie this sad event to the overarching misery of our times?  No academic would co-sign a theory in which the tumult of our fractured and unhappy planet is causing the inherently hilarious to end their lives.

This academic does sign onto that theory. This is pretty much the theory this anthropologist is using in her research.   I didn’t plan on integrating mental health in my PhD pursuit, but once I started reading and thinking about it, I didn’t see how I couldn’t study it.  Our metrics of success are wonky.  We’re a world of extremes.  There’s no way that our current climate (social, economic, atmospheric) is not leading to mental health issues. But it takes more people to accept these issues as problems than deny them before a more honest discussion of depression can emerge. 

There Will Be Blog (Otherwise Titled: I'm Still Perturbed and Disturbed by David Brooks)

These words are a work in progress. Ending global inequality is a work in progress.  This road to one of my fieldsites is one hell of a work in progress. 

David Brooks recently wrote about character development as the ingredient missing from attempts to break the poverty trap. This irked me.  Greatly.  I made use of Facebook to announce my disgruntledness.  Interesting conversation ensued that was quite helpful for me to see beyond my fury.  And I’ve tried to take insight from that conversation to figure out more thoughtfully why this Brooks’ piece still greatly irks me.

My primary beef with the column was (and remains) that he ignored the bigger picture of causality. Does any permutation of character cause the poverty trap?  No.  Do permutations of character integrate into the poverty trap equation? Perhaps, but not in the simplistic equation he presents. He waters down social science research on character that has merit in its own right, but is not intended to trigger a  “AH HA, THE solution to breaking the poverty trap” response.  Anytime any one thing is heralded as ending poverty we should all be skeptical. Any one thing that is attempting to end poverty is patchwork development. Patchwork development isn’t wrong, but it just patches. It doesn’t fix.  I am a proponent of people reaching out to other people. Good things can come of this. Lives can improve—both the helper’s and the helpee’s.  Maybe some even escape their marginalized circumstances.  But as long as the system that actually causes the poverty is in place, someone else is going to fall right down to the spot of the escapee.  So while certain cycles of poverty might be broken (or at best interrupted or paused), other cycles begin.  That’s not doing anything to resolve a world of some people with a whole, whole lot and a whole, whole lot of people with only bits and pieces.  Furthermore, if David Brooks wants to bring character into the conversation, why doesn’t he talk about the character of the corporate world or the political world, the people who circulate back and forth to make the world the shitty playing field it is?  I’d like to be an AmeriCorps volunteer working on developing some performance character on Wall Street or Congress. They make rash, impulsive decisions that affect many more lives than any one individual who decides to buy cigarettes instead of kale.

His dismissal of the bigger picture is dangerous, but perhaps what’s more dangerous is that what he’s watering down  sets the stage so that people who are chomping at the bit to blame poor people for their poverty can have an accredited voice to turn this itch into policy. Brooks’ outline rests on many of our day to day assumptions about why poor people stay poor—because they make stupid decisions because they lack self-control/will power. What’s a good way to kill our remaining social welfare programs (that already don’t do justice for the amount of need)?  Make people pre-qualify with a character assessment.  But of course in the Brooksonian world, the needy folks would have been offered a free online course on character enhancement (perhaps run by a subsidiary of Haliburton) or had their neighborhood AmeriCorps mentor train them how to become pre-approved for social assistance.

I’m allowed to be critical of AmeriCorps.  I was a volunteer.  Twice.

And that’s what gets me so damn fired up about this Brooks piece. I was an AmeriCorps volunteer twice. I also spent a year working on a public health project giving voice to the experience of uninsured Missourians and all the while was not offered health insurance by my non-profit employer. I’ve done empirical research on food and health issues in Uganda and Malawi. I spent an extra year in New Orleans after AmeriCorps Term 2 working several part time jobs just so I could keep immersing myself in learning how a city’s social and economic history resulted in the devastating and divergent destruction unleashed by a hurricane as well as the bizarre and disparate process of rebuilding the city. Currently, I try to learn about lives and livelihoods of stressed out farmers in Ghana and how a cycle of poverty and stress perpetuates in deleterious ways both socio-economically and biologically. I have, and continue to, live and learn amongst the population whose circumstances I hope to critically and thoughtfully interpret so as to address the hows and whys of human suffering.  All the while I’ve never eeked out a living above the poverty level, but I’ve got pre-approved credit cards, student loans, and parents who won’t let their daughter drive an unsafe car (or go without the occasional good haircut) on my side to keep me wading in the kiddie pool of poverty.

