The Cultural Dimensions of Climate Change and Rice: A Profile of Joanna Davidson

The recent Climate Change Summit in Katowice, Poland, brought delegates from nearly 200 countries to address climate change. Many at the Summit pushed forth toward an  updated model that would meet emissions standards with stricter regulation and enforcement. However, this is just one example of collective action working to solve urgent environmental problems such as climate change. In a small village in Guinea Bissau, the Jola are also finding effective ways to help address environmental concerns such as climate change through rice and the power of community.

Dr. Joanna Davidson, a leading cultural anthropologist at Boston University, understands the connection between rice and people. She has studied the relationship between rice cultivation in a Jola village in Guinea Bissau for a decade.  However, Davidson did not always see the direct relationship between culture and the environment immediately. Over the course of a decade, Davidson saw how climate change was beginning to affect the Jola community as their rice paddies became increasingly dry due to climate change. Consequently, food insecurity also increased. This challenge sparked Davidson’s interest in furthering her research and increasing her focus on West Africans’ response environmental and economic changes occurring in this region. Rice is is not only an important part of the identity of villages such as Jola, it has also unexpectedly become a part of Davidson’s research as she points out, “ I, myself, did not go to the Jola region of northwest Guinea-Bissau to study rice. And yet I still find myself, more than a decade after my first Jola rice harvest, returning again and again to rice.”

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Shorter rainy seasons have threatened livelihoods and increased food insecurity, especially in Esana. Through her interactions with the Jola village in Esana, Davidson turned this into a research problem that aimed to capture these dramatic changes and explore further how the Jola people were reinventing themselves as a result of these complex challenges. It was particularly Davidson’s ethnographic research in Guinea Bissau that led her to discover the complexities of food security, gender, and climate change. Through her field research in this fascinating and understudied place, she began to gain a better understanding of how environmental problems may be present to a community and the actions taken as a result to help adapt to the changes. This work culminated into her recent book, Sacred Rice: An Ethnography of Identity, Environment and Development in Rural West Africa.   In her book, she stresses the importance of gaining a better understanding of environmental problems when viewed through a cultural lense. She explains, “Jola lives, like those of most rice-growing people in this region, are permeated by rice.” Rice cultivation is intimately connected to rituals and ceremonies in the Jola culture.

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Davidson not only highlights the importance of localized efforts to address environmental issues such as climate change, but also the need to take a closer look at the “reconfigurations of women’s power” in the context of the Jola women. Jola women farmers in particular have had to respond to the environmental changes because of rice’s central role in their lives. Traditionally, there is gendered division of labor in rice cultivation as Jola women are responsible for transplanting rice seedlings and harvesting ripe rice. Climate change has presented challenges to agricultural cycles as well as women’s identities. For some, these challenges might seem insurmountable.

While environmental changes continue to diminish the viability of rice cultivation and economic stability of the Jola, they have also found strategies to address these challenges. For example, Jola women organized themselves, forming  gender-based work groups called societé, or societies as a way of adapting to these changes both socially and financially. These societies help women to share agricultural techniques as well as to create a social support network. Through these networks, cultural identity is preserved through their connection to their land and history.

And these groups produce results, specifically through financial assistance. Similar to the model of microfinance organizations, Davidson says, “the success comes from these women pooling their labor and funds to help each other out in the midst of environmental shocks.”  The financial assistance provides women farmers the capacity to Community collectives offer a new way to think about climate change readiness in rural areas. The model that Davidson documents is a promising one, although it is not without its challenges. Such mutual support is a shift in traditional practices, as the Jola strongly believe in self-sufficiency and autonomy. Thus, climate change is forcing them not only to modify their agricultural practices, but to shift their cultural identity too.

Th Jola illuminate a lesson in adaptation and hope. The example of the Jola village shows the importance of viewing climate change through a cultural lens. Davidson’s shows us that there are many complexities embedded in a community that scientific models cannot solely address. A multidisciplinary approach that includes a cultural dimension helps achieve better policy decisions because of inclusion of various perspectives and identities. Davidson’s own narrative and investigative skills shine light on innovative solutions to problems facing smallholder agriculture in Africa. Davidson poignantly remarks on the resilience of the Jola. She explains, “the Jola villagers exemplify dilemmas rural people throughout West Africa face as they try to keep their families together and as they continue to farm and live in ways that give them a sense of accomplishment in their own eyes and in the eyes of their kin and neighbors, but in a world of circumstances that make those efforts increasingly precarious.”  Rice and culture are inextricably linked for many people like the Jola, and only through looking at them through a cultural lens can we find solutions to the pressing challenges of climate change.

 

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