Gleaning is an age-old practice grounded in the right of the subaltern to the remainder, and the obligation of the dominant to produce and/or grant access to this remainder under conditions of marginality. Drawing on the history of gleaning and contemporary empirical examples from Senegal, this talk aims to elucidate the character of gleaning and to move beyond its portrayal as a pre-capitalist ‘custom’ of commoning. It shows how gleaning arrangements in Senegal invoke different moral registers, such as coosan (Wolof for culture, tradition), or the Islamic principle of zakat with their norms of (female) subalternity and neediness, benevolence, or mutual aid, which again obscure the profitability of gleaning and its embedding in emerging values of private economic prosperity. As such, gleaning, this talk traces, can be a key, if fragile livelihood practice especially for women that also allows to eschew labour relations or can figure as an integral part of and a means of reshaping labour relations. Gleaning as a ‘minor tactic’ thus creates distinct, if entwined minor niches within hierarchical socio-economic relations and their dynamics of marginalisation, dispossession and ruination. Gleaning is thereby permeated by indeterminacy and limits and both affirms and decenters these relations, while breathing a sense of justice and figuring as a larger promise that questions the givenness of hierarchies, the character of work/labour and the establishment of property and value.
Details:
Tuesday, 5 August 2025
13:00 – 14:00 SAST
PLAAS seminar room, 2nd Floor, Jakes Gerwel Hall (Main Hall), UWC
Register via Zoom
Biography:
Sandro Simon is a postdoctoral researcher at the Global South Studies Center (GSSC) of the University of Cologne and a member of the VW project Medium-Scale Farmers in Rural Africa. He is affiliated with the Centre for Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities (MESH), the CRC Future Rural Africa, and the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne. His academic stations include the universities of Freiburg i. Br. (DE), Basel (CH), Groningen (NL), Minnesota (USA) and Cologne (DE) and he has been part of the DFG Emmy Noether Junior Research Group DELTA. He has also worked for NGOs in Switzerland and Ecuador. Sandro’s research has explored moral economies and food systems, mobilities, infrastructures, and multispecies relations across wet and dry environments in west-, east-, southern- and central Africa, as well as southern Europe.
He works at the intersections of environmental and economic anthropology, the anthropology of work and of migration, legal anthropology, science and technology studies, poststructuralism and phenomenology. He does so multimodally, combining different methods and forms of representation, such as film, sound, photography, academic text, and creative non-fiction.