And yet because I’m a pie chart of insecurity (woman, graduate student, Midwesterner) I hesitate to say what is mine even though I present a decade’s worth of experience immersing myself in and thinking about the causes and consequences of poverty. I think, well I haven’t quite had enough experiences yet to have a voice.  I’ve worked some jobs and learned some stuff, and maybe I reached some people with my genuine interest in their lives and not just their need.  But even in the moment of my effort to help improve lives, I was frustrated that I was doing was temporary, peripheral, patchworky. I knew the social services I hooked the elderly up with in St. Louis were fragile services that could just as easily disappear as appear.  And as a volunteer match make in New Orleans I helped visitors find places to help in the rebuilding process, but I was helpless to address the fact that the city was rebuilding long standing racial and economic divides with a brand new dash of gentrification. Despite the pride I had for the narratives I helped collect on the experience of living without health insurance, when I marched in and out of Congressional offices in Jefferson City, disillusionment quickly set in when I saw just how little elected officials cared about what we had to say about their constituents’ physical and mental well being.

Then there’s the very upsetting fact that I’m not even close to figuring out how to dismantle and remantle a healthier, more equitable economic system like I cheer for.  

What I’m starting to realize is that smarter people think on how to fix the bigger picture.  What I’m starting to realize is that those of us who do have experience in being in some trenches as teachers, as AmeriCorps volunteers, as social workers, need to start finding our voices and sharing our experiences more to say that what we do helps but we see the bigger picture and we’d like to work on that too so that the seams of our patchwork finally get some reinforcement. We don’t need a new needle or thread.  We need some new material and a giant new sewing machine. If the David Brooks’ of the world, the ones who’ve not embedded themselves anywhere, ever with marginalized populations, are going to say what is theirs then sure as hell the ones of us who have need to stand up and question that and start saying what is ours.  

As an anthropologist invested in theoretically and empirically understanding the poverty trap, this is what is mine: To truly understand the poverty trap, it takes understanding the coping mechanisms employed even if such coping mechanisms are not congruous with seemingly rational or sound decision making.  In my current research, sometimes I observe someone who has just informed me that they are only eating 2 meals a day and are pretty damn worried about potential medical emergencies, drop 10 cents on beer or 50 cents on gin.  When I see this I don’t think “Shit, another bad move on their part. No wonder they’re so poor and so worried.”  I think, “Oh yeah.  This local beer is like a meal in a calabash.  They probably didn’t have breakfast so their kids could have breakfast.  That beer might be their breakfast.”  Or, “That 50 cents of gin is going to make her worries feel a little less worrisome.  And I know she’d have to save 50 cents everyday for 6 days to have enough money to buy all the ingredients she needs for a somewhat decent soup.  Today she must only have 50 cents.  Maybe her charcoal didn’t sell at market.  Maybe she did sell all of her charcoal but had to spend all of the profit on medicine.” I think those things because I’ve learned those things by talking with people about their experience. The same framework can and should be used in the States.  I am someone who has qualified for food stamps for 10 years.  And I buy beer. 

A calabash of local brew-if Guinness is a meal in a can, pito is a meal in a calabash

When people are living lives that fall into the “scraping by” category, the maybes that explain decision making patterns are INFINITE.  As an anthropologist I seek to understand what can lead people to divert money from one thing to another thing. The very people who I may observe spending money on booze and not food might also be diverting money from food to education because in their world it makes more sense to get your kid schooled than well fed. A malnourished, but educated child has a better chance of having better job opportunities and helping out elderly parents than a well fed, but un-educated kid.  The farmer who sells the food from the house so he can buy fertilizer for the farm isn’t making an uncalculated move either.  He knows that his wife can pick up the slack with her income earning activities until the new crop are harvested.  The poor think about their immediate and long term future a whole hell of a lot more than we give them credit for. There’s a very popular slogan here (and perhaps throughout West Africa and maybe even beyond): “Who Knows Tomorrow?”  Poor people never know their tomorrows.  Tomorrow your roof might blow off in a storm and the money you saved for fertilizer will have to fix the roof.  Tomorrow you might be paid for labor you performed 2 years ago and you might be able to buy a bag of maize for your family and your wife can then divert her income to investments.  These are actual scenarios I’ve learned about within my sample population.  Who knows how many unknown tomorrow stories I haven’t captured in just one community in just one corner of a country whose economy is falling apart in a very tragi-comic manner?

What do you think when you see this house? 

Does your opinion change when you see they have a satellite dish?   

From what I’ve seen and heard in various spots around the globe, you don’t survive impoverished circumstances unless you’re smart, full of gumption, and able to navigate daily decisions that require constant assessment of present and future costs and benefits.  Human psychology plays a role in the decisions we make.  But human psychology is not an isolated thing.  Our psychologies exist within complex domestic spheres and social relations and our individually complex domestic and social spheres exist within an even more complex and interconnected global system. Character is something within all of us humans wherever we may fall on the spectrum of having or having not. It’s something we build within ourselves and through our interactions with one another. Maybe we can become better, more accomplished humans through our character development.  But the development of our character does not determine our ability to succeed or fail in providing quality lives for ourselves and our future generations.  For that we get a lot of help from the social and economic structures that entangle the most of us.

