Annual Reviews Annual Review of Anthropology

African Famines and Food Security: Anthropological Perspectives
Author(s): Parker Shipton

Source: Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 19 (1990), pp. 353-394
Published by: Annual Reviews
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Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 1990. 19:353-94
Copyright ? 1990 by Annual Reviews Inc. All rights reserved
AFRICAN FAMINES
AND FOOD SECURITY:
Anthropological Perspectives
Parker Shipton
Harvard Institute for International Development, and Department of Anthropology,

Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
KEY WORDS: cultural economy, agriculture, poverty, malnutrition, sub-Saharan Africa
Research on Africa is full of surprises. Much of the best cultural anthropology

on famines south of the Sahara has been written by historians and geogra-
phers, while some of the best agricultural economics comes from an-
thropologists. African food problems make a mockery of northern disciplin-
ary divisions. These things should not be so surprising. Famines are hard to
study in depth except from safer times and places, but the causes and effects
of seasonal supplies and demands are best understood by getting dusty ankles,
then muddy ones-the humble hallmarks of anthropology.
Concentrating mainly on agrarian peoples (but including references on
others, too), this preliminary scan reviews a few findings in the thinly bridged
gap between anthropology and economics, mainly by anthropologists and
other researchers who have done extended rural research south of the Sahara
since 1970. I note previous summaries and survey several schools of thought
on famines' interthreading causes. Then I address three questions about
famines and food shortages-who suffers, what do they do about it, and what
becomes of society in the process-and this means addressing some hotly
debated issues of human nature. Understanding African food problems re-
quires not fixating on a particular unit of analysis (the individual, household,
ethnic group, nation) but observing the changing bonds and alliances among
353
0084-6570/90/1015-0353$02.00
354 SHIPTON
the units or levels. Famine reveals ordinarily hidden sides of human beings,
but it changes them at the same time as values and social affiliations shift. The
study of food shortages and deprivation also reveals many ironies. Some of
famine's contributing causes-for instance, "oversales" of crops after har-
vests, or large families and herds where land is becoming scarce-are also
reasoned accumulative or defensive strategies of rural people. I suggest
further that some of famine's known remedies, in market involvement, state
interventions, and exogenous safety crops, are ironically not so different from
its known causes. Reviewing toward the end some suggestions for practical
action, I consider briefly that haunting question about anthropological knowl-
edge: So what?
A shift of emphasis is gradually occurring from conventional economics
and anthropology into a kind I call "cultural economy," venturing deeper into
the gulf between the disciplines. This is a balanced and eclectic realism
guided by modest and accessible theory, neither averse to nuanced broad
comparison nor shy of causality, and acquiescent to practical application.
Cultural economy includes the rich and the powerful for anthropological
scrutiny-including bureau officials and businesspeople of any level-as well
as the down and out.
ABOUT THE LITERATURE
Previous, Related Literature Surveys

Reviews of anthropological literature bearing on famines and food shortages
worldwide include summaries of human responses to famine (93, 366); diet
(148, 247); bioanthropology (189, 190); agrarian ecology (13, 255, 266);
agricultural change and nutrition (120); gathering and hunting (264); pastoral-
ism-i.e. heavy reliance on herding (105); vulnerability to seasonal hunger
(249) and to famine (100); migrations (143, 206); resettlements (336); disaster
sociology (215); and anthropologists' work in development (179). Practition-
ers' wisdom on famine prevention and relief methods have also been distilled
(108, 290; see also 323). Specifically on Africa are summaries of Sahelian
pastoralist ecology (359), resource conservation (337), famine geography
(262), farming systems research (62), the agricultural economics of develop-
ment (107), household and community (145), and the variously "critical"
social and political economy of agrarian crises (19, 160, 305, 387; see also
21). There are book-length bibliographies, some annotated, on famines (on
Africa, 338, 339; worldwide, 77, 138, 264a) and on grain marketing (157,
158; 310), and a bibliography of dissertations on the Sahel (374). Periodical
literature for keeping up to date includes essential abstracts on rural "develop-
ment" in anglophone (319) and Francophone (2) countries, a periodically
issued bibliography (321), and briefings on the latest bad news (75, 95, 299).
AFRICAN FAMINES & FOOD SECURITY 355
Still needed are general comparative summaries on African food preferences

and preparation techniques, though bibliographies are available (121, 122).
Recent Advances in Ethnography

African famines are a topic unlike many, in that the recent ethnography is now
the fullest and best. Research on this sad subject surged after the 20th
century's worst African famines, which peaked in 1972-1973 and 1984-1985
in parts of the Sahel, in parts of the Sudan zone spanning the continent from
Senegal to Somalia, and in some more southerly areas. A spate of representa-
tively collected volumes, in English and in French, appeared after each (after
the former famine, 70, 76, 83, 84, 91, 129, 287; then in the late 1980s, 61,
84, 86, 101, 102a, 136, 152, 190, 201; see also 191). In the 1980s important
monographs appeared by anthropologists Richards (306, 307) and Dyson-
Hudson & McCabe (106), geographers Watts (384) and Mortimore (262), and
social historians Iliffe (196), McCann (241), and Vaughan (379), among
others. In the past two decades scholars have applied theories and questions
current anyway in social research, and they have drawn up more complex
descriptions than were previously available.
Some Schools of Thought
PERENNIAL DEBATES Famine theorists have divided into camps that cut
across disciplinary lines. The main debates have concerned famine's causes.
The first is a nature-culture debate: whether to point the finger at natural
hazards like droughts and floods, or to blame human oppression, exploitation,
and bad management-the human-made "political economy" of colonialism,
markets, and states. All the latter were main preoccupations of 1970s and
1980s analysis (49, 68, 135, 136, 221, 234, 279, 317, 340, 384). In a 1980s
version, the debate was about whether famines are caused by food's absolute
shortage, for instance over whole regions or countries (262; sources cited in
100); or on the other hand, by the inaccessibility of what food there is to
particular kinds of people-a failure of the rights, rules, and bargaining or
purchasing powers that together the economist Sen (340, see also 375 and cf
292), admittedly elaborating a much older idea, tagged "entitlement." Sen's
argument has lately influenced many able Africanist minds (see e.g. 291,
379), but there are some who exaggerate it (and thus seem to try to justify
learning no physical science).
The second debate is about whether the responsibles are inside or outside
Africa (70, 162, 272, 289, and continuing discussions in 299). African
scholars themselves, like northern colleagues, sort into both camps. Often,
debate about whether famines come from too much capitalism or too much
socialism has been pitched in these terms, though the issues are not necessar-
ily the same.
356 SHIPTON
A final controversy is whether the rural poor act as self-int

individuals or socially programmed "moral" beings (see summaries in 93,
366; 384, 387). This one is essentially a millennia-old debate about free will,
or about whether fish swim or get pushed by currents. At one level, each of
these contests stalemates, with both sides right; yet at another the variations
over time and space are hardly trivial, and the debates continue.
GLEANINGS FROM THE DEBATES Through dialectical process and other-

wise, famine theory has progressed. All can see now that famines are in-
ternational (as well as national and local) affairs, in their causes and effects,
and in possible preventions and remedies, and that they are longer-term
processes than northern television broadcasts suggest-news coming, as
savannah rains do, in flash floods after long droughts. There is little doubt
remaining that part-involvement in markets and states has impoverished
people on the African rural periphery and widened class splits, as analysts
variously inspired by Marxian "dependency" or "articulated modes of produc-
tion" theories (209, 245, 309, 384; see also 231) on one hand, or by older
libertarian "modernization" theories (in 61; refs. in 107) on the other, can
agree. Physical and cultural anthropologists together have shown, with a
recent emphasis on seasonal and longer-term temporal process, that true
famines are far less regular or widespread than seasonal hunger or chronic
malnutrition (86, 188, 190, 232, 248, 282, 390; see also 44, 322a). Acute
food shortages are never, however, just about food. They threaten the body
and mind systemically. As Himba of western central Africa say of famines,
"hunger does not kill, it is sickness that kills" (250:23; see also 92, 315); and
lately in Africa, violence, too, has killed more and more often in famines.
More broadly, famines are about poverty and powerlessness. These can be
structural (i.e. built into society and long enduring) or conjunctural (i.e.
arising unpredictably from ephemeral combinations of events) (196, 384).
Ever since the reminder of the Nigerian civil war about Igboland (Biafra) in
the late 1960s, agency and intention have remained in the picture: Famines are
something people can do to each other.
UNITS OF ANALYSIS Each generation of Africanist anthropologists seems to

focus on one or two particular units of aggregation that catch its imagination.
Between the world wars it was the lineage; in the 1950s and 1960s the
community and nation; and in the 1970s and 1980s the "world system" to
some, and then to others the "household" (a concept that seldom fits rural
African homesteads or compounds well). Famines challenge all such group-
ings, real or perceived. In recent scholarship, standard units of analysis have
been "deconstructed" as part-fictions (256, 311, 312, 340, 384) in social
science movements paralleling others in the humanities. Seeing that these
units are never entirely united helps to understand how they deconstruct in a
more literal way: how a nation or even a village can export grain while much
of its population starves; how some ethnic or religious groups in a "communi-
ty" will profiteer or be persecuted to flight when reserves run low; and how, in
the extreme, family may change radically in meaning, or lose meaning. A
wave of varyingly feminist research rooted in work of Cambridge University
anthropologists A. Richards (302, 303; see also 125) and Hill (169-172), and
inspired in the 1980s by Boston-based scholars Guyer (145, 147) and Berry
(19), has scrutinized gender relations and the domestic economy of farm
resource distribution, showing competing interests and negotiations between
spouses over labor and income allocation (see e.g. 240, 263, 378, 379, 391;
and 256, esp. 202), with a recent emphasis on contested cash crop earnings
and on remittances from labor migrations. Other analysts have concentrated
on schisms between ages and generations within domestic groups (see e.g.
196, 245, 330). All the new scrutiny on units of aggregation makes it clearer
how, in a severe famine, a cherished great aunt may become a detached
migrant, an adolescent a gang looter, or a child a chattel pledge.
SYSTEMS RESEARCH AND BEYOND Slowest to emerge has been a coherent

