The Art of Gleaning and Not Becoming Domesticated in Mollusc Waterworlds

Abstract

In the Sine-Saloum Delta, Senegal, development actors strive to ‘develop’ female mollusc gleaning. In an apparently boundless amphibious environment, domestication underlined by discursive dispossession figures as an attractive alteration of enclosure and material dispossession. It intervenes especially temporally in human and mollusc life and overlays the (material) dialectic of capitalist ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ with one of bringing humans and molluscs from an ‘archaic’ and ‘wild’ ‘outside’ into a ‘modern’ and ‘cultivated’ ‘inside’. However, domestication projects remain entangled with the unruliness of molluscs and waters, and struggle with organisational problems and the agency of gleaners. The latter seek to foster and profit from the continuous production of ‘outsides’ and ‘insides’. They attract, appropriate and undermine projects and integrate them as mere additions into their gleaning practice. In upholding their gleaning practice and complicating mollusc domestication in alliance with unruly molluscs and waters, I argue, gleaners can also resist their own domestication.

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