Valentina Peveri. The Edible Gardens of Ethiopia: An Ethnographic Journey into Beauty and Hunger. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2020. 264 pp. $40.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8165-4115-7.
Reviewed by Christopher Conz (College of the Holy Cross)
Published on H-Africa (October, 2021)
Commissioned by David D. Hurlbut (Center for Global Christianity and Mission, Boston University School of Theology)
In The Edible Gardens of Ethiopia, anthropologist Valentina Peveri guides readers though the intricate yet little understood ensete culture in the Hadiyya region of southwestern Ethiopia. Ensete (Ensete ventricosum), or weesa as Hadiyya call it, is a botanical cousin of the banana, but its food lies underground in its roots. Cultivation and processing of this perennial plant, which requires plentiful time, knowledge, and labor, dates back ten thousand years. Situated in household gardens, women control ensete culture from propagation and harvesting to fermenting the pulp and preparing bread to gathering the leaves for use and market. Despite its ecological, cultural, and nutritional benefits, “the tree against hunger” has remained among what Peveri calls “orphaned or underutilized crops” (pp. 20, 116). This status of ensete as poor people’s food owes to narratives produced by powerful institutions over time, such as the Ethiopian imperial state, Christian missionaries, and development institutions—all of whom assume that cereals are superior for nutrition, markets, and modernity. Peveri confronts this entrenched perspective that has global significance by examining the local nuance of ensete, focusing on how it features in Hadiyya women’s beliefs and practices of health, hunger, and beauty.
Peveri argues “for an aesthetics of pragmatism, one that is rooted in the reciprocal and active relationship between humans and plants” (p. 31). This view contrasts with Western approaches to aesthetics in which “human beings and plants are conceived as occupying radically different domains” (p. 30). On this difference, the author engages with Jack Goody’s contention that Africans paid little attention to colors, smells, and beauty. Instead, for Hadiyya gardeners, “safety, prosperity, abundance, and culinary enjoyment are all anticipated qualities that generate the feeling of what is beautiful” (p. 34).[1] It is from this definition of beauty that Peveri builds a multidimensional analysis by which The Edible Gardens of Ethiopia comments on numerous problems, such as the tyranny of market-based monocropping, the sidelining of women’s voices and knowledge in development programs, and the ecological and cultural integrity of perennial plants. As a botanical ethnographic subject, ensete helps Peveri to illustrate what “the value of subsistence, the role of women farmers, the idea and practice of beauty; and the sense of hope emanating from a simple garden” mean for an ecologically stressed and socially unjust world (p. 199).
Peveri draws on research trips to Hadiyya that span more than ten years, during which she established strong social networks in rural villages. Throughout the book, she maintains a sense of humility about her project and carefully articulates her positionality. At the heart of the book, Peveri’s interviews with Hadiyya women narrate a place undergoing rapid change in the twenty-first century. Older ethnographies of ensete cultures in the region, especially those by Dorothy and William Shack in the 1960s, provide key details and local comparison.[2] Other sources include linguistic evidence, photographs, household surveys, development reports, missionary writings, and botanical materials.
The thematic chapters intersect well with one another. In chapter 1, the author explains the “Riddle of Beauty” by discussing the relationships between social stratification, gender, ecology, and food in Hadiyya villages. Colors in the ensete culture are a key feature here for examining “beauty in the field and on the plate.” For instance, “white is the color of clarity, fortune, peaceful coexistence, and success” (p. 24). But ensete culture was a relatively recent development for the Hadiyya. In chapter 2, Peveri describes an historical transition from pastoral people that built culture and sustenance around cattle and cattle products to sedentary people who integrate cattle into ensete gardening with some cereal production. In the eyes of the Ethiopian state, “the Hadiyya were despised as searchers of land and scattered vagabonds” (p. 53). Like the Maasai, Tuareg, and other African groups, the Hadiyya fit uneasily into state-making projects. Ethiopian agricultural programs assumed the superiority of the national cuisine, based on teff bread (injera) and stews like doro wet, both well known internationally. In a recent Ethiopian government nutrition program, there was no mention or any root crops. It is in this context that Hadiyya have developed an elaborate ensete culture, in part, adapting knowledge from the neighboring Gurage people.
