Prelude
In 1964, Djifère was not yet a real village, but a fishing camp, located on the mainland side of one of the main mouths of the Sine-Saloum Delta, Senegal. Here, some Lébou and Wolof people fished and shipped their catch to the urban centres of the region – to Dakar, Mbour or Joal, up the coast.1 They also brought ashore what in Wolof is called Yet (also Yeet, Yët), a type of Cymbium, a sea snail from the gastropod family.
Boubacar Fall2 calls these animals ijanga or ijangaké (pl.). He is today one of the oldest in his village and a member of the Serer Niominka (also Sereer Niominka a.o.), who live in highly diverse communities scattered across the islands of the northern part of the Sine-Saloum Delta. These communities have historically shifted back and forth between diverse aquatic and terrestrial activities and formed a matrilineal, egalitarian society that up to the present day welcomes personal experimentation with different practices (cf. Cormier-Salem 1999; Pélissier 2008 [1968]). Correspondingly, in the course of his life, Boubacar has worked as a mechanic, an artist (carver), a boatbuilder, a farmer, a trader and a fisher, among others.
Back in 1964, Boubacar from time to time bought ijangaké from the Lébou and Wolof fishers and passed them on to Soukeyna Fall, a cousin of his, and other women in his village. They would crack the shells, ferment and dry the flesh, then cut it into small pieces and use it as spice in meals such as ceebu jën (rice and fish, also Thiéboudiène), just as people would do all over the country. One day, when Boubacar bought several boxes of ijangaké from the Lébou and Wolof fishers, he took a closer look at the net of an ijangaké fisher from around Mbour and memorised how it was constructed. Back at home, he built a similar net and decided to take it out to sea.
In the following years, other men of his village began to copy his net and try their luck at sea as well. More and more of them stopped leaving the delta during the dry season to seek work in the cities on the mainland, for example as wage labourers in the ports, or to embark on fishing and trading campaigns along the deltaic estuaries or the coast (see also Pélissier 2008 [1968]; Van-Chi Bonnardel 1977). Many women also used to look for dry-season work in the cities, for instance as street vendors or domestic helpers, or would join their husbands on fishing campaigns or engage in diverse income-generating practices in and around deltaic villages (see also Pélissier 2008 [1968]; Van-Chi Bonnardel 1977). They also now shifted their focus. They processed and sold the ijangaké via trust networks across the mainland and became food processors and banabanaké (traders), while the ijanga turned into a product.
‘We were rich! The whole village was rich’, recalled Fatou Diouf, a friend of Soukeyna, more than four decades later (Fieldnotes 12 June 2018).
Two ijangaké (Photo by author, 2019)
Citation: Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 31, 4; 10.3167/saas.2023.310409
Introduction
While the ijangaké trade represents a key economic activity among the Serer Niominka, it is but one of many emergent occupations. ‘We have twelve professions’, they say, and it is this reliance on a broad palette of different terrestrial and aquatic practices and the shifting between them that has historically informed the sustenance of deltaic life. It is a life that has been about combining relatively regular patterns, such as tides, growth cycles and seasons, with more irregular events or phases. Thereby, delta dwellers have been continuously forging and embracing recurring and new opportunities, have been realigning and reskilling – and have shifted their focus repeatedly (see also Simon 2021). In this article, grounded in a good year of ethnographic research in the Sine-Saloum Delta between late 2017 and late 2019 and drawing from oral history, life histories and interviews, I examine two such examples.
First, I inquire into the practice of fishing to supply a factory producing fish meal and fish oil for the world market. I trace how, once the factory opened, delta dwellers quickly adjusted their fishing practices and started delivering to it. I outline this as a form of salvaging that allows for ‘salvage accumulation’, a translation of non- capitalist value into capitalist value and effectively helped transform deltaic waters into a peri-capitalist site (Tsing 2012: 521, 2013: 26, 2015: 63, 66, 301). Anna Tsing (2015: 296) relates ‘salvage accumulation’ to Marx's ‘primitive accumulation’, the transformation of abilities, land and goods into capitalist value in a historical process of separating producers from the means of production. However, as she claims, capitalism does not transcend ‘primitive accumulation’ (see Harvey 2003; Luxemburg 1968 [1913]; Moore 2012). Her concept of salvaging, salvage and ‘salvage accumulation’ proposes that capitalism cannot fully produce its own conditions of existence (e.g. ‘raw’ materials, skills) and requires an ongoing translation of non-capitalist economic forms into the capitalist realm, whereby the non-capitalist ‘outside’ is continuously produced anew. Consequently, there is also neither a teleological ‘global’ nor, as J.K. Gibson-Graham argue, a ‘singular, mysterious, normal, lawful [world market], imbued with expansive authority and force’ (2002: 38). Rather, there exists a patchwork of capitalist, non- capitalist and peri-capitalist sites, that is, sites that are both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ capitalism where capitalist and non-capitalist forms interact (Tsing 2015: 63, 296). Delta dwellers’ salvaging for the fish factory was thus about relating oneself and the environment one dwells in to capitalist value chains and feeding into them, allowing for ‘salvage accumulation’ (Tsing 2015: 66, 301). Yet, salvaging is non-scalable and, as I show, can be an opportunity, hinging on the successful navigation of the degrees to which one becomes entwined with the project one salvages for.