contribution to anyone's planning. In the past decade, "systems" research
inspired by the "farming systems" school (62, 320), emphasizing the practical
complexities and interactions among all resources and activities on and off the
farm (or rangeland), has come closest (42, 152, 256). Systems researchers
have produced no shortage of convoluted flow diagrams, exemplified within
some recent interdisciplinary collections (86, 136, 315; see also 100), show-
ing (in case anyone doubted it) that in African rural poverty everything is
related to everything else. Mere complexity, however, is seldom as welcome
to planners as to scholars. Every rural African knows that some causes and
effects (or combinations of them) are more important than others. The next
challenge is to compare the local variations. The idea should be to observe
more (or more finely nuanced) causal links, and more variety, as part of the
search for truth, while elsewhere, for the use of practitioners, paring them
down to the most general or essential. The same scholars should be involved
in both these opposite tasks. This is part of what cultural economy is about.
While program planners rely heavily on numbers, the statistics on rural
African livelihoods tend to mislead in many ways, for reasons that researchers
experienced in "hard" and "soft" survey methods have explained (e.g. 19,
145, 173, 343). The problems worsen in famines (365). Researchers' travel
gets restricted, informants disappear, problems of survey ethics and etiquette
deepen, and officials cook figures more determinedly to deflect unfavorable
attention or attract aid. Counterintuitively, small samples (see e.g. 106) in
rural Africa often yield more reliable numbers than big ones.
358 SHIPTON
To close these introductory words on the literature, I must note how

seriously the internationally available sources on food shortages underre-
present African voices. This applies to social science (though see e.g. 3, 58,
195, 204, 225, 234, 271-273, 275, 289, 318) and to poems, songs, verse,
and oral literature about famine sufferings-all forever in the air inside Africa
(selections appear in 104, 379, 384). Biographies, autobiographies, and
diaries with substantial sections on famines are still pretty scarce (though see
6, 22, 27, 57, 106, 222, 349): Would that starving and illiterate peoples had
easier ways of making their experiences and needs known. The problem over
all is not a shortage of knowledge or opinions, but a communicational
"entitlement" failure.
WHAT FAMINES ARE
A definition of famine must denote breadth and severity without suggesting

that everyone starves or suffers in the same way or at the same time: I suggest
"severe shortage or inaccessibility of appropriate food (including water),
along with related threats to survival, affecting major parts of a population."
A population is tricky to delimit on a continent with arbitrarily drawn national
borders and millions of migrant opportunity seekers and refugees.
Skeins of Causes
There is no lack of accusers or accusations in this emotive topic, but there is
enough blame to go around. Although this is not the place to try to list them
all (see 19, 100, for more detail and references), the causes of famines and
food shortages are many and varied: meteorological and hydrological (262),
edaphic (20), biotic (87), economic (69, 103, 221, 291, 385), and political
(10, 48, 68, 230). They are also ethical, diplomatic, logistical, and military-
to name a few kinds of perspectives. The use of food and famine as weapons
in often ethnically or racially rooted civil wars, and in geopolitical power
struggles, ties into countless indirect causes.
Among those contributing factors that most directly concern anthropol-
ogists are legal land alienations and disruptions of local land-right systems,
either for privatization (as in the British "mailo" land titling scheme begun at
the turn of the century in Uganda, and possibly in Kenya's since 1954) or for
collectivization, as in Ethiopia and Tanzania in the 1970s and 1980s (85, 102,
131, 223, 274, 305, 344, 346, 377; see also 212). In many countries,
well-connected individuals have used land nationalization decrees as a cover
for private land grabbing, notably in Francophone West African countries
where designations like "terres vacantes et sans mattres" often neglect
long-term fallow rotations and the rights of occasional users.
Whether pastoralist "overgrazing" and common access to property (stan-
dard scapegoats) contribute to land degradation and thus to food shortages is

an issue now fiercely contested by ecologically inclined anthropologists and
range scientists. Recent research has made it clear, however, that pastoralists
are better ecologists, and their movements and range management more
subtly orchestrated (even, it seems, under newly straitened conditions), than
many once supposed. "Sedentarization" programs are likely to impoverish
pastoralists, to make them miserable, and to damage their environments. For
some of the better discussions on these and related problems in the cultural
dimensions of mobile herders' ecology and food production beyond the scope
of this article, see Swift's review on the Sahel (359) and later sources (on
Eastern Africa, 106, 112, 132, 133, 142, 149, 176, 237-239, 246, 265, 392,
393; on Western Africa, 16-18, 126, 129, 184, 286, 334, 360; on southern
Africa, 174, 283, 325; on Africa generally, 4, 111, 186, 254, 261; see also
70, 105, 128, 134, 168, 205, 354, 367, and continuing research reports in 269
and 276a).
Research on cultural-agronomic causes of the continent's falling per capita
food production has progressed quickly. The appropriateness of "modern"
farming techniques has been pretty thoroughly scrutinized. Agricultural pro-
grams' input selection has often been based on research out of touch with real
farm conditions. Richards's work on the Mende and others in Sierra Leone
(304, 306, 307) has influentially shown the importance of indigenous African
environmental particularism and experimentative "folk ecology" in crop strain
selection, intercropping, and conservation. Prescribed input combinations
designed too rigidly have not allowed adequately for local division of labor,
for temporary supply and communication blockages, for part-exchanges be-
tween farmers, for microvariation in ecozones, or for farmers' own trials of
crop and input intermixtures (32, 152, 165, 320; see also 9, 37). Nor have
they taken sufficient account of seasonal bottlenecks in labor and human
energy (31, 188) or in cash flows. The so far generally disappointing out-
comes of "green revolution" attempts with credit and crop "packages" for
maize and other crops have been analyzed from indigenous and exogenous
perspectives, with these issues in mind, in western Kenya (343), western
Tanzania (236), Zimbabwe (318), and broader regions of Africa (5, 291; see
also 59, 61, 107, 243, 251, 328).
A quickly growing literature on the effects of cash cropping on nutrition
can only be mentioned briefly here, but these effects are not simple. High-
value cash crops, variously prohibited and promoted under European author-
ity in the colonial periods, commonly compete with food crops for land,
labor, and other inputs, but their earnings allow buying more foods (73, 120,
163, 317, 384; cf 220, 324). Extensive recent USAID-funded inter-
disciplinary team studies on tobacco growing in Zomba District, southern
Malawi (284; cf 109) and on sugarcane growing in Nyanza Province, south-
360 SHIPTON
western Kenya (57a, 207, 208; see also 8, 343) both suggest the net effects on
child caloric intake are small on balance, and the effects on total child
nutrition almost indiscernible. In part of The Gambia, another in-
terdisciplinary study found that irrigation and other new technology in an
intensified rice growing scheme has shifted this staple crop away from
women's and toward men's control, but has apparently raised family incomes
more than enough to compensate in improving child nutrition (380, 381,
388; cf 36). These were all, however, areas with fairly well-developed and
reliable market infrastructure, and pro-market governments; and they are
not purported to represent the continent as a whole. Other crucial vari-
ables are who within families actually sells the cash crop or marketed food
crop (almost continent-wide, men sell the bulk) and how much of the earn-
ings they actually share with other family members-something never to
assume in rural Africa.
A risk of integration in world commodity markets is that periods of poor
harvest or local supply no longer necessarily coincide with periods of high
demands and therefore with high prices for producers. Both supplies and
prices can fall (or rise) at once. To survive such a system requires mechanisms
of saving or storage to ride over the rough patches: whether in cash, livestock,
stored crops, hardware, jewelry, or trees.
Nor must one forget some cash crops' various long-term environmental
risks, as in the case of heavy firewood use for tobacco-curing fires, and
resulting dangers of soil erosion (see e.g. 24). Cash crops involve many
trade-offs if seen properly in long-term perspective.
Double edged, too, are the emergency food crops that Europeans in-
troduced almost continent-wide (sometimes by force). Cassava and sweet
potatoes are now increasingly grown across Africa south of the Sahara ( 1, 46,
203, 288). Cassava tilts food intake radically toward protein-poor, vitamin-
deficient starch and fiber. But its heavy, bulky tubers provide a long-lasting
underground store of calories that is also resistant to drought, locusts, or
grasshoppers. (The Luo of Kenya figuratively call it dero oko: the "granary
outside" the homestead, for when the real granaries run dry.) It contributes to
malnutrition but then also saves lives. I suggest below that markets and
governments are analogously doing both, in their different ways.
A demographic debate about whether population growth fuels productive
technological innovation in agriculture (e.g. plough adoption) or outstrips it
(28, 29) is clearing up: It does both. In an area undergoing rural crowding as
in western Kenya or eastern Nigeria, farming techniques may be constantly
changing while per capita food production falls (266, 285, 346). Certainly,
too, growing numbers, hunger, and need have often forced people to move
onto lands that could not support them. Resettlement schemes-always
among the hardest kinds of directed "development" to achieve safely-have
often been thoughtlessly designed (see 45, 63, 65, 324, 336), and sometimes,
as in the forced Ethiopian "villagization" and southward migrations, cruelly
implemented in ways leading directly to hunger and malnutrition (53, 54, 60;
cf 88)-stories of the moved and shaken.
Debated social structural causes of selective deprivation within families or
communities can include patterns of property and inheritance (102, 240), of
marriage (256), and perhaps of childrearing (329). Hyden (194, see also 61;
cf 233, 331) laments the persistence of kinship, patronage, and ethnic favorit-
ism (his "economy of affection") in official circles. To include the "emic" or
sufferers' perspectives is also to include spiritual and religious causes:
rainmakers, ancestral and other spirits, witches, or divinity (and often,
through their agency, peoples' own self-accused moral laxity) mingling
among famine's other perceived causes (217, 252, 253, 379). Across Africa,
famine victims commonly attribute their misfortunes in part to weak leaders.
POVERTY CYBERNETICS Many cybernetic cycles in food shortages are

