"Not so strange farmers": Rural displacement, colonial agriculture, and economic precariousness in Siin during the 20th century

Summary

This paper uses the results of long-term archaeological survey and oral histories to examine the intersection of rural migrations, colonial rule, and economic impoverishment in the Siin region of Senegal during the 20th century. The Siin is today the theater of acute rural anxiety, a ‘peasant malaise’ carved by the combined effects of ecological crises, declining land productivity, degrading life conditions, and state withdrawal over the past forty years. These worrisome circumstances, however, have roots in a longer colonial history of agricultural commodification, which sparked considerable human displacement. While much has been written on long-distance seasonal migrant labor, smaller-scale movements have received more limited scholarly treatment, even as they subtly reshaped the contours of regional social landscapes. The paper charts some of these internal mobilities and transformations, paying special attention to the strategies of place-making and processes of economic marginalization that arose in their wake.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Late Empires: the archaeology of recent colonialism and imperialism - 1860s to the present   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2013

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

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PaperId(s): 158