Second, I describe how the ijangaké business changed from fishing for ijangaké towards gleaning them from industrial trawlers: after the fishers’ nets were increasingly caught up by trawlers, fellow fishers who laboured onboard these as deck hands gleaned the ijangaké from the ‘worthless’ bycatch and passed them on to the fishers, before networks of female traders sold them across the country. Delta dwellers were implicated in the trawlers’ massive destruction of (deltaic) fish-grounds and the corresponding adverse impact on livelihoods. At the same time, delta dwellers, by performing the marginality of the bycatch while redescribing its value and exchanging it, realised their own gains from it. Thereby, they renegotiated ownership and possession as well as labour and turned trawlers as capitalist sites, which, similar to the fish factory, ‘send value up’ to the cheque books of capitalists (i.e. their owners), into peri-capitalist sites. In these peri-capitalist sites, lives and products moved back and forth between non-capitalist and capitalist forms (Tsing 2015: 63, 65). Gleaning from thus points in the opposite direction from salvaging for.
Gleaning has been described as the right of the subaltern to the remainder and the obligation of the dominant to ‘produce’ remainder and allow access to it.3 As I show, the ijangaké trade, as a more recent form of gleaning, also involves things that do not neatly fit the modalities of capitalist value creation and circulation. Such gleaning from is non-scalable and is largely made possible by outside factors. Furthermore, it includes not knowing for sure what one will encounter or for how long. However, within these constraints, such gleaning unfolds according to its own aims beyond both ideas of unsustainable growth rates or surplus maximisation and notions of ‘survival’ or subsistence; it is distinct, yet entwined with capitalist principles.4
I consider such gleaning as a ‘minor tactic’ (cf. De Certeau 2002 [1980]; Deleuze and Guattari 1986 [1975]) that both confirms and decentres social and economic hierarchies while enabling one to valorise capitalist processes to one's own end. I thereby draw, on the one hand, from Deleuze and Guattari (1986 [1975]). They invoke the idea of a minor language within a dominant major one using the example of the literature of Franz Kafka, a Czech Jew writing in German, the language of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For them,
the three characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation. We might as well say that minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature. (1986 [1975]: 18)
On the other hand, I draw from Michel de Certeau, who notes that in facing the strategies of the dominant that create systemic realities,
a tactic insinuates itself into the other's place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance. It has at its disposal no base where it can capitalize on its advantages, prepare its expansions, and secure independence with respect to circumstances. (2002 [1980]: xix)
Gleaning as a ‘minor tactic’ can thus allow people to nurture ‘minor’ economic, social and ecological niches within racialised ruination, precarisation and dispossession (see also Simon 2021, 2023).5
The trawlers as well as the fish-meal and fish-oil factory expanded economic frontiers (cf. Moore 2012), and thereby introduced new volatilities in the delta. Social scientists frame such volatilities induced by capitalist processes as spatio-temporally unfolding, uncertain, rapid and profound transformations from ‘above’ that overwhelm and victimise people ‘below’ and that should be stabilised and mitigated (cf. Krause et al 2020; Krause 2022; Krause and Hylland Eriksen, this volume; Marin 2019). For instance, mainstream development research laments how global market volatilities weaken growth rates of poorer countries like Senegal (Calderon et al 2019; Hnatkovska and Loayza 2003).
To rhythm volatilities – here I use the term as an active verb – is about making productive use of such volatilities and living off them. Gleaning and salvaging thereby represent two distinct ways of not just reacting and responding to imposed volatilities, but also exploring them as opportunities from ‘below’. They require sensory engagement, situated action and skilful flexibility. They are about spatiotemporal coordination without standardisation or a singular pulse of progress (cf. Tsing 2015) and they are characterised by a productive repetition that brings forth difference and multiplicity (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Lefebvre 2004 [1992]). Such repetition interlocks ‘beats’ and ‘pauses’ through linking the anticipation of something yet to come and the fading of that which has taken place (cf. You 1994).
Rhythming volatilities through gleaning and salvaging is hence not so much about clearly defined prediction, about resistance to, taming or mastering volatilities. Rather, it is about the perception and exploration of volatilities as opportunities (cf. Nuttall 2010); as an indeterminate opening beyond the overwhelming and victimising transformation from ‘above’ and the sensory, situated and flexible mastering of the self in relation to them (cf. Simon 2021). Delta dwellers, I show, mobilised gleaning and salvaging as two ways to explore the volatilities induced by the trawlers and the fish factory as opportunities. In drawing on their principle of ‘twelve professions’, they sought to weave them into a wider, rhythmic meshwork of practice (cf. Ingold 2006) – connecting events or phases and their temporalities and integrating them into an ongoing pattern. And once these opportunities started to become unprofitable, in the quest to maintain their wider rhythmicity of practice, they re-oriented themselves and embraced other, old and new activities at sea or on land.
Salvaging for Capitalists
In 1977, the SOPESINE factory (Société de Pêche du Sine Saloum) started operating in Djifère, the fishing camp opposite the mouth of the delta where Boubacar had traded ijangaké a good decade earlier. It produced fish meal and fish oil for export in addition to some frozen fish for the domestic market. In the early, more successful years of its existence, which lasted until 1986, it processed up to 30,000 tons of fish per year, and up to 10,000 people from the Sine-Saloum Delta and from up the coast relied wholly or at least partly on it for securing their livelihoods (Bousso 1991: 12; Fontana and Weber 1983: 19; Fréon and Weber 1983: 267). In its second year of production, it was Senegal's second-most important landing point in terms of weight, catapulting Djifère onto the national fishing map (Bousso 1991: 3).