becoming familiar enough that we can talk about regularities. Bad harvests
contribute to food price rises and speculative hoarding, and so food shortages
worsen themselves in spirals: This is why "food shortage" and "entitlement"
arguments should ally. Malnutrition, illness, poor harvests, poverty, and
aggravated malnutrition can be a vicious circle (161, 313). Wryly twisting the
1970s catchphrase "integrated rural development," Chambers (42) describes
as "integrated rural poverty" the pentagonal deprivation trap by which
powerlessness, isolation, poverty, physical weakness, and vulnerability all
contribute to each other. Famine's causes tangle together, as "systems"
theorists have made clear. There is no quick fix or silver bullet. But a point to
remember, on which I say more below, is that some of the contributing causes
are also remedies.
Who Suffers
URBAN BIASES AND BUFFERS The great irony of famines is that it is rural
food producers who most often go hungry. Economist Lipton's seminal work
on urban biases in poor countries (227) opened all Africanist eyes to how
national political leaders protect cities (a) with artificially low crop and food
prices that disfavor rural producers, and (b) with food imports and subsidies-
partly to protect themselves from urban riots (10, 160, 201, 291). Interethnic
competition for power, structurally engendered by artificially drawn national
borders, contributes to the insecurity that makes politicians favor cities.
Urbanites have other economic, communicational, and organizational means,
only lately becoming better understood, of keeping fed (30, 97, 146). These
include two-way flows of food and money with rural kin, sometimes revers-
ible like tides. Among newly studied urban phenomena are quasi-families of
362 SHIPTON
room- or compound-mates, who can, as in an example from Amin's Kampa-

la, pool foods as available from their respective kin in different rural areas
(271). Anthropologists (33, 50) and other social scientists (97) have begun
observing small-scale urban food traders and vendors since Hart (159) in-
fluentially pointed out in Accra the "informal economy" that, as he perceived,
had always flourished there. Urban agriculture, "communal" neighborhood
restaurants or food centers, and child fostering are all coming into focus as
adaptive measures. There has always been urban destitution, however, parti-
cularly among the crippled or mentally disturbed, who are often denied
kinship ties (196). Urban food provisioning will call for much more research
as African cities and peri-urban shantytowns quickly grow.
MODE OF LIVELIHOOD BIASES In the countryside, famine hits selectively.

Peoples depending heavily on herding have commonly suffered heavier pro-
portional losses than have agrarians. They are hurt by remoteness from towns
and cities, among other things (84; see also 91, 333). Kenyan groups that mix
farming and herding have come out better than neighboring groups practicing
only one or the other (35). Among Sahelian herders, the more mobile groups
have sometimes survived better than less mobile ones (129). Both failed crops
and diminished herds can take years to recover fully, but herds recover more
slowly (79, 81). Rural nonfarm occupations differ in famine vulnerability (78,
379), but one cannot yet generalize.
AGE AND GENDER BIASES Not only do the poor and infirm suffer first and
most, but usually elders (i.e. those over about 45 in Africa), young children
(particularly girls), and women have tended to suffer or starve before men in
their young and middle years (70, 102a, 196, 210, 257, 271, 277, 291, 315,
379, 384, 391; cf 96, 332, 380, 382). The skews have seldom been reliably
quantified-a hard thing to do. Who eats first at mealtimes (usually men, in
most African societies, though women sample while cooking) appears to
make a bigger difference than usual to nutrition when supplies dwindle. The
rules may change then, however; and so, often, does the membership of
domestic groups. Women are particularly vulnerable when pregnant or lactat-
ing, and infants when being weaned; and severely malnourished infants may
never recover fully in mental capacities (74, 315). Whether or where the
strongest family members "buffer" children more than they do elders (who
can remember emergency foods from other famines) is still not well un-
derstood.
Among agrarians, and possibly among some pastoralists, newly established
domestic groups without established herds are especially vulnerable in food
shortages (81; cf 47); and female-headed domestic groups or families, tending
to be poorer anyway, often seem to suffer more than others (240, 257, 397).
LOCAL STRATEGIES OF FAMINE PREVENTION

AND RESPONSE
Humans deal with famines as sequential processes. The literature on "coping

strategies" has grown quickly in the past two decades, and despite variations,
it shows some broad regularities. (On the densely settled Nigerian Hausa, for
instance, see 262, 375, 384; on northeastern Africa, see 192, 201; on East
African pastoralists, see 34, 35, 106, 357; on pastoralists of the Kalahari, 84,
174. See also 40, 64, 72, 86, 90, 101, 118, 129, 151, 190, 387.) Rural people
throughout Africa both plan for contingencies and respond actively to them.
As Dirks's review suggests, however, people anywhere seem to become more
passive and seemingly apathetic once severely weakened by hunger and
malnutrition (93; see also 303, 316).
The three most important prevention strategies observed are diversification
of livelihood; consolidation of savings into illiquid, indivisible, or incontest-
able forms; and social investment. Once crisis hits, the three most often
observed remedies are liquidation of savings (converting inedible "capital"
assets-including livestock, land, household goods, or obligations of
others-to edible ones), service labor (wage labor and clientage or asymmet-
ric interpersonal dependencies), and movement. Most of the coping strategies
involve markets in one way or another. In recent African famines, having
something to sell or exchange for marketed grain has proved critical to
survival.
Repertoires of Coping Strategies

Below I summarize some of the strategies commonly observed for preventing,
adjusting to, and recovering from famines and food shortages; the main
strategies are discussed in more detail in subsequent pages. Of course the
processes vary in time sequence-for instance as pastoralists move before
agrarians, or as members of threatened minorities may sell their weapons later
than others-and of course they overlap.
1. Precautionary strategies variously include diversifying fields, herds,
trades; rotating fields, crops, and pastures; planting drought-resistant crops
(millets, sorghums, cassavas); breeding or procuring mobile, adaptable ani-
mals; grazing herds in divided locations; accumulating larger herds than
needed for survival in good times; fattening up (humans or animals) or
periodically fasting; keeping jewelry and ornaments (both valuable and mo-
bile); storing up debts and obligations by gifts, etc; maintaining friendships in
distant groups practicing other modes of livelihood; lending out livestock;
allowing delayed marriage payments (the "installment plan," nearly ubi-
quitous); paying tributes or tithes; entering into share contracting agreements;
investing in kin's schooling and labor migrations. Other preventative mea-
sures include oral history and perhaps food taboos (debatable in function).
364 SHIPTON
2. Earliest or most reversible measures for adjusting to shortages have

been known to include these: Intensifying any production or trade; engaging in
more secondary occupations; willingly undergoing food privations to be able
to sell in less lucky areas where prices are higher; substituting bulkier foods
(e.g. tuber crops) for others; grinding stalk or husk with grain; substituting
grain for milk (pastoralists); substituting unconventional foods (poorer plant
products, more wild plants and game, etc); cutting meal size and number;
concealing consumption indoors; splitting into smaller, more mobile com-
munities or families (foragers or pastoralists); allocating grazing and browsing
by animals' minimum food and water requirements (e.g. cows to grazing,
goats to browsing, camels to driest lands-also a plant conservation strategy);
exchanging cattle for more drought-resistant goats (browsers) or camels;
selling or slaughtering male animals not immediately needed (nonplowing
peoples); selling manure; invoking distant or lapsed kin ties, patronage with
fictive kinship; collecting loans and marriage debts; postponing marriages
and other ceremonies; fostering out children; converging upon schools,
churches, or (by one means or another) jails; migrating to towns and cities
and back.
3. Intermediate or semi-reversible responses observed include borrowing
money and other goods; pledging land, children; diverting more milk from
young animals to humans, at the expense of the herd's future; stealing,
raiding (livestock, or grain convoys); teaching children to steal; sloughing off
clients, especially of other ethnic groups; selling more nutritional foods
produced, to buy bulkier, starchier, less nutritional ones; selling farm tools,
household furniture, clothes, weapons, etc; selling or slaughtering draft,
milk, or pack animals (at depressed prices); prostitution; migrating to relief
camps.
4. Last or least reversible responses observed include sloughing off elders
or dependent kin; selling children, wives, sisters, land, cooking pots, utensils;
consuming seeds, ground-up water gourds; killing infants; suicide.
5. Recovery strategies frequently noted include borrowing (or repurchas-
ing) livestock, tools, seed, land; reaggregating split herds; exchanging large
to small stock for quicker reproduction, at the risk of epizootic losses;
reintensifying labor; redeeming pledges; adopting kin; readjusting marriage
payments and their requirements; and resettling.
6. Strategies often used throughout may variously include hiring out labor;
migration; secret or concealed consumption; prayer, sacrifice, dance, magic
and witchcraft, witch-hunting.
THEORIES ON RESPONSE PHASES Analysts have broken down phases of