David Brooks needs to sit under more trees with people and just listen to them like I am here with my research assistant.  

If the David Brooks of the world want to pontificate about poorness and why people are poor, they need to actually start LISTENING to poor people rather than relying on tired assumptions about poor people.  This takes empathy, a trait, perhaps of character, that is also making a splash in the inequality debate. I cordially invite David Brooks to come hang out with me in Ghana. Hell, bring Nick Kristoff, too. We’ll roam town and talk with people.  But like the rest of us here, he’s going to have to learn to drop his deuces in the latrine or the bush.  Hopefully then he can then use his column for more well thought out analysis.

                                                                                                                                                            

JuneJuly

In the Upper West, June and July are often referred to as one month: JuneJuly.  The JuneJuly compression evokes the lean season—the period before harvest when farming households endure incredibly tight food budgets.  Farmers have invested all of their money in their crops that are still in the fields.  Stored food from last year’s harvest is finished.  Money for buying food is pretty darn hard to come by, but people manage to different degrees.

Maize reserved for planting in July

This year JuneJuly is extending into JuneJulyAugust. The first harvest period has been derailed by drought that killed a lot of the maize that was planted at the start of the rains.  People have replanted this staple, but there are still 2 more months to go before it will (hopefully) be harvested. To add insult to injury, with no new local maize integrating into the food system to compete with maize from other regions of Ghana, those who sell foodstuffs can set high prices.  Last year at this time, with fresh, local maize in the markets, a bowl of maize (enough to feed a family of approximately 5 people approximately 2 meals) cost approximately 2 Ghanaian Cedis, which is approximately $1 when the Ghanaian Cedi is not deflated (as it currently is). Right now a bowl of maize is hitting 3.50 Ghanaian Cedis a bowl.  With the sudden and recent cessation of a government subsidy on fuel, fuel costs have recently soared and with the rise in fuel comes an additional blow to food costs. This is not a trivial series of events for most families in Ghana, where food costs make up a high percentage of the household budget. However, coping with JuneJuly, just like food insecurity anywhere in the world, is not a homogenous experience. 

Being food insecure in one of my research communities means skipping meals because money is so tight that even maize porridge and a proper soup is not always guaranteed. It means having to beg for some pieces of fresh maize from family members so you can eat for the first time in 24 hours.  It means carefully doling out roasted bambara beans to your children and not offering any to the visiting anthropologist, a rarity in a culture that always invites strangers to partake in their food. Here people laugh when I question whether they’ve lost weight in the past month because this is seen as a given for JuneJuly.  This question results in people sharing “funny” stories about pants falling off.

Being food insecure in my other research community is not about skipping meals because of lack of food, but fatigue with having to eat the same foods over and over again because they are the most affordable foods.   It means selling your rice harvest to buy more maize for the household because even though everyone is sick of the maize porridge, the porridge that can be made from one bag of maize lasts a lot longer than the equivalent bag of rice. Maize is cheap.  Rice is not.  In this community people laugh when I ask them if in the past month they’ve ever had to forgo eating a whole day. This is an unfathomable scenario here. But people also express enough malaise with a routine, non-changing diet that their appetites diminish and they skip meals not out of necessity but choice. They express disappointment for not being able to satisfy their cravings for foods that satisfy certain taste and health preferences. 

Fresh tomatoes and peppers are often cited a ingredients desired for soups but sacrificed because of cost

These are different types of hunger that exist within a 5 kilometer radius.  Both deserve compassion and comprehension of causation. Hunger is a complex function of the human experience. Hunger doesn’t just exist in the stomach, but also in the mind, where our cultural notions of food and what it means to eat and be satisfied are met depending upon our different types of hunger.  After a day of mental overload at the conference I recently attended in Scotland I announced to a companion that I was famished and wanted something hearty to eat.  She laughed at this announcement but in her laughter I knew she knew what I meant. That was the night I finally gave vegetarian haggis a go.  It was hearty.  It was satisfying.  It was exactly what my mind and body wanted to eat.  Food doesn’t just have to be present, it has to be appealing and considered satisfying by the eater. 

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

Butter Up

From mid April to mid May, it was challenging to be a researcher.   With the start of the rains, my opportunities to beg/goad/charm people to talk with me were greatly constrained. Everyone was on their farm prepping the land for planting and then planting the land. The community became a ghost town from 8 AM to 6 PM, a place that outsiders would assume is populated and ruled by children between the ages 2 and 10.

Fortunately for the anthropologist, but unfortunately for crops and for farmers, the last 2 weeks in May went by with no rain.   This has been the pattern for quite a while now in this region: The rains start with a bang, then take a break, and then return—but often without the frequency or duration that they should.  Though the region has always been guaranteed a rainy season and that the rainy season always involved potential uncertainty, a changing climate ensures that the uncertainty now involves certain uncertainty.

