SACRED RICE IOG P

Sacred Rice explores the cultural intricacies through which Jola farmers in West Africa are responding to their environmental and economic conditions given the centrality of a crop--rice--that is the lynchpin for their economic social religious and political worlds. Based on more than ten years of author Joanna Davidson''s ethnographic and historical research on rural Guinea-Bissau this book looks at the relationship among people plants and identity as it explores how a society comes to define itself through the production consumption and reverence of rice. It is a narrative profoundly tied to a particular place but it is also a story of encounters with outsiders who often mediate or meddle in the rice enterprise. Although the focal point is a remote area of West Africa the book illuminates the more universal nexus of identity environment and development especially in an era when many people--rural and urban--are confronting environmental changes that challenge their livelihoods and lifestyles.