coping strategies in several ways (38, 40, 90, 93, 262, 384). Cekan (40)
distinguishes (a) continuation or intensification (e.g. of transhumance), (b)
substitution (using wild plants, raided animals), (c) extension (moving out to
broader area, splitting off smaller herds, begging), and (d) abdication (eating
draft or milk animals, or seeds; selling land). Dirks (93) adapts an older
schema in distinguishing phases of alarm (intensified activity), resistance, and
exhaustion. Hussein (192) and Watts (384) note that the steps require increas-
ing commitment of domestic resources and become increasingly irreversible.
Note that the last stages of desperation involve selling the means not just of
production (land, draft animals, farm tools) but also of distribution (donkeys)
and consumption (pots, cooking utensils). As famines progress, rural people
rely decreasingly on loans or delayed reciprocities, and increasingly on
immediate exchanges (see 288). Some of the strategies may waver or reverse
as a famine progresses-for instance sharing out food, then hoarding it; or
perhaps fasting, then glutting.
Responses to famine vary by gender and stage in life cycle. As Campbell
observed of drought-stricken Maasai at one time, for instance (35:52), "the
head of household is most likely to trade, particularly in livestock; the sons to
work in town, and the wives to sell food." Long-evolved indigenous coping
strategies do not always address current food problems; there are time lags.
Nor do all help. Desperation thefts can cause intergroup violence and in-
formation blockages destructive to all (371).
To begin examining some of the strategies in more depth, we must start by
asking a deceptively simple question: How do rural Africans make a living?
Diversified Livelihoods: Farmers as Herders, Herders as

Traders
Africanist scholarship is in an era of linkages, an age of betweens and
acrosses; such terms as "sedentary agrarians", "pastoralists," or even "rural"
and "urban" must be qualified to account for people's shifting and straddling.
Especially in famine-prone areas, people may oscillate over a year from hoe
to herding stick, (201), and perhaps to fishnet (277) or sewing needle (78); or
over a lifetime, from city to farm (356) or from town to herd (181, 182, 228,
353). The African poor as lately portrayed might be called category trans-
humants.
Nor do they necessarily make their livings how they say they do. Mursi
farmers in Ethiopia like to think of themselves more as herders (371); Luo
farmers in Kenya, as herders or fishermen (343); and Berti herders of Sudan,
as farmers (183). It is as though a people had culturally to remind itself not to
put all its eggs in one basket. Everyone in rural Africa, even among "pastoral-
ists" or among "foragers," depends to some degree on grains or other agri-
cultural products, whether by own production or by exchange (86; see also
51, 82, 91, 111, 130, 132, 224, 396a). Multiple secondary occupations and
cottage industries add up, particularly among the poorest strata (78, 163, 164,
171). Famines are failures of livelihoods eclectically cobbled together. This
implies that "pastoralists" might be assistable not just through livestock, or
366 SHIPTON
"farmers" through crops, but also through complementary strategies-for

instance small industry or trade, individual or collective (235).
DIVERSIFICATION IN FARMING Diversification heightens security, up to a

point, whether on Wall Street or at the source of the Nile; and the principle
appears everywhere in anthropological studies of African food matters.
Against climatic, biotic, or political risks to subsistence, African farmers
diversify their livelihoods in many ways. Some are very subtle. These include
fragmented landholdings with varying soils, pitches, and shadings (15, 102);
broad mixtures from among available cultivars (listed in 1, 199, 214, 278);
intercropping (306, 307); multiple seed strains with different maturation
periods (31, 306, 307); and mixed livestock species (32, 81, 320; see also 79,
80). Long-term livestock loans (which often take the form of delayed mar-
riage payments) and herd dispersion spread risks of drought, disease, or theft.
Diversification strategies can help even-out peak labor and capital demands
over the year and, by keeping assets less conspicuous or countable, help avoid
taxation or confiscation. Fishing (137, 277) and small-scale mining can
provide incomes that fluctuate more or less independently of farming or
herding incomes, though they may be no more stable. As a Gambian case
exemplifies, rural Africans commonly keep large parts of their monetary
savings in savings clubs or in the hands of trusted individual neighbors (often
older, wealthier men) instead of their own hands, partly for diversification
(347).
Rural development program planners, in optimistically aiming at higher-
yield, higher-risk specialization, have tended to discount these important and
culturally embedded strategies, ignoring both risk and seasonal bottlenecks in
labor or capital. But farmers and herders have often resisted overspecializa-
tion. In Africa as elsewhere, most agrarians derive the bulk of their calories
from only one to three grain staples (86), but monoculture and single-species
herding are rare on the continent. Comparing Sahelian and Sudan-belt villages
in Burkina Faso suggests that the riskier the environment, the more diverse
the economic activities relied upon will already be (295). A challenge is
assessing kinds of diversification strategies in combinations. Might con-
centrating on several high-gain though high-risk activities sometimes be even
safer than trying to spread one's scarce resources all over the board?
Surpluses that Are Not: Savings Cycles and Wealth

Consolidation
CYCLES OF "OVERSALES Throughout Africa, food crops are usually also

cash crops, though not always the reverse. There is practically nothing that is
never sold (86, 169, 229, cf 116, 345); the questions are why, when, by
whom, and over what distances.
Contrary to some economic assumptions, foods small farmers sell are not
necessarily "surpluses." Across Africa, poorer farmers sell crops heavily
despite low prices after the current harvest and pay much higher prices to
rebuy their equivalent in the hungry season before the next (to economists, a
"perverse supply response"). In many areas a few solvent farmers or traders
speculate in these seasonal "futures" markets, as something like crop
pawnbrokers. When repeated year after year, the process seems to be a
poverty ratchet (a conclusion still, however, needing quantitative evidence).
Standard interpretations of "overselling" hinge on differences of "withholding
power" or similar concepts (e.g. 161, 209, 273; and various Hausa studies
including 172, 384; cf 55, 56, 262, 267, also on the Hausa, and 294),
suggesting the process is coerced by poverty. Partly it is.
But there are other reasons for it, too. Selling heavily after harvest lets one
push storage risks onto buyers. And one can turn around and invest in a cow,
an iron roof, or a bicycle without looking selfish to needy relatives and
neighbors, as one would seem by selling grain for such things in the hungry
season. Also, exchanging grain for a less liquid, less divisible asset like large
livestock shelters wealth from daily demands for sharing or sales, not least
those of one's spouse or spouses (345, 347; cf 115). The "squawk factor"-
the potential for complaints and damaging accusations-underlies every sav-
ing or investment decision. Since social ties are also investment or insurance,
it can make more sense to sell cheap and buy dear than to try to wait and sell
dear. In Africa as everywhere, however, what is good for an individual may
not be good for a class or other aggregate.
SOCIAL DIMENSIONS OF STORAGE AND SAVING Crop storage always

involves social as well as economic and biological calculus. Families may be
better at conserving grains than the cash of individuals, because supply
changes are more easily observed and one member can complain to another.
Gambian Fula who divide their seed stores between individual stores and
village stores locked by one or two trusted villagers (where they keep name-
tagged sacks) use social pressure to resist temptations to sell or consume their
family seed rashly during hungry seasons, but also keep secret how much they
possess. Personal incentives and public responsibility mix (347). Understand-
ing rural African saving and storage properly requires not obsessing on a
particular social unit (the individual, the "household", etc) but seeing how the
different units interact.
Preferences about keeping savings in cash, grain, livestock, or jewelry
differ greatly among societies, particularly between agrarians and pastoralists.
But within a single society, for instance among a group of Maasai herders,
elders and juniors disagreed markedly about how to distribute savings among
herds, crops, and cash, the elders favoring animals (35; cf 115). Some
foraging societies rely far less than others on storage (86).
368 SHIPTON
Strategies not generally practiced include holding over substantial cash

savings from year to year, as farmers in northern countries more often do.
Good reasons for not doing so include money's inflation, manipulation by
governments, and constant demandability by neighbors and kin. Low interest
rates at banks give cash saving a high "opportunity cost"; other investments,
like livestock or trees, can grow faster (43). Rural Africans hold varyingly
ambivalent feelings about money. Among the Kenya Luo, nothing is more
sought after than money, but nothing is more quickly disposed of (345; cf
115, 281, 347).
SOCIAL INVESTMENT Social investment means giving, sharing, or lending

to others with expectation of direct or indirect return. It includes aspects of
kinship, friendship, and patronage; and it encompasses both dyadic reciprocit-
ies and concentric redistribution (including ceremonial exchanges, and trib-
ute- or tax-fed relief). Socially and politically, rural Africans tend to spread
their investments widely, whether to their long-term aggregate advantage or
not (19). Exogamy, as among Luo clans, creates networks of alliances useful
in emergencies. Pastoralists dependent on movement keep multiple channels
of information, exchange, or patronage open across the countryside, with
particular farmers or with gatherer-hunters, in case of emergencies (129, 382;
see also 110, 174). Some peoples seem to consider fasting in better times, as
in Islamic Ramadan, a preparation for emergencies (211, 248), while some of
the same societies also practice feasting and otherwise fatten up particular
humans (or animals) (17, 93); but neither kind of practice is reducible only to
ecology. For anyone, ceremonial and other redistributive exchanges are
insurance investments, too-one of many reasons why official attempts to
reduce them usually fail.
Debates continue on the past and present adequacy of exchange systems in
rationing (99, 218, 219, 298, 317, 322, 341, 368, 384, 394, 395). Obviously
such systems sometimes fail. Historical and prehistorical studies (e.g. in 136,
190, 201, 280) suggest, contrary to some popular interpretations, that few if
any parts of Africa ever had a "golden age" when reciprocity or redistribution
prevented hunger altogether. Given that social investment is economic an-
thropology's stock in trade, the subdiscipline has contributed surprisingly
little knowledge about its effects on famine survival. We return to this topic
later.
Debt and Poverty Ratchets