The operation of the SOPESINE was conditioned by the delta dwellers’ shifting of their practice and mobility. The fish factory emerged at a time when the delta's terrestrial resources like rice fields and oil-producing palms were dwindling due to drought and growing salinisation (Pagès and Citeau 1990). When the SOPESINE opened, some deltaic communities quickly began to supply the factory with fish. They intensified their fishing during the rainy season at the cost of farming, and during the dry season embarked less on campaigns to fish, trade or search for work beyond the delta. They pooled money and took out credit along kin networks and either reconfigured large pirogues (wooden boats) previously used for coastal and inland trade or for purse seining, or built new pirogues (Fontana and Weber 1983; Fréon and Weber 1983).6
The SOPESINE fed goods processed from fish into a global market by relying on catches from fishers, whereby it helped to transform Djifère and the deltaic waters into a peri-capitalist site where lives and products move back and forth between non-capitalist and capitalist forms and where these forms interrelate and penetrate each other (Tsing 2015: 65). People knew how to fish and have fished ‘before’, but through ‘salvage accumulation’ (Tsing 2015: 66, 301), the SOPESINE acquired and transferred the resource fish as well as the fishers’ skills and the value they produce into the capitalist realm.
The SOPESINE relied on fishers as suppliers and the deltaic environment with its moving fish and shifting tides and seasons. And it relied on a volatile world market as well as other fluctuating conditions: the availability of engines and spare parts, the passability of the dirt route to Joal built in 1980, or the flow of electricity and fresh water, and so forth – all while trying to maintain fixed prices for suppliers. The suppliers, in engaging with the SOPESINE, experienced these circumstances and the speculative gaps in the SOPESINE's calculation and realisation of profit foremost as volatilities in the form of spatially situated clashes ‘of diverse and antagonistic temporalities’ (Negri 2003: 68 cited in Bear 2014: 19), in which they themselves participated (cf. Bear 2014, 2015). These clashing temporalities were grounded in inequalities of social relationships and for suppliers manifested themselves in the course of difficult working conditions (cf. Bear 2015). However, suppliers developed responses to transform their working conditions for their own ends through spatio-temporal coordination, that is, through rhythming the volatilities they became enmeshed with.
At first, as deltaic elders today remember, fish were plentiful and one could make up to four trips to the SOPESINE per day. The factory operated five days a week, meaning that delta dwellers tried to be out at sea during these days and then remain home during the weekends, which became times of expenditure and pleasure. But soon payments became more irregular and often came late, while catches diminished. Moreover, the promised ‘fixed’, always rather low prices ended up changing several times in accordance to the world market (Freon and Weber 1983: 293, 294). Delta dwellers responded to the experienced volatilities by bringing forth rhythmicity for themselves through adjusting timing, relating to other temporalities and adding individual, diverse ‘beats’ and ‘pauses’ (compare to Han 2011; 2012; James 2012, both cited after Bear 2014, 2015): they fished more intensively and embraced credit through kin networks, sold their fish in the villages, only drove to the factory when the calculation of income and costs justified it, took a day's break or, despite the high costs and the time, sailed up north to Joal to sell their catches (Fréon and Weber 1983: 285, 292). If that did not help, fleets were reduced, young men acquired through kin networks as deck hands for purse seining were laid off (Fréon and Weber 1983: 299) or other practices in place, along the coast or on the mainland were embraced (see final section).
The SOPESINE was a prime example of a business seeking to build on both scalability and non-scalability. As Tsing (2012: 506, 2015: 38) notes, scalability describes a form of business the organisation of which is not changed as it expands and integrates new relations. However, during its operation, the SOPESINE relied little on employees and hired labour, controlled input and spatio-temporal translocation like the trawlers described below. Rather, it depended on self-employed fishers and their varying supply on the basis of catch-by-catch sales. These suppliers initially reconfigured their practices and their social organisation to foster spatio-temporal ‘fit’. Yet, they did not build on engineered and spatio-temporally designed fish farms but on the fish that they could get a hold of in the estuaries of the delta and the ocean beyond. This part of the value chain, although characterised by a certain permeation of technology, standardisation of input (i.e. type of fish) and augmented ‘productivity’, was non-scalable: the deltaic fishing grounds are spatially finite and caught up in temporal fish cycles. Fishers, who were not employees, ultimately were the ones who decided on making and/or landing catches or not. Their landings reflected their striving for rhythm and were informed by the prices offered at the SOPESINE and elsewhere, by its limited capacity for fish intake and the corresponding experiences of large discards as well as diminishing catches. The seasonal variations and the increasingly shifting day-to-day landings by fishers then led to a supply pattern that for the SOPESINE, with its limited flexibility, appeared as yet another volatility (cf. Fréon and Weber 1983).
The factory's awkward position as a capitalist enterprise caught up between different (types of) markets and modes of production as well as its peripheral geographical location thus made its business fragile. This highlights, according to Laura Bear, how
capital circulation is not a large scale process with a single logic working its way through history. Its contradictions are not fixed with large-scale mechanisms such as those of credit . . . . Capital circulation is a contingent effect of the conduct of productivity that emerges from specific time-spaces of work. (2015: 149)
For the SOPESINE, some of the volatilities in its contributing elements were anticipated and accounted for. Yet the magnitude of each such volatility and the interdependencies and feedback effects between different volatilities were potentially problematic. Consequently, the history of the SOPESINE was characterised by fragility and, ultimately, failure (see final section).
