Cash Crops and Gender Constructs: The Jola of Senegal

Abstract

Discussions of commercial agriculture often fail to appreciate the profound cultural differences that may separate cash crops, grown exclusively for an export commodity market, from subsistence crops that are consistently or even occasion? ally sold for cash (Klein 1980; Hart 1982; Bates 1983). Whereas the latter tend to be multifunctional and polivalent, having many social uses and diverse meanings in their local contexts, cash crops are often unifunctional and univalent; they mean money, pure and simple. They are frequently foreign in origin, politically alien, and ritually neutral. Cash crops also tend to increase the overall sexual division of labor in agriculture (Boserup 1970). Their very lack of domestic association, of social relevance within particular kinship contexts, facilitates processes of sexual and social separation. In contrast, subsistence crops, especially those of native origin with a long history of cultivation, are frequently embedded in networks of traditional prestations and ritual obligations. This insures that old practices surrounding their production may well remain unchanged, or even become reinforced, regardless of the additional cash-bringing purposes they are put to. Many multifunctional products easily enter the local cash market precisely because they are seen as potentially useful in many contexts. Thus it is important to understand not only the historical trajectory of particular crops, and the social organization of the groups that adopted them, but also the changing meanings and symbols they have been invested with. For it is often the cultural constructs surrounding particular crops that determine how and why their production and sale is appropriated by one sex, or a particular group. By cultural constructs of gender I mean the arbitrary system of meanings that defines sexual identities in any particular society (MacCormack and Strathern 1980:5-8; Sanday 1981:163). That such identities are shaped by economic practices?by the sexual division of labor, for example?is a commonplace. Less attention has been paid to how economic products (in our case, agricultural crops) may become sex-linked from the beginning. Why crops come to function as symbols, including sexual symbols, requires an understanding of the particular historical circumstances surrounding the use of old crops and the introduction of