Embodied Engineering: Gendered Labor, Food Security, and Taste in Twentieth-Century Mali by Laura Ann Twagira (review)

Reviewed by:

• Embodied Engineering: Gendered Labor, Food Security, and Taste in Twentieth-Century Mali by Laura Ann Twagira
• Devon Golaszewski (bio)

Embodied Engineering: Gendered Labor, Food Security, and Taste in Twentieth-Century Mali By Laura Ann Twagira. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2021. Pp. 344.

In her introduction to this journal's April 2020 special issue on "Africanizing the History of Technology," Laura Ann Twagira identified key themes emerging from scholarship centering African experiences of technology, including technology in action, the remaking of infrastructure, scarcity, and creativity. Twagira's new book, Embodied Engineering, takes up these themes via a history of African women's food production, enriching the literature on both the history of technology in Africa and studies of gender and technology.

Embodied Engineering redefines food security as encompassing the quality, not just quantity, of food: its taste, color, texture; its familiarity and capacity to evoke memory and satiety; its place at the center of household relationships and Malian norms of hospitality; its nutritiousness; and the laboriousness or ease of its production. Malian women were responsible for producing this fulfilling food—labor that included not only cooking but also collecting firewood and wild plants, growing garden produce, pounding grains, producing shea-nut cooking oil, and other work. Centering the historical importance of everyday or "modest technologies" like the hoe, metal pot, and wrap skirt, Twagira reveals how Malian women's skill, knowledge, and innovative use of these technologies allowed them to make the landscape a food resource (p. 3). [End Page 365]

In chapter 1, focused on the early twentieth century, Twagira masterfully uses folktales to show how Malian women produced satisfying meals from both cultivated and wild lands. Chapters 2–4 trace life in the Office du Niger, a 100,000-hectare agricultural scheme in central Mali, initially created in the 1930s by colonial officials and maintained after Mali's independence from France in 1960. Because of the deep association of the Office du Niger with mechanized, industrialized, and export-oriented agriculture, Twagira's choice to explore women's food production in this context produces intriguing juxtapositions that allow her to renarrate the history of technological change in West Africa.

Chapter 2 identifies the interrelationship of food production and social relationships. Colonial officials imagined the Office du Niger to be a model site of "modern" agriculture. But for Malians, it was a space of violence, including forced resettlement, isolation, and food shortages. This was epitomized by the lack of women residents and their difficulty in producing food, as the Office du Niger reordered the landscape into a matrix of roads, canals, fields, and protected forests, limiting women's access to food sources like gardens and wild trees. Chapter 3 examines how women ultimately adapted the Office du Niger's infrastructure into a useful foodscape, for example by building rock staircases to more easily draw water from irrigation canals. In chapter 4, Twagira pairs changes in agricultural technology, like the introduction of mechanized threshers, with a parallel "modest technological revolution," epitomized by the replacement of clay cooking pots with metal ones (negeda) after World War II. Young women, specifically brides, were the technological innovators, as they introduced metal pots via their dowry of household goods. Metal pots altered the dynamics of labor time by cooking food faster and requiring less wood, saving women time that they reallocated to other tasks. This chapter also offers an excellent example of Twagira's attention to the sensory and embodied experiences of food production, engaging Marcel Mauss's concept of the "body as a natural tool" (pp. 149–50)—metal pots required new physical movements when stirring the thick staple porridge toh and produced new sounds as the stirring spoon hit the pot's walls. The final chapter presents a visceral exploration of food insecurity during the 1969–73 Sahelian drought and famine. While the Office du Niger was comparatively better off than other areas of Mali, the postcolonial regime sought to monopolize the region's rice production via coercive measures. As in earlier eras, it was Malian women who were responsible for food security, whether by making food aid palatable or hiding bundles of rice from anti-smuggling police by disguising it as...