As other delta communities and especially his direct neighbours embraced the SOPESINE-bound fishing, Boubacar and his colleagues faced scant competition for their ijangaké fishing. And so, driven also by increasing motorisation, the village's fleet of pirogues focusing on the ijangaké grew from six boats in 1976 and 1977, to sixteen in 1979, to well over fifty in 1981 (Fréon and Weber 1983: 299; Moriniere 1980: 3). Pierre Moriniere (1980: 39, 40) estimated the catch in 1979 at 1,032 tons, which results in 370 tons of dried ijangaké per year, more than a fifth of the total assumed catch on the entire coast up to Dakar.
In the shadows of the ‘salvage accumulation’ (Tsing 2015: 66, 301) by the SOPESINE that enmeshed fishers from the delta and beyond, Boubacar and his colleagues took full advantage of their ijangaké fishing. However, another challenge arose, leading the ijangaké fishers to search for a niche literally within the machine.
Gleaning from Capitalists
From the early days of ijangaké fishing, Boubacar and the others from time to time met industrial fishing vessels in the waters in front of the delta. They were owned by Italians, Spaniards, French, Kuwaitis, Polish, Russians, Chinese, Koreans or Taiwanese. Some had Senegalese crews and some operated under a ‘false’ Senegalese flag (cf. Belhabib et al 2013).
The number of industrial vessels grew steadily and drew almost even with the national artisanal fishery until its first peak in the late 1970s (Belhabib et al 2014; Domingo 1982). The vessels signified a threat to Senegalese fishers and fishing grounds and at the same time embodied a dream of many men: la navigation, employment in the commercial fleet. This could mean earning good money, a few weeks’ holidays every few months, building a house at home, investing in a pirogue, looking after the family and gaining reputation in the community.
Ousmane Fall, a younger cousin of Boubacar, is one of the lucky ones who became a navigateur. His career spanned from the 1970s to the 1990s. During this time, he travelled around the world, fished in the waters in front of most of West Africa, Spain, Madagascar and the Seychelles. The ships were Spanish, Korean, French and Chinese-Senegalese owned. When he was far from home, he was working for up to six months, followed by two months of holidays, for which he was flown back to Senegal. When he was working near home, he spent a month at sea and then nearly a week in Dakar. These trips would also lead him to the waters close to his birthplace.
One of his assignments was on a vessel called Soachip, which frequented the waters off Joal, the Sine-Saloum Delta and the Casamance. It was a vessel reflagged from China to Senegal and owned by the African-Chinese Fishing Company Societé africano-chinoise de pêche (SOACHIP) (La Pêche maritime 1985). On board, there was a maximum of thirty people, working in shifts. Ousmane prepared the net, casted and hauled it, and worked in the processing of the fish before it was put on ice. The Soachip was a chalutier, a trawler. With the help of sonar, it monitored the water depth, the bottom quality and schools of fish. It was mainly after fish which populated the bottom, such as red mullet, cod, lobster or sole. So-called bottom trawling (as opposed to pelagic trawling) required grazing the ground, which led to large bycatch – including ijangaké (cf. Chabanne, in preparation, cited in Moriniere 1980).
The Soachip Ousmane worked on was not the only one of its kind; there was a whole fleet of them numbered I to XII. In the words of one of his friends, referring to their ecological impact and ultimately their impact on livelihoods, ‘it was the Soachips that destroyed everything here’ (Lamine Ndong, Fieldnotes 16 October 2019). The reasons for the swaths of destruction in front of the delta included the bottom-trawling method, the penetration into coastal waters and the size of the fleet, but also related to the fact that the vessels ran with false tonnage certificates, lowered in the process of reflagging, so that catches were much higher than accounted for, and revenues from licensing were much lower than they should have been (Greenpeace 2015).
Industrial vessels like the Soachips are mobile fish factories that acquire scalability through continuous movement combined with a reconfiguration of time for their catch through freezing and landings according to international price developments. They thus exploit market volatility by dislocating space and time. Without difference – or, with indifference – they repeat their extractive mode du vie and circulate the West African coast and beyond, following schools of fish across borders and feeding them into a globalised market at certain places and certain points in time.
Driven to foreign waters also by the exhaustion of their domestic fish grounds and fuelled by subsidies (cf. Kaczynski and Fluharty 2002; Sala et al 2018; M. Sarr 2012), they shift through different spatial zones and legal forms and put massive pressure on national states such as Senegal. There, they come and go and change between fishing legally and illegally (Belhabib et al 2014). In roaming along individual trajectories, they cause situated damages while letting the national catch figures jump up and down. In the Sine-Saloum Delta, it was the naturalised Soachip fleet from the 1980s that left the deepest and longest-lasting marks. Industrial vessels are thus not volatile themselves in their search to attune the translocation across space and time with profit maximisation (cf. Bear 2015) while maintaining their practice. Yet they live off a volatile global market and transduce it into precarious working conditions on board and ruination and dispossession in places in which they circulate, which are then again experienced as states of volatilities.
A Soachip (Drawing by Lamine Ndong, 2019)
Citation: Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 31, 4; 10.3167/saas.2023.310409
The ruins that vessels like the Soachips left and leave behind are the ruins others have to live in and with, while the fleets have long moved on. They, in turn, create value in cheque books managed far away from the places they trawl. The work that makes this possible is highly spatially restricted, hard and dangerous. It is normed and repetitive as well as controllable due to the spatial enclosure of the vessels, while at the same time being prone to accidents. The room for ‘doing things differently’ and for new relationships with other humans and non-humans is limited – yet some loopholes for the crew exist.
