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The Scarcity Slot is the first book to critically examine food security in Africa’s deep past. Amanda L. Logan argues that African foodways have been viewed through the lens of ‘the scarcity slot,’ a kind of Othering based on presumed differences in resources. Weaving together archaeological, historical, and environmental data with food ethnography, she advances a new approach to building long-term histories of food security on the continent in order to combat these stereotypes. Focusing on a case study in Banda, Ghana that spans the past six centuries,
The Scarcity Slot reveals that people thrived during a severe, centuries-long drought just as Europeans arrived on the coast, with a major decline in food security emerging only recently. This narrative radically challenges how we think about African foodways in the past with major implications for the future.
Amanda L. Logan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University.
"This book offers a pathbreaking archaeological ethnography of food in a region of West Africa that experienced some of the most cataclysmic socio-political upheavals the world has ever seen. Amanda Logan’s lucid prose transports the reader to kitchens of different times and places to show indigenous food preferences amid precarity and environmental change. She dismantles the dominant narrative that Columbian Exchange crop introductions rescued a continent long shaped by hunger. This brilliant study elevates archaeology’s contributions to African food history and food insecurity studies."––Judith Carney, author of In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World
"This book is a reimagination of the history of food security in West Africa, with vital implications for the whole continent. It dismantles 'scarcity slot' assumptions about Africans, in favor of a far more realistic account of how African peoples managed their own lives."––Scott MacEachern, author of Searching for Boko Haram: A History of Violence in Central Africa
"A radical shift from the old ways of doing the archaeology of diet, this book breaks ground for a new food archaeology, engaged with timeless and persistent issues. A truly innovative and exciting work and a convincing antidote to the popular image of Africa as a continent of famine."––Richard Wilk, Distinguished Professor and Provost's Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Indiana University
"Overturning more than a century of assumptions about the causes of contemporary food scarcity in Africa, Logan deftly weaves together an interdisciplinary archive to recover a longue durée history in which men and women in west central Ghana fed their families, indulged their taste buds, savored curiosity, and nourished resiliency in the face of foreigners’ self-fulfilling conjectures that Africans could do no such thing. The Scarcity Slot is an accessible, empirically grounded history demonstrating for students of Africa’s futures the urgent need for her pasts." ––Kathryn M. de Luna, Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor, Georgetown University
244 pp.6 x 9Illus: 25 b/w illustrations
9780520343757$34.95|£30.00Paper
Dec 2020