| Diola villagers in Guinea-Bissau have long been recognized for their capacity to grow rice in their landscape of tangled mangroves and thick oil palm forests. Recently, declining rainfall, desertification, and widespread erosion have increasingly challenged their ability to provision themselves through long-established wet rice cultivation practices. The effects of these ecological shifts are exacerbated by increased youth migration, national political instability, and the simultaneous increasing demands of a cash economy and declining overall economic security.; Based on two years of ethnographic research in Guinea-Bissau, this dissertation begins with the recognition, shared by most residents in the region, that Diola villagers are currently challenged to maintain a way of life that has largely worked well for many centuries. Diola see their sustenance system not simply as a means of survival, but as integrally tied to their conceptions of personhood, social relations, ritual obligations, and collective cultural identity. What do Diola villagers do when the actions that define a worthy person are no longer tenable? What happens when they find that many of the premises of their society are working against them? How does a cultural group maintain itself as such when the values that have long defined its members are under severe pressure? This ethnography tells a complex and often contradictory story about Diola responses to these challenges by examining three central crises underway in Diola-land.; First, I consider Diola responses to changes in their environment that impinge upon their ability to maintain their long-held system of rice agriculture. The second part examines Christian missionary presence in Diola-land, and particularly how Diola Christians negotiate the different orientations and opportunities of village and mission life. The final section explores a conflict between Diola and Fula residents in this region, and explicates Diola values regarding social incorporation and exclusion.; Across these sites of analysis, this study explores which social forms are reproduced, which boundaries are maintained or redrawn, and how such processes are continually contested. Through specific ethnographic examples that have direct bearing on current Diola lives these three stories collectively engage broader questions about conflict, social change and continuity. |