Whenever Ousmane circulated in the waters close to his home village on the various fishing vessels over the years, he also met his brothers, cousins and neighbours on the water. They were searching for squid or langoustes and, most importantly, were checking their ijangaké nets. In the context of encounters between pirogues and trawlers, barter had developed early on: the trawler crews lowered large nets full of ijangaké into the pirogues, as bycatch from their mission. In exchange, they received cigarettes, sugar and coffee, or even a living sheep. For the fishers of the delta, it was a lucrative but also perilous business. Several men were crushed between pirogue and trawler or slid from the wet planks of the rope ladders down into the sea. Even whole crews disappeared without a trace – probably because they were rammed by a trawler at night. Among the vanished was also Boubacar's brother in law.
In the 1970s, Ousmane repeatedly convinced the captains of his trawlers to keep the ijangaké and not discard them with the other bycatch. He would then see that he could give them to friends and family, or he would exchange them. From the early 1980s on, however, up the coast towards Mbour, some Senegalese navigateurs started to sell the ijangaké for cash to their fellow countrymen (see also Moriniere 1980). Monetisation spread, competition accelerated and with time, Ousmane also felt entitled to take some money for the ijangaké.7 The profits from this trade for the crews were so alluring that, as was said later in the village, some navigateurs persuaded the captains to steer closer to the coast at night to steal the fishers’ nets full of ijangaké.
Purposefully or not, many men indeed lost their ijangaké nets, and therefore their investment, to the trawlers. And some also recounted the nightly stealing of ijangaké from their nets by other fishers. This and the opportunities to buy ijangaké and high-value fish at the trawlers led to a general abandonment of fishing for ijangaké by net and to a full embrace of trade with the trawlers during the 1980s.
Alasane Fall, Boubacar's nephew born in 1970, who went out to the trawlers with his older brothers from a young age, vividly remembered:
One day mid-1980s, me and my brothers drove out to search for a big ship. There was no GPS at that time, so you had to navigate on sight and orientate ourselves with the help of the sun, the stars, the wind and the waves. Around 30 or 40 kilometres off the coast, we spotted a ship and set course. One of my brothers went to the front of the pirogue and prepared the rope. Behind us ten pirogues from Joal were trying to surpass us, but we arrived first. We knew we had to dock in a way that the waves would not throw us against the big ship, so both us and the ship needed to point towards the waves. After throwing the rope up and getting tied to the ship, two of my brothers jumped through one of the small windows. They negotiated with the Chinese and Senegalese crewmembers. The Senegalese on the ship understood a bit of Chinese, the Chinese understood a bit of Wolof and this is how they managed. They paid 200,000 Francs and our pirogue got filled with ijangaké. Later we sold the ijangaké for 550,000 Francs, so that with the expenditures, we made 300,000 Francs that day. We were very happy. (Interview, 14 October 2019)
During the accelerating commercialisation of the ijanga in the early 1980s, deltaic ijanga fishing and then trading thus became a business that was highly profitable and assembled far-reaching hierarchic relations and forms of dependency – the ijangaké themselves and other bycatch, industrial vessels, their owners and their crews, fishers, female processors and traders, and consumers across Senegal. In the Sine-Saloum Delta, at the same time, it remained largely tied to one village, the village of Alasane, Boubacar, Soukeyna, Fatou and Ousmane.
While the fishing and trade at sea was men's work, it was women who processed and then traded the ijangaké across the country along existing female trading networks. Many turned into full-time banabanaké (traders) and abandoned or paused other activities, as outlined above. Moreover, it was the women who financed the men. In Alasane's words,
the real profiteers were the women who processed and traded the ijangaké. They often advanced our gasoline and you could see them walking around with 500,000 Francs in their pockets just to buy ijangaké. (Interview, 14 October 2019)
Conceptualising Gleaning and Rhythming
Riding on the back of industrial trawling that forcefully replaced ijangaké fishing by net, Alasane and Ousmane and their kin and colleagues were engaged in a dangerous business, implicated in and profiting from exploitative fishing and massive ecological destruction. Their practice could be described as a form of gleaning. As outlined above, the salvaging of deltaic fishers for the SOPESINE factory meant that fishers related themselves with their skills to the factory and fed it trade material from the deltaic fish-grounds. The SOPESINE factory thus relied on ‘salvage accumulation’, describing ‘the process through which value created in noncapitalist value forms is translated into capitalist assets, allowing accumulation’ (Tsing 2015: 301). Salvaged things might turn once again into gifts (Tsing 2015), yet they do not have to; they may remain commodities. The sea-snail gleaning from the trawlers pointed the other way around. It was about the ‘invisible’ surplus of capitalism and about obscuring its value from capitalism. In other words, it was about performing surplus as remainder while redescribing its value, and feeding it into another, non-capitalist market organised by women.
For captains and trawler owners, ijangaké were seen as part of the bycatch, without (exchange) value in comparison to the fish caught. This created a dichotomy of categories in which catch (i.e. certain types of fish) figured as one entity and bycatch as the ‘other’ entity. For the crews and the fishers and traders from the delta, however, within the bycatch there was yet another valuable entity ready to acquire its own exchange value. They hence increased the efficiency of trawling, but to their benefit. Successful gleaning thereby hinged on the maintenance of the value dichotomy and the comparability of entities; the semblance that gleaning is and remains marginal in comparison and that surplus is just obscure, hardly quantifiable, non-priceable and non-exchangeable bycatch – or, remainder.8 By performing the ‘other’, gleaners like Ousmane both confirmed and decentred social and economic hierarchies: in redescribing value and relation under the premise of marginality, they renegotiated ownership and possession as well as labour. They transgressed their alienating positioning and claimed room for manoeuvre from captains and owners; the right to glean while working. They still laboured and let the skills they brought with them get salvaged (cf. Tsing 2009). But at the same time, by gleaning while working, they demonstrated how there are limitations in the rationalisation of labour in capitalist projects. Moreover, they created double value, once for the owners, once for themselves, yet only the former appeared in the owners’ cheque books, and from their perspective, the trawler business remained unthreatened and unchanged. For Ousmane and the others, lives, however, did change.
