The Art of Gleaning and Not Becoming Domesticated in Mollusc Waterworlds

ABSTRACT

In the Sine-Saloum Delta, Senegal, development actors strive to ‘develop’ female mollusc gleaning. In an apparently boundless amphibious environment, domestication underlined by discursive dispossession figures as an attractive alteration of enclosure and material dispossession. It intervenes especially temporally in human and mollusc life and overlays the (material) dialectic of capitalist ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ with one of bringing humans and molluscs from an ‘archaic’ and ‘wild’ ‘outside’ into a ‘modern’ and ‘cultivated’ ‘inside’. However, domestication projects remain entangled with the unruliness of molluscs and waters, and struggle with organisational problems and the agency of gleaners. The latter seek to foster and profit from the continuous production of ‘outsides’ and ‘insides’. They attract, appropriate and undermine projects and integrate them as mere additions into their gleaning practice. In upholding their gleaning practice and complicating mollusc domestication in alliance with unruly molluscs and waters, I argue, gleaners can also resist their own domestication.

KEYWORDS:

• Gleaning
• domestication
• water
• dispossession
• Sine-Saloum Delta Senegal

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to all my interlocutors, friends, mentors, companions, hosts and interview partners. I also thank the DELTA team, the reviewers and the editors of the special issue.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Gleaning is mentioned in the Old Testament and was practiced widely in the early modern period in terrestrial Europe until its demise in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries due to efficiency increases in production and enclosure. It has been re-popularised in recent years by food-saving movements in the Global North and has also increasingly been described for the Global South (cf. Bize 2020; Simon forthcoming). It has therefore always had many faces. For instance, from growing crops and leaving some in the fields during the harvest to tending a forest and allowing access to dead wood, the example noted by Marx (1842, 224–263, cited after Moll 2020: 42), there is already a difference in terms of what it means for the dominant party ‘to produce’, and what a moral contract of obligation entails. For more details on the historical becoming of gleaning, see e.g. King (1989, 1991), Vardi (1993), Bardi (2015), Bize (2020) or Moll (2020).

2 The term gleaning also counters the terminology of development actors in the Sine-Saloum Delta of an ‘archaic gathering’ somehow untouched by a changing context.

3 As Lien et al. (2018: 4) outline, domestication stems from the latin domus, referring to a type of Roman house occupied by the wealthier classes. Domestication implies that something is either converted for domestic use (tamed) or household affairs, or made to feel at home (naturalised). Both terms imply the formation of ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’ through the establishment of boundaries, notably between something contained in the domus and something not yet contained therein.

4 This is not to say that in the longer run, projects of domestication may not still bring about unintended consequences, new niches, or new multispecies relations (cf. Scott 2017; Lien et al. 2018).

5 Since development projects have so far only limitedly stripped delta dwellers of land, labor, life, or natural resources (cf. West 2017), I do not describe them under the premise of material dispossession. Rather, I relate them to discursive dispossession (West 2017) and to ‘salvaging’ and ‘salvage accumulation’, which describes taking advantage of value produced without capitalist control, and the translation process through which diverse forms of work and nature are made commensurate for capital (Tsing 2015: 43, 63).

6 Mollusc gleaning is thus threatened in that it may be seen as too profitable, or not marginal enough. And indeed, relating to the decline of other income opportunities, the legal framework for deltaic water bodies and the increasing profitability of gleaning (see below), men have advanced sporadically into sea snail and oyster gleaning. They have, however, so far hesitated to move into cockle gleaning, historically and currently the most popular type of female gleaning.

7 During my research in 2018 and 2019, gleaners sold one kilogram of dried cockles for 1500 FCFA (around 2,30 Euros), with slight variations according to seasonally changing demand. With this price, women would glean cockles in the value somewhere between 6000 and 15000 FCFA per working day (around 9–23 Euros), depending on experience and location. From this, they sometimes had to deduce costs for male boat drivers or boat owners (a maximum of 1000 FCFA per day, around 1,50 Euros). They also occasionally sold mollusc shells of different types and values for construction or the production of amulets and incense. Following the tides, they would glean up to ten days, before taking a break for up to five days. The moratoriums more or less attuned to the rainy season lasted three to four months. In comparison, in 2019, those NGO’s who paid participants for their (irregular) work, paid between 3000 and 5000 FCFA per day (around 4,60 to 7,60 Euros). Or, in the same year, working in a deltaic hotel on a day-to-day basis (depending on the presence of clients), yielded a waitress 3500 FCFA per day (around 5,30 Euros). Until 2023, prices of cockles had risen to 2500–3000 FCFA per kilogram (around 3,80 to 4,60 Euros). Oysters and sea snails have always been more expensive, but also less regularly gleaned.

8 All names have been changed.

9 In this article, I first focus on female cockle- and then on oyster gleaning and leave out female sea-snail gleaning, which has undergone a certain change in technique and tools similar to cockle gleaning.

10 Nevertheless, there were NGO projects in the recent past that undertook transplantation to ecologically active sites then put under long-term protection and celebrated the following increase in size and prevalence as the success of transplanting and the foregone assessment. Such practices can be understood as an attempt to appropriate the moratoriums and obscure the limitations of transplantation.

11 In the words of a project manager, the women in the delta ‘appear actually not that needy’, leading them to downsize their projects and expectations in the past.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).