Potato rope families
Sharing food and precarious kinship in a West African fishing town
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 18979581 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jennifer Diggins (Department of Social Sciences; Oxford Brookes University; Headington Campus Oxford OX3 0BP UK) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 493-508 |
| Publication date | 2017-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Anthropology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0964-0282 • E-ISSN: 1469-8676 |
| Publisher | Berghahn Books (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/1469-8676.12448 |
| OpenAlex | W2751397878 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 26 |
This article examines the considerable material work men and women in coastal Sierra Leone invest in the attempt to nurture the webs of relations which, they hope, will catch them when their catches fail. From the raw fish handed to a stranger on the wharf to the intimate sharing of cooked rice at home, huge volumes of food circulate through Tissana's gift economy each day, in patterns that map each person's evolving network of friendships and romances. These networks of relationships are sometimes referred to locally as ‘potato rope families’, referring to their fast‐growing, ‘rhizomorphous’ forms. As the article progresses, I explore the ‘darker’ side of this flexible mode of reckoning social belonging. Huge anxiety is generated by the knowledge that, in the absence of gifts to hold them together, many of these intimate relations would atrophy and collapse as rapidly as they were formed. In other cases, a gift of rice is not only the substance of survival and kinship, but also a potent expression of power
Biology · Fishery · Fishing · Kinship · Nature versus nurture · Sociology · African Studies and Geopolitics · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender
Towards an anthropology of global inequalities and their local manifestations
My home is my people’ homemaking among rough sleepers in Leipzig, Germany
Forced gifts and moral claims
Collapsing fish stocks, gendered economies, and anxieties of entrapment in coastal Sierra Leone
Elders and transactional relationships in Sierra Leone
Remotely Global
Rainforest Relations
Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust
Key figure of mobility
Pirate Towns
The Underneath of ThingsViolence, History, and the Everyday in Sierra Leone
Darkness before Daybreak
Le lait, le sperme, le dos. Et le sang
On social currencies and human economies
Common Principles of Variant Kinship Structures among the Gola of Western Liberia 1
Coping with Hunger
The Real and Symbolic Importance of Food in War
Africa in Theory
Bulgur Marriages and "Big" Women
The Gift
Children in Between
The Substance of Kinship and the Heat of the Hearth
What kinship does-and how
Motion squared
Fishing for a Living but Catching HIV
Life during wartime
When the Future Decides
Things that Don't Come by the Road
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,63 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2026 (9) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |