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 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 introduces gleaning trans-culturally and focuses on two examples from the Sine-Saloum Delta, Senegal. The first inquires how gleaning for molluscs safeguards deltaic waters as a female sphere by appeasing ancestral guardian spirits and evoking a longstanding female subalternity and norms of benevolence and mutual aid. This also obscures the profitability of gleaning. At the same time, 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 labour, and turned trawlers from capitalist- into peri-capitalist sites (pointing into the opposite direction of salvage accumulation). Gleaning as what I term a ‘minor tactic’ thus creates distinct, if entwined niches of 'freedom' within conditions of 'unfreedom', that is, hierarchical socio-economic relations and their dynamics of dispossession and ruination. It is a fragile practice characterized by indeterminacy and limits requiring close attention to changing environmental and socio-economic contexts. It simultaneously confirms and decenters hierarchical relations across the rural-urban nexus, while figuring as a larger promise that questions the establishment of property and value and the character of work/labour and its alienation from the environment.