Serving status on the Gambia river before and after abolition

• Liza Gijanto ^[1]
  1. [1] St. Mary's College of Maryland

     St. Mary's College of Maryland

     Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Current anthropology: A world journal of the sciences of man, ISSN 0011-3204, Nº. Extra 22, 2020 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Atlantic Slavery and the Making of the Modern World), págs. 260-275
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The Atlantic slave trade and its abolition created two distinct commercial spaces on the Gambia River that represent the use of similar tactics to project socioeconomic identities at different points in the Atlantic trade that are compared in this paper. First, the trading village of Juffure, at the heart of the Niumi polity’s commercial center, gained prominence during the height of the trade in the eighteenth century. It became home to a multiethnic community whose residents were entangled to varying degrees in commerce. Community members asserted status and identity through material means that were based in established traditions of crafting and feasting. A second and distinct commercial space emerged at the city of Bathurst, which the British established following abolition in 1807. This new commercial center took shape with its own unique multiethnic community. At Bathurst the “Liberated Africans” utilized Western middle-class practices including meals to assert their identity as African elite. Thus, both the Liberated Africans and residents of Juffure used foodways to project specific identities to gain entry into commerce.