The alienation of things and the veiling of how and by whom they travel through value chains is crucial for ‘salvage accumulation’ (Tsing 2015: 66, 301). The sea-snail market, in turn, was largely unknown and inaccessible to capitalists (i.e. trawler owners); they would not have known how and where, or to whom, to sell the ijangaké. Beyond their grasp, however, ijangaké were traded with reference to those who gleaned and exchanged them. Starting with the encounters at sea and from there reverberating across the country, this trade was a particular economic practice beyond global consumption and the world market (cf. Gibson-Graham 2002); it was not linked to it in a way that was ‘sending value up’ to the cheque books of capitalists. In an assemblage of related people differently positioned towards this world market, gleaning was about reaping its own kind of profits. Gleaners and others sought to attune to or appropriate certain capitalist principles such as standardisation, accumulation, scalability, alienation, predictability or efficiency, and they enjoyed business and negotiation – the ‘art of the deal’ – as do capitalists. But their trade at the same time had other aims that differed from these capitalist principles and transcended them, and their well-being was rather about learning to live a life within limits (cf. Jackson 2011) and to shift between practices without having to push them to the fullest. Gleaning as described for the ijangaké trade is thus not limited to subsistence, but is extractive without being exhaustive. In addition, it establishes value, while going beyond physically producing or cultivating things. It is often socio-economically peripheral and enabled by outside factors, yet within these constraints and because it is peripheral, it unfolds according to its own aims and can be self-determined and lucrative.
The ijangaké trade as gleaning was intricately entwined with capitalist process and its ruination and did not explicitly threaten it. It was a multi-relational, non-scalable project unfolding from within a scaling project, which was what made it possible and profitable in this form. And thereby, whereas the SOPESINE helped to turn Djifère and the deltaic waters into a peri-capitalist site, the delta dwellers turned trawlers from capitalist sites into peri-capitalist sites. Gleaning can hence be understood as a ‘minor tactic’ (cf. De Certeau 2002 [1980]; Deleuze and Guattari 1986 [1975]) to nurture a niche, to establish a minor reality within and entwined with the major reality – hybrid, but distinct; both confirming and decentring social and economic hierarchies.9 Such gleaning as a ‘minor tactic’ can empower the subaltern, for example to renegotiate ownership and possession and redescribe value, earn a livelihood and appropriate – or not fully engage in – labour relations (see also Simon 2023). And it can figure as a pressure-release valve of structural inequalities and allow the dominant to eschew responsibilities towards the subaltern, such as (higher) wages or social security (cf. Dikovic 2016; Gorman 2019). At the same time, gleaning as a ‘minor tactic’ breathes a sense of justice and implicitly questions the givenness of hierarchies and the establishment of property and value (cf. Marx 2021 [1842]).
Industrial fishing is all about ‘precision nesting’ of scales (Tsing 2012: 507), the maintenance of a preconfigured relationship between fixed entities while expanding, including a standardisation of inputs, namely certain types of fish. At the same time, it produces bycatch that does not neatly fit into this scheme and opens up the possibility for new relations. Gleaning is about actively exploring such openings. It is not a stumbling over a remainder, an absorption of the ‘trickle-down leakage’ of the ‘unhinged flow’ of capitalism (cf. Bize 2020). Liberal fantasies aside, gleaning forges its own ways through the cracks of capitalism.
These ways are, on the one hand, characterised by chance, indeterminacy or openness, as one does not know for sure what one will encounter in advance or for how long, and as gleaning takes on form in the present, in the doing itself. On the other hand, the ways of gleaning are also characterised by chances missed, by omission or things that are overlooked, unachieved or avoided and eventually gleaned another time (see Simon 2021). On the trawlers, gleaning's contingency was informed by labour relations, the volatile world market and how trawlers tried to attune their practice to it and move accordingly, the tidal waters and the movements and recreation cycles of sea snails, spirits mediating their prevalence,10 trawling techniques and nets, and so forth. Such assemblages came to promise some gleanings, but navigateurs like Ousmane would not know for sure whether they would occur, or in what form, or for how long they might last, and hence needed to be attentive and then act situatedly and flexibly – and also accept omission.11 The case was similar with their kin in the pirogues.
Chance and omission render gleaning open, partial and gradual, and mean that in gleaning pause and action interlock and are constitutive of each other. At the same time, gleaning is directed, and is a means of close engagement with the world as well as a way of presencing certain aspects of it in the doing; articulating them from undefined horizons into figures (Merleau-Ponty 2002 [1945]: 35). It relies on bringing forth an emplaced and open-ended rhythm of practice through an individual and productive alignment with socio-environmental contexts and their movements and the possibilities they afford.