I’ve struggled of late to contend with why anthropologists have to spend soooo much time in the field.  I’ve met students from other disciplines doing research in the area and am always a bit jealous when their 6 weeks of fieldwork are over or they get to fly home for a break in-between research periods to recover from the emotional drought that is fieldwork.  What makes day in and day out life in the community where you are doing the research worth it?  Because patterns and not isolated incidents emerge. Patterns in economy and patterns in mental health are what I seek to trace.  And to see how these patterns interact, I have to endure the wet spells and the dry spells, be it in rain or data.

When the rains take a break and people are no longer on their farms, what people decide to do in place of farming is just as important as the farming.  Once households decided to hold off on planting more crops until the rains returned, women began diverting a good chunk of their time and energy to collecting shea nuts, the tree born fruit that leads to that product known as shea butter.

Shea butter is primarily used as a fat for cooking and is, thankfully, the primary and preferred fat used even though more expensive vegetable oils are in the market place. It is added to the litany of local food ingredients that come from the local environment.  In its final form it looks and feels thick and rich, as if a twin of Crisco.   Though it may look like Crisco, it tastes like buttah.  It took me three different meals to realize that shea butter is the awesomely rich ingredient that was fooling my palette into thinking it was eating dairy butter.  Shea butter melted with tiny fragments of scotch bonnet pepper turned a very dry and filling-less corn meal dumpling into a divine meal.  Luckily, licking the bowl with your fingers is culturally expected here.

She butter is also used as a skin care product.  If ever there was a region that was destined to rule in the skin moisturizing industry, West Africa is that region.  In the tropical forests zones, there’s cocoa butter, a byproduct of the cocoa industry that is used in skin care creams and lotions.  In the savanna zones, there’s shea butter, a distinct product of its own that is used in its purest form as a skin care product.  You can moisturize and cook from the same blob of shea butter. Before the importation of industrially manufactured lotions, shea butter was the thing that people in this region to moisturize their skin.  People still do, but the “luxury” of foreign goods often prevails. A shopkeeper in Accra pulled out her best show to try and sell me on a bottle of lotion baring the Family Dollar logo, a US based retailer emphasizing low-cost products that continues to thrive in the US economic slump.  Already familiar with the Family Dollar line of products, I politely declined and bought the cheaper cocoa butter lotion made in neighboring Ivory Coast.

Despite outside ingredients that are a threat to the local usage of shea butter, shea butter remains a very widely used product in the Upper West, so the manufacturing of shea butter is an important activity in women’s economic activity.Shea nuts take a lot of time and labor to process into butter.  First the fruit (which resembles avocado in texture but tastes perfumey) is removed either by eating or by stomping on or by laying out and letting the livestock go to town.  The nut is then exposed and left to dry in the sun before it is roasted.  Once roasted, the nut is then pounded to remove the shell and get to the meat.  The meat is then boiled and the nutty boil mixture is then processed by arm strength mimicking an industrial mixer to instigate the separation of fat from non-fat.  It’s a process that takes days. 

 As anthropologist Brenda Chalfin has well-outlined, most definitively in her ethnography Shea Butter Republic, shea butter is a product that has risen immensely on the global scene. It’s a commodity. There’s an international market demand for it. But unfortunately, the links for getting the producers of the nut and its product remain weak throughout Sahelian West Africa. Though there is the occasional artisanal scale market in a community adopted by an NGO, most communities lack the resources to develop a localized shea butter industry that can produce enough product to entice a fair price from a wholesaler.  Women therefore manufacture the butter on a household level basis and middle men/women make the profit on the way to the wholesaler.  As the initial producer and processor of the product, women throughout savanna West Africa usually get pittance for shea butter that will end up in a luxury cosmetic. 

Because women are actively engaged in helping on their husband’s farm as well as planning to start their own farms, while still maintaining their ventures into processing shea nuts, I’ve been asking them if it is helpful to have so many activities running at the same time.  The social science research from this part of the world continuously emphasizes that diversification of livelihoods-- not putting all of the eggs into one basket--is what keeps households afloat.  I’m getting similar responses here. Women don’t indicate that they want to rely solely on their own farms for supporting the household nutritionally or financially.  Also, they don’t want to rely solely on shea nuts.  As one woman put it, all of her activities pay her small money, so it’s best to keep doing all of the small money activities.  If she does her own farming and shea nuts, she is a buffer for the potential failure of the husband’s farm.  If her farm fails, her shea nut business is a buffer against that failure.  In a place where crop insurance doesn’t exist and there’s no social safety net that even pretends to help those who need help, this is risk management—a very important pattern indeed.