Embodied Engineering

Gendered Labor, Food Security, and Taste in Twentieth-Century Mali

Laura Ann Twagira (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

344 Seiten

2021
Ohio University Press (Verlag)
978-0-8214-2468-1 (ISBN)

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Foregrounding African women's ingenuity and labor, this pioneering case study shows how women in rural Mali have used technology to ensure food security through the colonial period, environmental crises, and postcolonial rule.

By advocating for an understanding of rural Malian women as engineers, Laura Ann Twagira rejects the persistent image of African women as subjects without technological knowledge or access and instead reveals a hidden history about gender, development, and improvisation. In so doing, she also significantly expands the scope of African science and technology studies.
Using the Office du Niger agricultural project as a case study, Twagira argues that women used modest technologies (such as a mortar and pestle or metal pots) and organized female labor to create, maintain, and reengineer a complex and highly adaptive food production system. While women often incorporated labor-saving technologies into their work routines, they did not view their own physical labor as the problem it is so often framed to be in development narratives. Rather, women's embodied techniques and knowledge were central to their ability to transform a development project centered on export production into an environmental resource that addressed local taste and consumption needs.

Laura Ann Twagira is an associate professor of history at Wesleyan University. She edited the "Africanizing Technology" special issue for the journal Technology and Culture and was a scholar in residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
A Note on Language
Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter 1 Making the Generous Cooking Pot, ca. 1890–1920
Chapter 2 Body Politics, Taste Matters, and the Creation of the
Office du Niger, ca. 1920–44
Chapter 3 “We Farmed Money”: Reshaping the Office and
Reclaiming Taste
Chapter 4 Reengineering the Office: Cooking with Metal Pots
and Threshing Machines
Chapter 5 Rice Babies and Food Aid: Reengineering Women’s
Labor and Taste during the Great Sahel Drought
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	02.08.2021
Reihe/Serie	New African Histories
Verlagsort	Athens
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies
	Wirtschaft ► Volkswirtschaftslehre ► Makroökonomie
ISBN-10	0-8214-2468-8 / 0821424688
ISBN-13	978-0-8214-2468-1 / 9780821424681
Zustand	Neuware