What carried the ijangaké trade forward was thus a certain gleaning rhythmicity that, like ‘salvage rhythms’ (Tsing 2015: 131, 132), is about spatiotemporal coordination without standardisation and one singular pulse of progress and about a productive repetition that brings forth difference and multiplicity (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Lefebvre 2004 [1992]). Echoing how capitalist labour increasingly hinges on socially shared, speculative transgressions of existing ethics, knowledge and routines to disclose and explore ‘hidden, opaque realities’ and their ‘potentials’ (Bear 2015: 19), gleaning from and salvaging for capitalists are ways of not just reacting and responding to trawler- and factory-induced capitalist volatilities, but also about exploring them as opportunities from ‘below’ and profiting from them in one's own way: volatilities are taken up as open-ended opportunities and ‘spun further’ with creativity, skill and flexibility. Thereby, rather than being perceived as a singular, irregular event or phase from ‘the outside’, volatility is pluralised and integrated – and made valuable.
Delta dwellers did not strive to tame or control volatilities but to engage with them through mastering the self in relation to them (cf. Simon 2021). By means of gleaning and salvaging, they both forged rhythmicity within volatilities and wove them into a wider, rhythmic meshwork of practice (cf. Ingold 2006) characterised by the Serer Niominka's distinct social organisation of work around ‘twelve professions’ and the close alignment with the temporalities of the deltaic ecology. It is a rhythmicity that provides self-determined orientation, progression and balance and fosters shared meaning and response-ability (cf. Haraway 2008), and is itself emergent as well as deeply transformative for those involved (cf. Tsing 2012).
Rhythmically navigating between ‘twelve professions’ is not preconceived but unfolds according to different emergent assemblages and temporalities. It can mean shifting between practices on a daily basis, or working for a few days and then taking a break, for instance until the tides are right again, and doing other things during this break. Or it can mean focusing on something for years and then reorienting oneself, or balancing it with other occupations once it starts to lose its attraction. The SOPESINE-bound fishing and the ijangaké trade with the trawlers were among the many time-limited occupations.
Coda, or Moving On
In 1981, the SOPESINE, which had been unprofitable for a long time, temporarily closed for the first time. In response, a number of deltaic fishers started to embark on fishing campaigns with their purse seiners, or paused them, or used parts to equip smaller pirogues, or sold them off (Chauveau and Laloë 1985: 114; Chauveau and Samba 1989: 612). Others increasingly returned to what was left of agriculture (mainly millet farming), laboured on the mainland or engaged in coastal trade. Despite state support and shifts to smoking, salting and drying, the SOPESINE remained only a shadow of itself until its final end in 1986. Equally, the existence of its successor, the company Delta Océan, which bought the SOPESINE factory to produce ice for local fishers and transported it to Joal and Dakar, was short-lived. It was disbanded in the 1990s (Bousso 1991: 12; Deme and Kebe 1993: 16, 17; O. Sarr 2005: 61). Again, the volatilities in terms of accessibility of the dirt road and of fresh water supply appeared as the main obstacles on the ground (Deme and Kebe 1993: 16). In addition, the factory was affected by increasing coastal erosion and repeatedly experienced seawater and sand intrusion (UEMOA-UICN 2010: 7).
Despite all the capital flowing into it, the SOPESINE struggled throughout its existence to establish a steady relation outwards as well as stable circumstances on the ground in order to create and maintain a stable product. In the end, as much as it placed its bet on speculative calculations and realisations of profit, it was insufficiently flexible to deal sustainably with the global and deltaic volatilities it was enmeshed in. Yet, although it ultimately failed to overcome its scalar gaps (Eriksen, this volume) and adequately transform itself, it helped to transform Djifère and the deltaic waters into a lasting peri-capitalist site.12 From a fisher camp, Djifère developed into one of the most important fish ports at the coast.
The first time I arrived in Djifère to embark on a visit to the delta, in late 2017, was during a period when there were hardly any people, cooling trucks or fishing pirogues. Moving towards the shore in search for transport, I noticed a cracking sound and a strange texture under my feet. Looking down, I realised that I was walking on what I learned later were the cracked shells of ijangaké and other sea snails.
I asked my way around and was directed to a man who was just getting his pirogue ready for departure. It was Alasane. During the coming months, he told me of his experiences with the ijangaké trade, how he got involved in it and how he eventually abandoned it.
Toward the beginning of the 1990s, he recounted, the trade with ijangaké became less and less remunerative: the rising competition and purchase prices at the trawlers, the cost of petrol and materials, the devaluation of the regional currency CFA-Franc and the decimated stocks – all took a toll. He recalled how, ‘in the beginning, when we started to buy from the ships, we had a profit margin of at least 1 to 2 [i.e. expenses to turnover]. But over time that dissolved into nothing’ (Interview, 18 November 2018). Therefore, he and his colleagues, similarly to the neighbouring delta dwellers who abandoned SOPESINE-bound fishing described above, started to embrace and shift between an array of new and established practices and trajectories in and beyond the delta. Among them was fishing on campaigns or in the delta, whereby especially the fishing for high-value shrimp and squid became widespread during the 1990s (O. Sarr 2005: 83). This was also what Alasane focused on before he became a tourist guide and, when the hotel he worked for closed, he returned to fishing and the shipping of goods. Some men from Alasane's village also drove out to the trawlers from time to time until well into the noughties, but the big ijangaké boom was over.13
When I told Alasane about the shells I had stepped on in Djifère, he told me how some Lébou and Wolof people, from whom Boubacar had learned to make his net, were today fishing for ijangaké and other sea snails. Alternatively, they would find them in their bycatch. Some of the sea snails were sold on the beach and then cracked immediately, whereby the shells accrete and at a certain point get distributed to solidify the muddy ground for the cooling trucks with their continuous leakage of melted ice. Some types of sea snails, including one sub-type of ijangaké, also get sold intact to Chinese factories further up the coast, established rather recently, sometimes in the ruins of bankrupted fish factories from earlier days: another example of salvaging.
