Snack Sharing and the Moral Metalanguage of Exchange: Children's Reproduction of Rank‐Based Redistribution in Senegal

Abstract

Adults in Senegal explain children's snack sharing practices as the product of gender and age differences in children's temperament, describing older girls as better behaved and thus better suited to divvy up food. But close examination of children's language practices while sharing food reveals the nuanced semiotic strategies they draw on to negotiate rights to material resources. This article builds on Judith Irvine's research into the intersections of language and material exchange, to shed light on the ways children participate in the reproduction of linguistic forms that mediate material circulation. Analysis of snack sharing between siblings in Dakar illustrates how children embody contrasting semiotic practices linked to caste‐based modes of behavior. I argue that the semiotic resources children use to negotiate obligation and entitlement while sharing food can illuminate the naturalization of morally charged forms of language materiality that underpin material circulation according to asymmetrical, but complimentary social roles.

Cuisine, Health and Table Manners: Food Boundaries and Forms of Distinction among Primary School Children

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“…While some might want to set aside analytical types as crude representations of practice, they are forced to reckon with people's constant use of similar local types for communicative, moral, political, and conceptual work (on “officializing strategies,” see Bourdieu 1977; see also McIntosh 2018). That is, as shown by other anthropologists attentive to the reflexive dimensions of exchange (e.g., Keane 2008; Schram 2016; Valeri 1994; Yount‐André 2016), actors like Dii are often as committed to their own types and convinced in their realness as Dalton or Bohannan. These local types are fundamentally as ill‐fitting to “fuzzy” practice as the crudest analytics.…”