Palm Oil Diaspora: Afro-Brazilian Landscapes and Economies on Bahia’s Dende Coast by Case Watkins

Abstract

Watkins’ book provides a master lesson in interdisciplinary history, constructing a detailed analysis of long-term geographical, political, social, and ecological relationships across the Afro-Brazilian diaspora. It is grounded in stories of real people like the enslaved, Brazilian-born Benta, and the landscapes that they inhabit. Drawing on geography and anthropology, Afro-Brazilian and Atlantic studies, and political ecology, Watkins combines ethnographic, historical, and geospatial methods to investigate the linkages of societies, environments, and power. His account illuminates the nuances of the transatlantic “Columbian exchange” in new and surprising ways, within the framework of decolonial theory and practice.1 “Rather than rigid binaries of top-down and reactionary forces, this book traces power through networked and fluid contingencies that coalesce in transatlantic socio-ecological assemblages” (268).The dendê palm and the distinctive red cooking oil that it produces—a core cultural element in Afro-Brazilian cuisine and religions in Bahia, Brazil—provides an ideal vehicle for Watkins to explore how human–environmental relations created innovative, biodiverse communities. As he portrays it, Bahia’s emergent cultural landscapes of dendê offer a counterpoint to the homogeneous monocultural production landscapes of global capitalism that often leave socio-environmental degradation in their wake.Watkins combines photos, texts, and documents, such as ship manifests and estate inventories from archival and other historical sources, with original photographic images and quotations from 453 interviews conducted during a decade of fieldwork in Bahia. He uses landscape interpretation and other geospatial analytical methods to link geo-referenced field locations to historical and current accounts. He skillfully combines these methods as part of a hybrid, “interactive and iterative research strategy” (41), carefully framing and outlining for each chapter research innovations that produced the rich and powerful findings. His reconstruction of the development of Bahia’s palm-oil landscapes, for example, is anchored by two figures that locate the property boundaries of mid-nineteenth-century quilombos (Afro-descendant maroon communities) alongside the current location of quilombos in the same places, now surrounded by “vast monocultures and pastures” (132). In Chapter 6, he explores the evolution of Bahia’s dendê economy through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, using probate inventories and other primary documents to reconstruct the history of four Bahian families interlinked by kinship and slavery.The focus on cultural landscapes reveals the contrast between the complex, diversified dendê landscapes that afforded food security, biodiversity, and cultural meanings and the homogenous, modern monocultures that are more legible to public authorities.2 Largely invisible in official statistics and policies, the extensive “semi-wild” groves and forests on Bahia’s Dendê Coast were “planted by vultures” who carried the seeds that were then nurtured by local farmers—based on traditional African practices—through complex interactions between people and places on both sides of the Atlantic. The biodiverse “emergent” groves, which originated as an integral part of transatlantic trade, were recreated in Bahia through cross-species collaborations involving mixed peoples (quilombolas, freed people, enslaved people, and Indigenous), as a form of resistance and resilience during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The evidence shows a surprisingly significant participation by Afro-descendants, including women palm-oil processors and vendors, in direct trade between Africa and Brazil. “This book demonstrates how biodiverse palm groves, as legacies of African knowledge and practice, came to distinguish Bahia’s dendê landscapes despite centuries of colonial mandates and modern development schemes that sought to impose and enforce austere monocultures” (31).Palm Oil Diaspora’s relational approach to interdisciplinary history connects with the concrete struggles and forms of resistance that still characterize the people of Bahia’s Dendê Coast. These people continue to struggle, striving “towards a more cohesive framework of life and livelihoods” that can encompass the virtues of biodiversity, complexity, and cultural meaning (284).