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

Authors

Laura Ann Twagira

Files

Series

New African Histories

Description

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.

Award(s): Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, African Studies Association Best Book Prize

Copyright Statement

Embodied Engineering © 2021 by Ohio University Press is licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Language

eng

ISBN

9780821447338

Publication Date

8-3-2021

Publisher

Ohio University Press

City

Athens

Keywords

women in Mali, women in Africa, food security in Africa, agricultural tools, women's labor, developing, gender and labor, Laura Ann Twagira

Disciplines

African History | African Studies | Food Security | Growth and Development | Women's History | Women's Studies

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Twagira, Laura Ann, "Embodied Engineering : Gendered Labor, Food Security, and Taste in Twentieth-Century Mali" (2021). Ohio University Press Open Access Books. 101.
https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/101