Famines start by intensifying and concentrating local dependencies evident in
better times. Stock loans involve patronage, whether among agrarians (343)
or pastoralists (81; see also 358). In plow-using agrarian Ethiopia, for ex-
ample, "Drought reduces supplies of capital (oxen and seed) which in turn
lends increased manipulative powers to households which control the scarce
remainder. The results are increased risk for farmers who must borrow oxen
and seed for the next planting and a serious debt crisis in the event that rains
(or locusts, army worms, etc) reduce crop yields for the next harvest"
(241:264-65; see also 98). The same might be said of control over other foods
and livestock. Grain speculation quickens in shortages, worsening their sting
(84).
Debts encourage further borrowing, and on worse terms than otherwise.
Poverty is a vicious circle or ratchet that turns in one direction, as the
economist Haswell's unique quarter-century Gambian village study showed
(161: see also 42, 172, 347, 348, 384). People who specialize in moneylend-
ing are rare in rural Africa, but high-interest lending by traders and solvent
farmers is commonplace. Borrowers both depend upon local credit and resent
it. State cooperatives have reduced high-interest lending, adding new debts,
in most countries periodically written off. Credit is debt; it also means
political interference and patronage at all levels (160, 343, 347).
Richer farmers both help and impoverish poorer ones in crises by control-
ling the terms of share contracts (312, 361). Off-farm incomes and cash
cropping, circularly self-enabling, can help richer rural people to buy poorer
ones' land in bad seasons, or to crowd them off otherwise, sometimes in what
seems to be a vicious circle itself (102, 163, 164, 343, 344, 375). Land rights
can, however, involute and diffuse through usufructuary exchanges in better
times (262, 385; cf 241). So can livestock rights (81). Most analysts agree
that debt and poverty ratchets tighten in times of shortage, but there is no
consensus yet about their reversibility for crisis survivors.
Food Substitutions
In seasonal shortages (273) and famines people broaden their local definitions
of food. These may or may not include snacks, liquids like grain beers (66;
see also 320a), or field gleanings. Maasai in Kenya and Tanzania do not eat
eland in good times, but they have done so in famines, rationalizing that the
eland looks similar enough to the cow (R. Waller, personal communication).
Substitute foods and combinations observed elsewhere have been known to
include other kinds of wild animals, rodents, grasses, insects, or seeds raided
from anthills, among other things, in varying sequences (17, 23, 32, 64, 70,
89, 117, 120, 121, 152, 273, 275, 314, 315; cf 140; 123, 124, 198). Elders
remember emergency food repertoires and pass them along as oral history.
Famine sufferers often break food taboos, suggesting these may function
(among other things) to conserve resources for emergencies. Anthropophagy
(or cannibalism) and necrophagy have been reported in dire famines in Africa
as elsewhere (90; 219, 250), usually as isolated or rumored incidents, not to
be sensationalized. But the starving frequently will not eat just anything, as
shown in persistent Ethiopian Afar and Arsi fish avoidances in the early 1970s
famine (210) and in many rejections of particular aid foods (some locally
370 SHIPTON
indigestible) around Africa. It pays to check. Cultural rules about foods warp
and loosen in hunger, but they do not just wither away.
Competition between herders and young suckling livestock for the mother
animals' milk sharpens in famines, threatening herd futures (362), and long
extra boilings of bitter foods can threaten future firewood supplies. Aid foods
like wheat, where accepted, may sometimes inculcate expensive tastes (355).
These are among the vicious circles of poverty.
Migrations
Labor migrations of able-bodied men out of farming areas have sometimes
been cited as contributing causes of food shortages, particularly in swidden
farming systems where male labor is needed for clearing (303, 257; cf 270,
272). But migrations are also one of the main solutions to food shortages.
Having long understudied the topic of migrations, anthropologists have lately
"gone to town" on it, showing its importance for the hungry and needy (34,
84, 136, 206, 263; 356, 361, 373, 375, 379).
In droughts or famines, labor migrations intensify and change. Among
agrarians and pastoralists alike, it is often younger adult men without es-
tablished homesteads who leave first to seek work, followed by older men
and, in severe emergencies, by whole families or even communities (35, 84,
192, 216, 379; see also 81 on pastoralists). In crisis, travel destinations
become vaguer, absences often more permanent, and remittances less reliable
(67). Patriliny or matriliny influences who stays behind to defend land rights.
The centrifuge of famine, which separates close from distant kin, and elders
from juniors, can separate cohabiting religious or ethnic groups too, as in a
Muslim exodus from heavily Christian parts of Ethiopia in the early 1970s
(192), variously explicable by Muslims' more mobile leadership, or, more
plausibly perhaps, by competition or persecution. Migrants who can do so
commonly head for towns or cities (84, esp. 114; 181), and famines swell
peri-urban shantytowns with new arrivals, some to stay for good. Famine-
driven migrations require any number of cultural adjustments-for instance in
ecology, ethnic identities, and age-grade cycles (70, 116, 129, 201; see also
383).
Famine-related "refugee" issues, a wide field long neglected in anthropolo-
gy but ever more important in African life, are surveyed in a nascent literature
(52-54, 150, 153-155, 268, 296; see also the periodicals 297 and 197).
Problems of ethnic and class integration and affiliation, hospitality and con-
flict, official restrictionism, enterprise, resource sharing, and voluntary and
forced repatriation-among many others-all need more attention.
Desperation Sales and Exchanges

Africans in famines have starved with grain around but no money to buy it
(340), or, less commonly, with money but no grain to buy (3, 384). During
famines the relative values of grains, perishable foods, livestock, and money
change radically, but they usually do so in familiar and predictable patterns.
Below I note a few, without pretending to summarize a burgeoning an-
thropological and economic literature on African food marketing in shortages
(e.g. 26 on Africa; 157, 158, 310, 396 on West Africa; 169-171, 262, 267,
375, 386 more specifically on Hausa of Nigeria and Niger; 276, 326, 327,
342 on Burkina Faso; cf 293, 294).
Famine forces its victims into market exchanges. Usual efforts to convert
wealth "upward" into less divisible or more animate forms (e.g. grain to small
livestock, to large stock, to humans; or grain to valuable jewelry-25) reverse
in hunger as liquidation becomes the goal. Herders generally seek to sell their
animals for grain in a food crisis, but often not until these are almost dead and
valueless. Livestock prices plummet as markets become saturated; but grain
prices soar, commonly severalfold. The combination can force herders to sell
productive stock (a "perverse" supply response), setting into motion a vicious
circle of poverty. Upon the first good harvest, grain prices fall sharply and
livestock prices bounce up, as farmers or herders stop selling livestock and
start scrambling to reconstitute their herds. Over a few years prices become
more stable again. The past decade's literature has covered the changes in
Africa better than ever (115, 167, 183, 237, 262, 276, 327, 357, 375). But
whether price changes stand out early or sharply enough from more ordinary
seasonal fluctuations to serve as early warning indicators of emergency is still
in doubt (100, 167, 213, 242a).
The ability to market livestock for grain commonly determines who will
survive a famine and who will not (210, 262, 371, 375). Donkeys and mules
are highly valued in famines because they help travel (192). Livestock sales
are not simply economic decisions, particularly in parts of eastern Africa
where livestock is used in marriage payments and its control has most
significance in relations of kinship, gender, age, and patronage. Herders who
sell off livestock in emergencies frequently find it hard to rebuild their herds
later, when prices have bounced up again. For pastoralists, selling herds
can also mean losing land rights. It is important to note, too, that changes
in price values in cattle, for instance, may not necessarily correspond with
changes in symbolic or broader cultural values (which may change far more
slowly)-an issue on which anthropologists and economists tend to part
company.
Labor is about the last and maybe even the only commodity the poor can
exchange for food. Labor prices slump dramatically in famines, compelling
more work per unit of grain or other food; and the price change can force the
rural poor to neglect their own fields, locking them into low-paid wage labor
for the next season and twisting a longer-term poverty ratchet. Artisanal labor
loses monetary and barter value against grain (216), suggesting needs for
interventions to assist marketing. Famine sufferers need markets (114; see
372 SHIPTON
also 3, 262, 371, 375). The challenge is to make their markets of last
recourse, particularly for labor, more diverse, rewarding, and reliable.
WHAT HAPPENS TO SOCIETY IN FOOD SHORTAGES

