ABRANCHES, MARIA, 2022, Food Connections: Production, Exchange and Consumption in West African Migration, New York: Berghahn Books, 192 pp., ISBN  978-1-80073-373-2

Food Connections: Production, Exchange and Consumption in West African Migration is a well-written ethnography by Maria Abranches on the lives and experiences of migrants from Guinea-Bassau to Portugal, and the enduring connections that they aim to maintain with their relatives and their homeland. In her phenomenological approach to the subject, Abranches is able to thread a thorough discussion that intersects two key subjects of West African anthropology – food studies and migration – that have long been determined to be of significant interest within the regional subfield. However, Abranches’ approach shows us that an investigation of how the two interact can lead to more insights that may be overlooked by just looking at only one or the other in isolation.

Abranches leads us through the lives of Guinean migrants over the course of five chapters with rich ethnographic writing that manages to capture the mundane, such as quiet moments of conversation (77), and the exciting, such as the busy activities of agencies (103). Through narratives that revolve around the experiences of selected interlocuters, she presents her main argument that the ways in which the processes of production, exchange, and consumption alongside the interplay of the migration of people, plants, and animals, “affect people’s lifeworlds in ways that indicate a particular investment in connections” (4). Keeping with her central theme of connection, the book’s chapters are substantially interconnected with each other. While this means that the book is best read as a whole, this does not mean that individual chapters suffer when read independently, only that they are best engaged with as part of Abranches’ overall ethnography.

In Chapter 1, which focuses on the social spaces of production, Abranches takes a historical view in explaining land, territory, and social organization, criticizing the use of European views of land ownership in African contexts, as the latter cannot be thought of in simple concepts such as “coherent, homogenous, and stable” (24). Abranches shows how the urban farms through which vegetables that are key to products such as sauces (mafe) bound for Lisbon are grown can become spaces of performativity, with farmers and food sellers playing key roles in connecting Guinean migrants to their homeland. Abranches traces how these spaces have changed historically, from precolonial land organization tied to contracts with spiritual entities call Iran to ethnic co-ownership of farming spaces and liberalization reforms and the growth of small-scale urban farms.

In Chapter 2, Abranches explores the sensorial experience of food, highlighting the spiritual and religious dimensions of consumption and how this allows Guinean migrants to maintain links to their homeland (53). Furthermore, Abranches shows how the processes of adaptation and negotiation are essential for migrants in order to integrate new materials into their cultural traditions and into meaningful social interactions (55). Chapter 3 takes a closer look at the process of travel and transportation, and how the movement of people and products serve to fuel and reorient intentions and projects of migration among those from Guinea-Bassau, in addition to projects of return among migrants in Portugal. Abranches considers how an imagined Lisbon is mediated by the materials that are sent to Guinea-Bassau (80), and how the movement of parcels sent to Lisbon materializes the desires of bidieras, or women food sellers, to move to Portugal (81). Additionally, Abranches also considers the role that me