Sorghum as a Gift of Self: the Jie Harvest Ritual Through Time

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The purpose of this paper is to present an interpretation of sorghum as the dominant metaphor of self among the Jie people, and the offering of sorghum to the Turkana women by the Jie women as a gift. The literature on food as self is extensive, emerging from various key theorists who have defined the field of food and the semiotics of food (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993; Parry 1985; Raheja 1988). These scholars are keenly aware of the symbolic utility of food as constitutive features of self identity, and they have examined the interplay between self and food and tropes. For Ohnuki-Tierney, for instance, food and food production, and their associations with metaphors, define and produce meaning. Her interpretation of rice grain as one of the foundational categories of the Japanese traditional polity explicates the role commensality of rice plays in defining boundaries between people who share the commensal food and those who do not. As each member of the commensal consume the food, the food becomes a part of his or her body. The food embodied in each individual "...operates as a metonym by being part of the self" (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993:130). In this paper I extend Ohnuki-Tierney's theoretical model in understanding the role sorghum symbolism and metaphors play in producing identities and social relations of power in the Jie society and in the Jie people's interethnic relationship with their Turkana neighbors.

Metaphors used in everyday practice, or "metaphors we live by," as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's (1980; also see Ohnuki-Tierney 1993:5) phrase puts it, link figurative realms with everyday empirical practices. In this sense various metaphors of sorghum inform the Jie people's understanding of their sense of who they are and provide them with the necessary discourse to negotiate their relationships. As I have shown elsewhere (Mirzeler 2004), the major characterization of sorghum as the dominant metaphor of the Jie collective identity has been most vividly articulated in the interconnection of a well-known Jie and Turkana oral tradition of origin and the Jie harvest rituals. This tradition depicts the journey of Nayeche, a Jie woman, from the Karamoja Plateau to the plains of Turkana, following the footprints of an ancestral bull named Engiro. The mythic journey of Nayeche and the bull Engiro is connected to the phases of the Jie harvest rituals, which coincide with the annual return of the Jie cattle from the east, near the plains of Turkana, to Najie in the central Karamoja Plateau.

The interconnection between the Jie and the Turkana oral tradition of origin and the phases of the harvest ritual facilitates the circulation of sorghum grain between the Jie people and their fire-maker, the Jie politico-religious leader, and between the Jie and the Turkana women. Since this paper's primary concern is to explore sorghum as the dominant metaphor of the Jie people's collective self, and the role of sorghum metaphor in the interethnic relationship between the Jie and the Turkana people, I concentrate on the Jie people and sorghum first and foremost.

First, I introduce the Jie people and examine the place of sorghum in their cosmology and culture. I also explore the dual and complimentary nature of Akuj and Ekipe, the Jie deities.² Akuj and Ekipe are crucial for understanding sorghum as the dominant metaphor of the Jie people, as well as the harvest ritual. I then discuss the Jie and the Turkana oral tradition depicting the separation of the Turkana people from the Jie people, in order to examine the structure of meaning underlying the oral tradition in the broad context of the Jie cosmology, and the Turkana and Jie economic interdependence. I argue that blood, sorghum grain, and wild-fruit sacrifices in the history of the Jie led to the establishment of the harvest rituals, and Orwakol, the original ancestor and the first fire-maker of the Jie people, legitimated his power by his ability to ensure a bountiful crop of sorghum and a safe return of the Jie cattle from...