Chapters 3 and 4 examine ensete culture through a gendered lens, both magnifying the local case and placing it within global conversations about agroecology. In its botanical character and its influence on Hadiyya people, ensete makes place and community. Peveri emphasizes, too, that it “is a plant with personality and charisma” (p. 86). The story remains anchored, too, in the tangible ways that people, plants, and animals “collaborate to render the landscape functional and edible” (p. 82). In discussing gender in chapter 4, Peveri describes the ensete garden as a “box of wonders” where women find refuge from social pressures, where they produce knowledge, and where they cultivate nutritious food (p. 102). It is this space, Peveri argues, that agricultural extension agents, missionaries, and development workers have ignored or have not seen. Instead, the overwhelming pattern is for these institutions is to identify and support men as the real farmers.
In chapter 5, “Deep Roots,” Peveri connects her case to big questions about the place of agriculture in global capitalism. Drawing on James Scott’s classic work, Seeing Like a State (1998), the author examines “illegible gardens” in Hadiyya ensete culture. Given their embeddedness in polyculture gardens, ensete plants are not easily mapped by bureaucrats. The harvest is difficult to quantify and tax. Seed corporations cannot control its reproduction. It is difficult to export. Deep wells of local knowledge are essential. Not least, the spaces and processes are controlled by women. These same characteristics have made ensete important for the Hadiyya while making it a problem for the Ethiopian state, extension workers, and so-called progressive farmers.
Chapters 6 and 7 offer a deep dive into Hadiyya culinary practices, preferences, and aversions. Peveri uses recipes, photographs, and interviews to explain who does what work, who eats what and when. Through her rich descriptions, where butter and milk are central, readers learn about how certain preferences and ideals represent the tensions between an idealized past, nationalism, local identity, and an uncertain future. As more young people seek lives elsewhere and turn to non-farming livelihoods and other foods, Hadiyya farmers try to combat a bacterial wilt that has killed off many ensete plants. The fact that no remedy has been found is indicative of how ensete continues to be marginalized by research and development institutions. For these institutions, progress means bulk food calories via hybrid maize, often biofortified with vitamins. Peveri still closes on a hopeful note by arguing that ensete culture offers a symbol of hope, not for all people to cultivate it, but for all people to recognize that food justice must take seriously the vital links between subsistence, beauty, women farmers, and hope.
This reader learned a great deal in this deeply learned and beautifully written ethnography, but questions about change over time remain. How, for instance, did Hadiyya people interact with government agricultural policies and American Protestant and Ethiopian missionaries in the twentieth century? Even through resistance, important adaptations and adoptions occur. The twentieth century, like the twenty-first thus far, was a time of profound changes in ecology, economy, politics, culture, and technology. Of course, these changes happen unevenly across geographies, but this reader would have liked to learn more about these interactions and how they shaped life in Hadiyya. Peveri touches on some of these changes in chapters 2 and 5, and this reader recognizes the limitations of space, time, and our approaches to scholarship. Nonetheless, Valentina Peveri has achieved great things with The Edible Gardens of Ethiopia. Scholars studying Ethiopia, Africa, agriculture, development, environment, and nutrition will find this book original and informative, while graduate and undergraduate students in these fields, as well as those in anthropology more broadly, will read a fine example of what ethnography can achieve.
Notes
[1]. Jack Goody, The Culture of Flowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
[2]. For example, Dorothy Shack, “Nutritional Processes and Personality Development among the Gurage of Ethiopia,” Ethnology 8, no. 3 (1969): 292-300; William Shack, The Gurage: A People of the Ensete Culture (London: Oxford University Press, 1966).
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Citation:
Christopher Conz. Review of Peveri, Valentina, The Edible Gardens of Ethiopia: An Ethnographic Journey into Beauty and Hunger.
H-Africa, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56141
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