Paper Short Abstract:

Centered on Cape Verdean institutional records, individual testimonies, and cyclical famines’ imaginary, this ethnography addresses how social memory deconstructs unilateral visions of history whilst broadening the scope of ethnographic research.

Paper Abstract:

Cyclical, famines are a symbolic element of Cape Verdean culture, a phenomenon that belongs to both collective and individual memory. Famines are an object of artistic sublimation and regarded as an identity symbol. Located in the Central Atlantic, the archipelago was colonially exploited by the Portuguese for over four centuries, a historical process that, alongside the country’s climatic and geographic constraints, can be identified as one of the major drivers for the famine's cyclicality. Part of the country’s history, great famines and the tales surrounding them indicate that the poor administration of such events, the lack of natural resources and the oppression of the regime led to the assimilation of such phenomena as inevitable and directly associated with Cape Verdean identity and daily life on the islands.

This analysis is centered on three different dimensions in which “historicizing hunger” takes place: the collective, the individual and the institutional. Resulting from two years of ethnographic research in Santiago, each dimension was addressed through multiple methodologies ranging from fieldwork to interviews and archival research. By comparing these many testimonies and documents, some major issues will be discussed: what do the disparities indicate regarding official history and its refutation? Considering the gaps between versions, what impact does research on social memory has on potential rewritings of colonial histories?

This attempt in bridging collective memory, official records and individual experiences will also address the treatment of such data, methodological dilemmas and the ways in which local memory changed my ethnographic experience.