AND FAMINES
Human Commodities: Destitutes and Prostitutes

Famines scramble "spheres of exchange." They blur cultural distinctions
between persons and property, and destitution redraws the lines between the
saleable and unsaleable. Farmholders become laborers for richer neighbors;
part-timers may become full-timers. Young women frequently become short-
or long-term prostitutes (240), sometimes entering patron-client bonds with
men, or syndicates among themselves. As elderly rural Luo women told me,
some of their prostitute daughters in towns had remitted them money or
purchased food from towns; some mothers, having once done the same, had
even tutored them in the trade to begin with. This is, to twist Goran Hyden's
phrase (194), a particular kind of "economy of affection" that poverty sets
into gear. Children, fostered out in some societies in good times (139), may
get pledged off riskily in bad times (196, 382) to patrons, benevolent or
otherwise, who may or may not countenance redemption later; or they may be
sold outright (273). Minorities and children in western central African history
have been sold into slavery in famines and epidemics (92, 250), quickening
Atlantic slave export; in spots, similar practices may continue. Some of the
human exchanges tragically spread diseases, among their other effects, while
they may palliate poverty for some.
Who can sell whom in an emergency? Husbands sometimes sell wives, but
not vice versa; and parents have sold or pawned their offspring, but the
converse has seldom if ever been documented. Famine gives a window into
the structures of power and value in families. But it colors them by its special
exigencies, as the question becomes who will help out most (or consume
least) under the temporary circumstances; so not all inferences about the
"hidden nature" of society will be sound.
Rips (and Mendings) in the Fabric of Society

Famines exert contrary and reversible effects on kin and friendship ties in
food-sharing and other reciprocities. Increasing land shortage can make fami-
ly more a hindrance than a help, but kinship remains a main coping strategy
across the continent (196). Local sharing between families or households
often intensifies as the poorest run out of food, just as some grain speculators
begin hoarding. Hunger seems to separate the more from the less valued ties
(as culturally defined), as sharing becomes more discriminant; but it may also
shift the layers.
Shortage of resources for bridewealth (or dowry, less common in Africa)

slows down marriage and apparently also childbirth rates in famines (300).
Naming ceremonies and baptisms, initiations, religious feasts, marriages and
bridewealth, gifts, and long-term livestock loans may eventually grind toward
a halt, threatening the ordinary fabric of society (84, esp. 114). Marriages
become more brittle: Some matrilineal Malawians called 1949, the famine
year many husbands left home, the year of "many divorces" (379:34). These
processes can occur seasonally, short of famines (273). Many authors have
commented on aggressiveness, sullenness, or apathy as consequences of
hunger or malnutrition (e.g. 90, 273, 277, 303).
Division of labor (by ethnicity, gender, age, caste, class, or religion) blurs
or shifts in severe shortages. Men often either join women in less prestigious
work like gathering, as did Mossi men in Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso, in
the early 1970s, (216) )r compete in "feminine" enterprises like water-
carrying, as at the same time among some Amara in Ethiopia, who normally
disdained manual labor (192). Labor displacements may occur as chain
reactions, leaving the weakest without work.
Food shortages and famines can lead the needy to seek or invoke patron-
client bonds and reciprocities (70, 81, 288), but they strain other such bonds,
particularly in later stages (375). Among the Ethiopian Amara, loans became
tighter in the 1970s famine, and lenders began demanding sureties (192; see
also 288 on Rwanda). Theft in famines can locally become less disrespectable
(375); it may even become heroic if from strangers (e.g. food convoy
personnel). Mursi in southern Ethiopia in 1971-1973 raided cattle they had
paid in bridewealth, accepting divorce by definition, as relations between
them and the neighboring Bodi broke down into mutually destructive violence
(372; cf 382 on the Maasai). Sociability horizons, like time horizons, may
shrink under hardship.
SOCIABILITY, SELFISHNESS, AND THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE So, does

society disintegrate in famine? A challenge is to sort tragic truths from
emotive sensationalism, as in Turnbull's widely read book on the Ik or Teuso
(370) and the really savage anthropological debates that it unleashed (166 and
sources listed there). In my view, the book is better read as autobiography
than as ethnography, and the explosive response most useful as a reminder of
basic human worries about selfishness and sociability.
Certainly the ritual events and ceremonial and pragmatic gifts and loans of
livestock and other valuables, in marriage for instance, often slow down or
stop during famines (84, on Niger and elsewhere; 379 on Malawi). Some
statistics on Zimbabwe in the early 1980s suggest, too, that food transfers
between extended kin gradually declined with extended drought (136). Mossi
southward migrants in 1972 sought matrilateral kin, who shared wild foods
374 SHIPTON
with them more warmly and tolerated them longer than they did unrelated
Fulani or Bella (216). All this temporarily changes the nature of society itself.
African societies' characteristic deference toward elders does not necessar-
ily translate into privileged care in famines (see e.g. 382). Elders hold
valuable information on survival techniques, but dependent or infirm elders
may still be abandoned or turned away. This response may be taken as a sign
of deterioration in coping strategies, or as evidence that culture changes
radically or peels away in a true crisis.
Famine challenges the closest kin ties. The Shuwa-Arab of Bornu Division,
Nigeria, called the famine of the early 1970s Zaman Ankur Ikhaiyak, "the era
of refusing to recognize brotherhood" (375:58). A Nilotic Ugandan folktale
vividly expresses the principle (28 1a:30-3 1). In it, a rich man instructs a poor
one to show him what poverty is. The poor man goes home and later calls the
rich man's ten sons to fetch a sealed gourd, into which he has inserted ten
mosquitoes, to deliver to the rich man without opening it. On the way back, a
quarrel among the brothers leads to the escape of the mosquitoes, upon which
the quarrel escalates and the brothers hack each other to death, the last one
surviving only long enough to reach his father and recount the event.
Famines reveal the inner workings of society, as some analysts have
observed (e.g. 366, 382, 384); but note that they seem to retool society at the
same time. Hausa say, Yunwa, ba kau da hali: "Famine, thou makest an
honest man dishonest" (384:96). Nor is it just men: In Malawi's 1949 famine,
crop thefts increased as parents taught their children to steal. Step-children
and aged parents were turned out of homes, then wives and children, and
finally some parents are said to have killed their own children (379). To the
penultimate act this sequence would fit the sociobiologists' "inclusive fitness"
theory that humans are gene-protectors, but the final step might puzzle them.
Are even the most desperate choices culturally programmed, or does culture
peel away? To what degree is human nature selfish? The debates will contin-
ue, for there is something like the physicists' "uncertainty principle" at work.
Famine magnifies into view a knife edge between nature and culture, but it
also jiggles the knife.
UNIT ALLIANCES Famines challenge all units: domestic groups, lineages,

villages, ethnic groups, nations (and others between). In famines, however,
society does not usually just disintegrate or atomize into autonomous in-
dividuals. Its groups destabilize as individuals try to ally themselves with
other new or surfacing kinds of groups. These may include the "community"
(variously defined by territory, ethnicity, place of origin, or kinship), the
nation-state, or even (from the perspective of would-be rescuers) the world (as
in the 1980s famine pop song "We Are the World," or in Christian mission
rhetoric). Some units of aggregation ally against others. Looting gangs chal-
lenge families, villages, or larger polities, an example being the sometimes

debated rootless Imbangala or "Jaga" marauders of drought periods in western
central African colonial history (250; see also 92, 93; cf 382 for an East
African case). In other ways, individuals sometimes align themselves with
national leaders against their own ethnic groups. One might call the process
unit bonding; it results in unit alliances. The point is that society does not just
disappear; it temporarily changes. Political and practical allegiances shift,
and some kinds of groupings along a size continuum (from the individual all
the way to the world) can emerge to edge out others as they appear to offer
individuals new chances for security in a tricky time of illusions and
suggestibility. But the groups also differ in kind, not just in scale.
Famines in Memory
A severe famine's haunting aftereffects include imbalanced livestock pop-
ulations and milk shortage among pastoralists (81; see also 79, 80), and
mental impairments of those malnourished in infancy. Rural people com-
monly name famines after what they sold or exchanged to buy food: thus, the
Kamba famines of "the animal bones," "the sisal," "the rupees," and "the
cheap wives" (pawned wives and daughters) (3)-all reminders, among other
things, of importance of markets to famine sufferers. Famines are also
recalled by what people ate-thus, among the Himba, the famine of "eating
clothing" (250); among the Luo, the famines of "the locusts" and "the tree
bark." Across Africa babies are named after famines, chronologies framed by
them. Famines are the hitching-posts of history. Oral history and myth remind
listeners of famine's likelihood to visit again, and of what to do about it.
FAMINE INTERVENTIONS
Famine relief can take the form of positive aid, or the reduction of taxes,
tributes, or rents (70, 384). Even though many charitable transfers of food or
other essentials seem to follow from need, they have never followed from it
necessarily. African farmers have felt famines where a few kilometers away
others have thrown abundant food to waste-a situation familiar in
mountainous country with widely varying ecosystems (86, 240, 288).
Who helps whom? In most of Africa this century, charity has taken
personal, familial, and local forms (196), as has social security almost
entirely. This remains so despite the substantial life-saving and development
contribution of northern-based religious and secular private international aid
organizations. Among these there is more than a little competition, and the
much smaller indigenous ones, competing with them for the attentions of
larger donor and lender agencies, have many members who now rather resent
them. Relief handouts are not a new idea in Africa. Their principles parallel
376 SHIPTON
those of the Islamic zakat (mandatory redistributive tithing) and sadaka

