Palm Oil Diaspora: Afro-Brazilian Landscapes and Economies on Bahia’s Dendê Coast by Case Watkins (review)

Conventional economic geographic studies of supply and commodity chains often provide scant historical and cultural contexts. Case Watkins, in contrast, olympically serves up the story of palm oil’s journey from Africa to its insertion into Afro-Brazilian landscapes and livelihoods. Palm Oil Diaspora traces the transformation of northeastern Brazil’s colonial landscape where transatlantic commerce helped make a cultural economy for authentic African palm oil in Brazil, where Afro-Brazilians marshalled that trade for their economic and social mobility. In doing so, Bahia turns into an Atlantic entrepôt for South Atlantic trans-shipments and stocks of palm oil. This eloquently written tome clarifies how enslaved and freed Africans created distinct foodways and agroforest landscapes in Bahia. In stunning detail, the work offers insights into human agency, resilience, and cultural adaptation.

This study of African palm oil (Elaeis guineensis) disentangles the complexity behind these trans-Atlantic histories and geographies, which drove dendê production over centuries. Watkins’ fieldwork in Brazil gets bolstered by archival work in that country as well as in Lisbon. The book moves beyond the trite trope that palm oil was merely “brought from Africa.” In seven highly readable chapters, the reader learns about the connection between the extractavist logic of the plantation, prioritized by the modernist state, and how this commodity’s producers – Dendezeros—have sustained this crop’s input into Brazil’s cuisine and economy. These perspectives are important and the nuances of where each worker might reside in the production chain are insightful; whether it is the dendê harvester, the palm oil mill (rodão mecanizado), the small-scall digester (mechanical rodão), the lavadoras de azeite who wash palm oil, or the cutter (cortador). Each worker and production stage fits fairly well into this centuries’ old practice. Moreover, deleterious environmental impact on soil and water is thereby largely avoided, a fact that has been missed by efforts to promote multinational production, globalization efforts, and public-private partnerships.

Multi-layered methodologies drive this research. Anecdotally, it begins with the author enjoying a wonderful dish of Afro-Brazilian seafood stew (moqueca) in Salvador in 2004, enhanced with a palm-oil base. After inquiring and learning about the palm-oil ingredient, a friend tells the author to “check it out” (p. xiii) and, well, the rest is a decade and a half of detailed research which surfaces as a labor of love in these pages. And while the “cultural turn” in human geography since at least the 1980s usually gives some reference to mixed methods, this book exemplifies such an approach unlike any this reader has seen in some time. To achieve a “plural, agile and decolonized methodology” (p. 38), Watkins carried out interviews with 453 informants; he actually maps the interview sites (Table 1.4, p. 42) through the coastal plains and inland fields of Bahia (not to mention his work in 14 other states and the Federal District around Brasília). Fieldwork in Bahia deepens his knowledge of agroecology, biota, and people. As many white, male, foreign researchers who work in Latin America realize, but few articulate, Watkins acknowledges that the wind is at his back: “I benefit from coloniality, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and racial privilege in the United States, Brazil, and everywhere else. These layers of privilege must be acknowledged at the outset” (p. 43). His approach is to treat dendê landscapes as “living documents of cultural-ecological relationships,” a decidedly Sauerian focus. He hastens to add, though, these landscapes also reflect “power relations over vast expanses of time and space” (p. 39).

While all of the chapters draw important connections to the African origin of the crop, the first three chapters enlist painstakingly difficult-to-come-by data on slave trade, the demography of Salvador from 1775–1940, imports of African palm oil, ship manifests, rare customs records, exports (dispatches), periodicals, travelers...