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Sorghum as a Gift of Self: the Jie Harvest Ritual Through Time1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

Mustafa Kemal Mirzeler
Mustafa Kemal Mirzeler*
Affiliation:
Western Michigan University
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Extract

The purpose of this paper is to present an interpretation of sorghum as the dominant metaphor of self among the Jie people, and the offering of sorghum to the Turkana women by the Jie women as a gift. The literature on food as self is extensive, emerging from various key theorists who have defined the field of food and the semiotics of food (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993; Parry 1985; Raheja 1988). These scholars are keenly aware of the symbolic utility of food as constitutive features of self identity, and they have examined the interplay between self and food and tropes. For Ohnuki-Tierney, for instance, food and food production, and their associations with metaphors, define and produce meaning. Her interpretation of rice grain as one of the foundational categories of the Japanese traditional polity explicates the role commensality of rice plays in defining boundaries between people who share the commensal food and those who do not. As each member of the commensal consume the food, the food becomes a part of his or her body. The food embodied in each individual “…operates as a metonym by being part of the self” (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993:130). In this paper I extend Ohnuki-Tierney's theoretical model in understanding the role sorghum symbolism and metaphors play in producing identities and social relations of power in the Jie society and in the Jie people's interethnic relationship with their Turkana neighbors.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 36 , 2009 , pp. 387 - 419
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2009

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Footnotes

1

I want to acknowledge the assistance of the many Jie storytellers who have generously shared with me the depths of their cultures and practices. I am also grateful to Michale Lokuruka, Pauline Lokuruka, Lodoch, Joseph Lodungokol, Fr. Mario Cisternino, Rada Dyson-Hudson, Neville Dyson-Hudson, Elizabeth Marshall-Thomas, P. H. Gulliver, and Pamela Gulliver for sharing their knowledge of the cultures and peoples of the region. While I acknowledge the assistance of these storytellers and scholars, I am at the same time responsible for the information in this paper. My research was funded by the Social Science Research Council, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I would like to thank Dr. Dorothy Hodgson for reading and commenting on the draft of this paper.

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