Occasionally, Alasane joked that he would put his uncle's ijangaké net to use again. But he also once highlighted that every person had individual talents and every generation had its foci. Pointing to the two old men, who were dozing in their hammocks, he said:
Boubacar there was the first to fish ijangaké with his men, Ousmane was a navigateur. Soukeyna and the women traded ijangaké. We were into trading ijangaké with the trawlers, and I was later into tourism, fishing, transporting. You cannot go back to everything. Life goes on, new things come up. (Fieldnotes, 14 October 2019)
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to all my interlocutors, friends, mentors, companions and hosts. I also thank Julian Schmischke, Karen Ho, my colleagues of the DELTA project, the jury of the Harold K. Schneider Student Paper Prize in Economic Anthropology and the Society of Economic Anthropology (SEA), the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their support and feedback.
Notes
The Wolof are the largest ethnic group of Senegal and live in northwestern Senegal, Gambia, and southwestern Mauritania. The Lébou (also Lebu a.o.) are historically related to the Wolof, renowned as fisher people and predominantly live in the Cap-Vert peninsula of today's Dakar.
All names of interlocutors have been anonymised.
Through time, gleaning has always been marked by variability – such as the gleaning for agricultural produce mentioned in the Old Testament; the different forms of gleaning widely practised in the early modern period in Europe until its demise in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries due to enclosure and increases in production efficiency; the gleaning repopularised in recent years by food-saving movements in the Global North; or the forms described for the Global South (see Bize 2020, 2022; Gibson-Graham 2005; Kristiawan 2017; Scott 1985; Simon 2023; Stoler 1977). For more on the history of gleaning, see for example, Bardi (2015), Bize (2020), Cherkaev (2023), Hussey (1997), King (1989, 1991), Marx (2021 [1842]), Moll (2020) or Vardi (1993).
I hence use gleaning as an analytical category that describes economic practices at the margins of capitalist projects, relating to but not being contained by them.
In a historical perspective, gleaning has sometimes been deemed a practice of commoning and defending possession and use rights against property and enclosure (Moll 2020: 44). Moreover, with gleaning understood as a subsistence practice ‘embedded’ in a moral economy, gleanings have been described as having use-value as opposed to the exchange-value of the things gleaned from (cf. Bardi 2015). Contemporary forms of gleaning such as the one described here, on the other hand, can bring forth exchange value and could be seen as an in-between practice that is both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ capitalism, reaping from it its own profits.
The introduction of the industrial purse-seining method through the FAO, in the early 1970s, had a lasting effect on Senegal's pêche artisanale (cf. Chauveau and Samba 1989; Fréon and Weber 1983; Sarr 2005). Assembling two large pirogues up to 20 metres in length and with up to 24 tons capacity, around 20 fishers, motors of up to 40 horsepower and nets up to 300 × 40 metres (Fréon and Weber 1983: 267, 268, 287), purse seining indeed constitutes a form of industrialisation of artisanal fishing. It was this method that was predominantly used to fish for the SOPESINE factory.
Occasionally, he and his crews also sold some fish to the docking pirogues and then underreported their catch back in Dakar.
The remainder is an ambivalent and fragile category that lives off not being easily definable. In a historical perspective, the question has been brought up to what degree the remainder used to be intentional or inevitable due to the production processes – for example, harvesting crops by sickle or by combine harvester brings out very different amounts of remainder – and due to the economic principle that more costs are needed for the ‘last mile’ of efficiency (Bardi 2015). Moreover, what initially did not have (exchange-)value in the dominant markets (e.g. dead wood) can acquire such value and get claimed by the dominant (e.g. Marx 2021 [1842]). As the subaltern are only granted the ‘minor’ remainder, gleaning is always in danger of being (perceived as) too profitable or as too destabilising for property and production, or as pilfering or a gateway towards it (e.g. King 1992; Vardi 1993). Alternatively, gleaning might be subverted and turned into a part of workers’ wages or into salvaging. The question of whether gleaning is still gleaning when the subalterns claim the right to glean but the dominant consider it pilfering has been answered in different ways (compare Bize 2020; Dikovic 2016). The ijangaké trade described here, however, cannot be framed as pilfering since trawler owners tolerated it and captains helped to make it possible.
In this vain, Tsing (2015: 301) notes that ‘economic diversity makes capitalism possible’ while also offering the possibility of ‘instability and refusal of capitalist governance’.
As described elsewhere (Simon 2023), for dwellers of the Sine-Saloum Delta, (ancestral) spirits can communicate with humans via molluscs and be responsible for the molluscs’ occurrence. This multispecies gleaning arrangement revolving around the benevolence of spirits calls to mind that Marx (2021 [1842]), in discussing gleaning and the right to property, deemed the branches fallen from trees as a sort of gift of nature to the deserving poor.
With gleaning unfolding without many tools and in indeterminate, yet agentive ways, it is far from alienated labour and its purpose-orientedness and can be seen as what Marx in his early writings has termed a ’free activity’ (see e.g. Maidan 1989)
Also, the company's fragility and ultimate failure does not mean that some of its stakeholders did not make profit from it.
Across the delta, ijangaké and other sea snails are today still sought after with the help of wooden or metal poles by some women and through diving by a few men, are ‘bycatch’ in the seeking for cockles or are bought from Lébou and Wolof fishers to be processed.
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