(voluntary personal almsgiving) and other institutional and informal alms
charities (196: Ch. 3 andpassim; 71, 384). All charity, of course, can involve
complex mixtures of motives, including expected spiritual, political, or in-
direct material rewards for the giver, as Fall's ironic novel of Dakar politi-
cians hamstrung by a "beggars' strike" mordantly suggests (113). As Chris-
tians and Muslims in Africa have long known, it can also win converts; in
religion as in politics, handouts spread hegemonies.
Shortage politicizes food at all levels. Famines discredit leaders' abilities,
whether to make rain (250), to attract foreign aid (291), or to keep peace; and
they destabilize leadership (70, Vol. I; see also 39, 48, 146). Heads of state
commonly try to conceal and deny famines at first, to safeguard their reputa-
tions as leaders, but pin their own names domestically to relief efforts later for
like reasons. All aid, whether helpful or not, involves patronage and risks
incurring resentments (94). In 1980, many Kenyans receiving American
yellow maize (they prefer white) indignantly rumored it to be surplus animal
feed secretly doctored with "family planning" drugs for Africans.
Anthropologists have paid scant attention to the workings of famine relief,
but accounts of notorious delays, diversions, and dehumanizing aspects (53,
54, 84; see also 39, 154, 350) are at least partly counterbalanced by stories of
successful relief, as in Kenya's state-coordinated relief in the mid- 1980s (136;
cf 352) or other campaigns (355, 371, 119, 372). Trouble indicators like
falling livestock prices might be linked to grain stockpile releases in cyberne-
tic fashion, like a thermostat (371); but poorly timed central grain store
buying and selling may do more harm than good (11, 61).
Where relief supplies end up is seldom known for sure. As Tendler (364)
and Torry (369) note, private "voluntary" agencies (understandably preoccu-
pied with fundraising and practical logistics) have published few detailed or
balanced evaluations of their own programs' effects; but a few anthropologists
like A. Fleuret (119; see also 323) have begun pitching in. Her study of a
mother-and-child "supplementary" feeding program in Kenya concluded that
it reached both rich and poor, substituting for some local foods but denting
production incentives little or none. Food-for-work programs, say for road-
building, may have some moral appeal but divert the poor from farmwork or
child care at home. Collective state farms, whatever their general economic
failures and ecological inadaptiveness, may provide useful food aid channels
in a crisis (368). This field is truly full of trade-offs.
Last-Ditch Relief and Refugee Issues: Study Needed

Whether, how, and under what circumstances relief aid fosters dependency
remain poorly understood, though opinions abound (e.g. 156, 200; cf 175,
308, 351, 355). Relief nets have often encouraged people to stay in locations
whose resources cannot sustain them or could do so only seasonally (64, 336).
Famine victims need not just food, water, shelter, clothing, and medical
supplies, but also, if they are able to perform it, well-compensated and
culturally dignified work (see 108, 290). But large relief camps far from rural
people's homes, fields, and pastures seem to worsen and lengthen de-
pendency-for those strong enough to travel there. Dislocation, voluntary or
involuntary, frequently involves redefinition of group identities and affilia-
tions, and relief camps often attract disproportionate numbers of the very old
and very young (379). Research on cultural adjustments and clashes in famine
camps has just begun (53, 54, 150, 153-155, 210). Often classed by gov-
ernments under foreign policy affairs, refugees often lack coordinated "de-
velopment" initiatives. Not surprisingly, famine migrants and refugees often
try to return to their original homes as crises abate.
What Is to Be (Un)done? A Few Recommendations

What can the anthropologist conclude, besides noting Africa's true complex-
ity and variety (the risk-averse anthropology of indeterminacy), counseling
more caution and long-term study (advice aid agendies still reject), or eulogiz-
ing rational optimizers and silent stoics (cousins of the "noble savage")? A
few messages emerge fairly clearly in the literature. Land shortage is no
longer a problem irrelevant to Africa, and while individual land-titling
schemes based on European models may ironically worsen it, "villagization"
schemes associated with socialist reforms often quickly degrade land around
new villages. Agricultural and livestock program planners need to respect
diversity of occupations, and of crops and herd species. Input combinations
should be designed so as to accommodate input sharing, substitution, and
experimentation. Seasonal labor bottlenecks should be heeded. Outlawing
sharecropping and other share contracting is likely to do more harm than
good. More and better options for food storage and cash savings are much to
be welcomed, with perhaps less emphasis on credit (which means debt).
Programs for improving or rehabilitating crop storage facilities might need
some settings to divide their efforts between individual and group storage, or
to find ways of combining the advantages of both in subdivided collective
stores. Rural people need assistance with information flow, transport, and
marketing during and after emergencies. Choosing units of aggregation, and
leaders, for emergency assistance requires flexibility. Emergency foods
should be suited to local tastes in as disaggregated a way as possible.
Sufferers' needs to travel for relief aid should be strictly minimized. Reset
ment schemes are dangerous, and it pays to see first whether people are
moving to the intended places anyway-a valuable clue about whether the
schemes could work.
For pastoralists, Swift (in 70; see also 360), Dahl & Hjort (81), Horowitz
378 SHIPTON
(185), and other specialists suggest several approaches, based on recognition

of all-important needs for mobility and for substantial herds to tide over
sudden losses. A few are: cutting taxes on livestock and duties on pastoralist
long-distance trade commodities, limiting border obstacles to herders, curtail-
ing "sedentarization" and meat offtake programs, and encouraging rotation
among new waterpoints where overgrazing clearly occurs. Aid organizations
should consider food relief in particular years after years of severe droughts,
as herds ebb in numbers by cyclical demographic process. Emerging wisdom
suggests replacing destocking with restocking programs (for examples of
recent projects see 180, 260, 335, 389). One might add that more or better
savings options (including mobile or small-branched savings banks) may
become more important for agrarians and pastoralists as grazing lands un-
fortunately shrink, though many pastoralists continue to find animals them-
selves to be the best financial institutions.
Richer peoples may need to adjust their thinking about how to share wealth
and opportunities with poorer Africans. Easing migrations into wealthy
countries (inside or outside Africa), and remittances back, is a way that fits
African hopes and strategies and also avoids environmental damage, though
as Meillassoux argues, it is never without other snags (245). I once asked a
Luo father of many how his children and grandchildren would get by (their
heritable landholdings being tiny). He replied, "We'll manage-we'll send
some of them to work in America."
Brass Tacks: Some Simple Research Questions

The anthropologist or other local area specialist offers time in year-round
research, and in historical perspective-both missing ingredients in develop-
ment and relief. For anthropologists wishing to get more involved, even if
only to counter existing hegemonies, the literature offers pointers (31, 177,
187, 259, 369). Some simple kinds of information can be surprisingly
obscure, and poorly disaggregated, to indigenous or exogenous planners; and
some can be gathered in the course of other research. Here is a (personal)
selection of approaches from a broader literature: (a) Observe indigenous
technological experimentation in food production. (b) Watch how people
save: in what forms, in what social units, and with or against what peer
pressures controlling consumption and sales. Discern existing debts and how
new credits or debts might alleviate or compound them. (c) Compare the
flows of cash and food incomes within domestic groups: How do changes in
the form of income change diets? (d) Collect famine biographies and histories
at multiple levels of aggregation (individual, cooking group, family com-
pound or lineage, etc), distributing economic attention among production,
distribution, and consumption. (e) Watch for rising prices of grain relative to
livestock, labor, wood, or jewelry; and for increased outmigrations-likely
warning signals of famine. Observe that changes in price value may not
correspond to changes in cultural value. (I) Identify leaders, authority struc-
tures, and associations usable for emergency distributions, as they emerge or
change in famines. Interpret local decisions about what ages or genders within
families should be contacted with assistance. Study ad hoc coping associa-
tions (quasi-families, gangs, prostitution circles, etc). (g) Study outcomes of
private agencies' relief and development programs, using nonreceivers as
"control" groups: Does aid to one locality inflate food prices and push others
nearby further into destitution, as in one version of "entitlement" theory; or,
conversely, do kinship, patronage, and other ties spread it around? (h) Assess
the costs of lost opportunities (e.g. time away from fields) in travels for relief
handouts, or more importantly, food-for-work programs. (i) Document what
people eat and will eat in crises (by ages, genders, classes, and religions), and
how they prepare it. (i) Watch to see whether relief handouts encourage
dependency, and where stolen or diverted resources really end up. Study
cross-border trade, including smuggling. (k) Identify talents and ethnically
related predispositions for small enterprises, individual or collective. (1)
Interpret: Help to mediate rural inter-ethnic conflicts and to break information
blockages; vet surveys and survey statistics to screen out locally meaningless
questions; decode Aidspeak; append a list of practical implications at the end
of long academic monographs, or add the customary short summary at the
front of long nonacademic reports to bureaucrats. (Crossing subcultures
should not, after all, intimidate an anthropologist.)
STUDYING AID ORGANIZATIONS Gaps between anthropology and develop-

