An Ethnography of Hunger: Politics, Subsistence, and the Unpredictable Grace of the Sun [Paperback]

InAn Ethnography of HungerKristin D. Phillips examines how rural farmers in central Tanzania negotiate the interconnected projects of subsistence, politics, and rural development. Writing against stereotypical Western media images of spectacular famine in Africa, she examines how people live withrather than die fromhunger. Through tracing the seasonal cycles of drought, plenty, and suffering and the political cycles of elections, development, and state extraction, Phillips studies hunger as a pattern of relationships and practices that organizes access to food and profoundly shapes agrarian lives and livelihoods. Amid extreme inequality and unpredictability, rural people pursue subsistence by alternating betweenand sometimes combiningrights and reciprocity, a political form that she calls subsistence citizenship. Phillips argues that studying subsistence is essential to understanding the persistence of global poverty, how people vote, and why development projects succeed or fail.

Kristin D. Phillips is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Emory University. Her work has appeared inAfrican Studies Review, PoLAR:Political and Legal Anthropology, Comparative Education Review,andCritical Studies in Education.

Kristin Phillips has written a compelling, compassionate exploration of the social life of food and hunger in rural Tanzania. She masterfully evokes the voices and visions of everyday people seeking economic security and political justice in the face of deepening inequalities, a negligent state, and exploitative development projects.An Ethnography of Hungershould be read by anyone interested in the intersections of food, power, and sociality in agrarian communities.

This book presents an empirically detailed and powerfully argued analysis of how rural communities negotiate precarious livelihoods amidst pressures to participate in local development.