Paper short abstract:

Negotiated around a social contract of benevolence and marginality, contemporary gleaning simultaneously confirms and decenters socio-economic hierarchies and invokes the possibilities of life entwined in-, yet transgressing racialised and gendered dispossession and ruination under late Capitalism.

Paper long abstract:

Gleaning describes the age old right of the subaltern to the remainder and the obligation of the dominant to produce and/or allow access to the remainder under the premise of marginality. This paper traces descriptions of gleaning across space and time before focussing on two contemporary examples from the Sine-Saloum Delta, Senegal. The first inquires how gleaning for molluscs in the rising and warming deltaic waters is safeguarded as a distinctly female practice and its profitabilty obscured by appeasing ancestral guardian spirits and by evoking a longstanding female subalternity and gleaning’s historical embedding in norms of benevolence and mutual aid. Simultaneously, gleaning allows women to eschew labour relations introduced e.g. by NGO projects. The second example inquires how deltaic deck hands gleaned molluscs from the bycatch of industrial trawlers. By performing the marginality of this bycatch while redescribing its value and exchanging it along female networks, they realised their own gains from it, renegotiated ownership and possession as well as precarious labour. Exploring marginal potentials of given circumstances marked by anthropocenic and capitalist volatilities, gleaning as what I term a ’minor tactic’ thus attunes to- and creates distinct, if entwined minor niches within hierarchical socio-economic relations and their dynamics of dispossession and ruination. It is a fragile practice, permeated by indeterminacy and limits and both confirms and decenters these relations, while breathing a sense of justice and figuring as a larger promise that questions the giveness of hierarchies, the character of work/labour and the establishment of property and value.