ment management studies have begun to close as "appropriateness" has taken
root in general development parlance, and as lower and mid-level project
managers of food and agricultural programs have become respectable subjects
for sociocultural analysis. Socially sensitive scholars of various disciplines
have begun analysing the disappointing workings of rural extension (and more
neglected, feedback) services (41, 226), cooperatives (7, 14, 193, 343),
settlement and irrigation boards (45, 60, 244), and the largest development
organizations (42, 178, 179, 259, 301, 311, 363, 376). They have also looked
into international and local private voluntary organizations (141, 235, 364).
Often the various actors tied together in "development" or relief (aid agencies,
public subscribers, congressional committees, local African chiefs and farm-
ers) know remarkably little about each other.
Anthropologists have begun to analyze seriously the language and mytholo-
gy of aid: the "sectors" dividing agency corridors or ministerial vehicle fleets,
and the "phases" of project ritual cycles (178, 311). They are exploring sacred
creeds, including, lately, what I might call a "blind faith in the invisible
hand". They are questioning basic concepts of "credit" and "interest" that also
380 SHIPTON
mean debt, as different cultures interpret them (347, 348). Similarly they are
reexamining planners' moral revulsion, imported from southern Asia, about
"sharecropping" or "moneylending"-things that help as well as hinder the
African poor (173, 312). The mystique and hegemony of economics in
African planning as a whole are coming under scrutiny (126, 173, 231, 311;
see also 242). Scholars are peeking into the time constraints and personal
risk-avoiding strategies within agencies themselves that have made change
hard (42, 178, 179, 235, 363). Economics and economic planners (or
rationalizers?) are properly anthropological subjects: Economics is culture
(144).
Ripe for anthropological study, too, though well barricaded and beyond the
scope of this article, is the set of dynastic, largely family-controlled firms that
have dominated much of the world grain trade from Minneapolis, Chicago,
and other northern centers-the companies of the Cargills, MacMillans,
Heffelfingers, and others (258; cf 12)-and some smaller but comparable
firms within Africa (127). Their kin ties, and the ties binding large African
trading firms to governments (riskier to study), show that kinship (or "nepot-
ism") can work at any level of organization. Kinship in power centers is
perhaps not just something to be rooted out from among the causes of food
shortages, but also something that might be more positively invoked in
imaginative solutions of one kind or another.
CONCLUSIONS
Famine bares the values and the workings of a society, allowing the cultural
analyst almost voyeuristic privilege, but it distorts the view at the same time.
Like a centrifuge, famine spins apart kin networks, generations, and ethnic
groups. Poverty spirals are made up of processes cybernetically linked, and
they seem to be able to keep themselves turning as inequalities widen. But
humans are not just chemicals, nor society a machine; and layers of priority
and power can shift in the process, and new trusts form. Hence the lingering
doubt about whether the sad, vertiginous truths represent more than those
particular places and those hard times.
Humans prove throughout to be adaptable, successfully or not, and they
work by cultural rules that warp in the heat of crisis but never quite vanish.
Famine makes no unit supreme-not the individual, the mob, the nation state,
or some "world system"-but people rebond new unit alliances between
them. Society does not evaporate or wash away, but transmutes.
Mixed Damnations, or Causes That Are Solutions Too

Ironically, the processes and structures by which rural Africans save them-
selves in a crisis are not so different from the ones that impoverish them to
begin with. If it is "the market" (for cotton, spare parts, fancy radios) that
renders them destitute to begin with, it is as often the market (for labor,
livestock, or household durables) that saves them in the crunch. If it is "the
state" that impoverishes them with taxes, suppressed producer prices, and
ethnic biases, it is state governments that can mobilize large-scale relief
efforts most quickly. European-introduced cassava impoverishes the diet, but
it resists locusts and droughts. Clearly "the market," "the state," and "ex-
ogenous crops" are all concepts too crude to help famine analysis much in
themselves-rather like capitalism or socialism. The subject requires more
analytical precision, better data, and less dogma. Poverty causes famine, and
the prevention of both may thus amount to the same thing, but their remedies
or cures often seem to be different. Much depends on precise stage of
historical process, and thus on long-term perspectives. Mixed blessings, or
damnations, lie in many of the conditions of rural African life-new medi-
cines that have raised populations but cut major famine-related epidemics; or
older patterns like large families, which drain one's savings in food or school
fees but ensure a better chance of steady cash income later. Famine responses
themselves can be double edged. Men's labor migrations offer rural families
chances for food and remittances, but they sap families back home of farming
or herding labor and indirectly make child care harder. When farmers eat
seeds, herders sell heifers, or traders barter away their donkeys, they may
survive but they impoverish themselves. Extra boilings of bitter foods use up
fuelwood for all; importing relief foods may encourage dependency or whet
expensive tastes for wheat.
The paradoxical nature of famines and responses to them suggests that new
solutions might lie in familiar "evils." Systems some reflexively dismiss as
smuggling, gangsterism, nepotism, and bribery involve powerful principles
of incentives, solidarity, kinship, and reciprocity that governments and in-
ternational agencies have proved they cannot police away. Might there be
ways instead to rechannel the underlying principles somehow to the good of
the poorest and least powerful?
Cultural Economy: Possibilities of a Realistic Eclecticism

As one of many possible ways to bring serious cultural scholarship more to
bear on problems like African famine, the emerging sort of study I have called
cultural economy shifts some of the emphases in conventional economic
anthropology. It draws on both sides in some perpetual debates-rationality/
morality, diversity/universality, interpretation/measurement-but sells out to
neither. It fills in the cultural values and beliefs missing from 1970s and 1980s
"political economy." Divisions of class are not assumed more important than
those of ethnicity, gender, or age. Pinstriped bureaucrats should be examined
like beaded herders, and neither romanticized. Cultural economy privileges
382 SHIPTON
no social unit (individual, household, lineage .. .) but looks for the frictions
and "unit alliances" among them. The theory should be accessible. All this
may seem a tall order, but it boils down to little more than reflective common
sense.
Famine forces hard choices. Just as it can reveal the inner workings of a
society, and alter them, it can bare the motives of the scholar, and change
these too: for what, and for whom, is one in the field in the first place? Almost
any subject is easier than famine, and cheerier, but those who learn something
about it should not fear soiling their hands now and then in practice or
political advocacy, as they soil their feet in fieldwork.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This article was commissioned on behalf of the Task Force on African Famine
and Food Security of the American Anthropological Association, and written
during a generous residential leave fellowship at the Carter Woodson Institute
for Afro-American and African Studies, University of Virginia. The Alan
Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Program at Brown University availed its
collection. Thomas Schaub, Michael West, and Sarah Potok provided in-
telligent assistance at Harvard University. My students there teach me well.
Also, Jindra Cekan, Miriam Chaiken, Thomas Downing, Art Hansen, An-
gelique Haugerud, Michael Horowitz, James Ito-Adler, Terrence McCabe,
Shem Migot-Adholla, Joseph Miller, Pauline Peters, and Mary Rose made
valuable suggestions, and Miriam Goheen, Rebecca Huss-Ashmore, Ellen
Messer, Polly Steele, and Richard Waller commented helpfully on a rough
draft. None is responsible for views expressed.
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African Famines and Food Security: Anthropological Perspectives

Author(s): Parker Shipton

Harvard Institute for International Development, and Department of Anthropology,

KEY WORDS: cultural economy, agriculture, poverty, malnutrition, sub-Saharan Africa

Research on Africa is full of surprises. Much of the best cultural anthropology

ABOUT THE LITERATURE

Previous, Related Literature Surveys

Still needed are general comparative summaries on African food preferences

Recent Advances in Ethnography

Some Schools of Thought

A final controversy is whether the rural poor act as self-int

GLEANINGS FROM THE DEBATES Through dialectical process and other-

UNITS OF ANALYSIS Each generation of Africanist anthropologists seems to

SYSTEMS RESEARCH AND BEYOND Slowest to emerge has been a coherent

To close these introductory words on the literature, I must note how

WHAT FAMINES ARE

A definition of famine must denote breadth and severity without suggesting

dard scapegoats) contribute to land degradation and thus to food shortages is

POVERTY CYBERNETICS Many cybernetic cycles in food shortages are

room- or compound-mates, who can, as in an example from Amin's Kampa-

MODE OF LIVELIHOOD BIASES In the countryside, famine hits selectively.

LOCAL STRATEGIES OF FAMINE PREVENTION

Humans deal with famines as sequential processes. The literature on "coping

Repertoires of Coping Strategies

2. Earliest or most reversible measures for adjusting to shortages have

THEORIES ON RESPONSE PHASES Analysts have broken down phases of

Diversified Livelihoods: Farmers as Herders, Herders as

"farmers" through crops, but also through complementary strategies-for

DIVERSIFICATION IN FARMING Diversification heightens security, up to a

Surpluses that Are Not: Savings Cycles and Wealth

CYCLES OF "OVERSALES Throughout Africa, food crops are usually also

SOCIAL DIMENSIONS OF STORAGE AND SAVING Crop storage always

Strategies not generally practiced include holding over substantial cash

SOCIAL INVESTMENT Social investment means giving, sharing, or lending

Debt and Poverty Ratchets

Desperation Sales and Exchanges

WHAT HAPPENS TO SOCIETY IN FOOD SHORTAGES

Human Commodities: Destitutes and Prostitutes

Rips (and Mendings) in the Fabric of Society

Shortage of resources for bridewealth (or dowry, less common in Africa)

SOCIABILITY, SELFISHNESS, AND THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE So, does

UNIT ALLIANCES Famines challenge all units: domestic groups, lineages,

lenge families, villages, or larger polities, an example being the sometimes

those of the Islamic zakat (mandatory redistributive tithing) and sadaka

Last-Ditch Relief and Refugee Issues: Study Needed

What Is to Be (Un)done? A Few Recommendations

(185), and other specialists suggest several approaches, based on recognition

Brass Tacks: Some Simple Research Questions

STUDYING AID ORGANIZATIONS Gaps between anthropology and develop-

Mixed Damnations, or Causes That Are Solutions Too

Cultural Economy: Possibilities of a Realistic Eclecticism

14. Bennett, J. W. 1983. Agricultural coop- Werner, 0. 1980. Indigenous Knowl-

Economy. Stockholm: Univ. Stockholm, Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge

duction and Society. Cambridge: Cam- tacts entre Pasteurs et Agriculteurs.

Fasting in Ethiopia, an anthropological comments with reference to Eastern

Dakar: Mission Anthropol. Afr. chande des cereales et les mechanismes

velopment. Cambridge: Cambridge 328. Sautier, D., O'Deye, M. 1989. Mil,

patches: a dimension in some Afri- 357. Sutter, J. W. 1982. Commercial strat-

374. University Microfilms Limited. 1981. reflections on famine and starvation in

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