Collected Food and Domestic Knowledge in the Gambia, West Africa

Abstract

Two aspects of rural African life which have hitherto received little attention are women's domestic knowledge and collected food products. A Gambian case study reveals that both are important for household survival since it is through storage and preservation that women seasonally regulate the collected food supply in relation to cultivated food availability. While there is a lack of awareness by 'experts' of the nutritional role of collected foodstuffs to rural households, locally held values regarding collected products are ambivalent. This ambivalence is also demonstrated by the partial and dynamic nature of domestic knowledge, which is both generated through local practice and externally derived information. Domestic knowledge is thus both spatially and socially specific and simultaneously embedded within national and international economic, social and political relations. Furthermore, the differences between women regarding levels of specialist knowledge suggests a multiplicity of knowledges and consequently the paper calls for an avoidance of 'systematic' approaches to understanding life in rural Africa. In particular, through examination of domestic knowledge and collected products the false dichotomies of work/non-work, production/reproduction, public/private and cultivated/wild are revealed, suggesting that a productive 'bricolage' would be a more appropriate conceptualization.