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Rice was historically a "total social phenomenon" in Sierra Leone, molding rural identities through farming. Crop yields are rapidly declining, forcing change among people who once claimed to be "wealthy" from rice and now face severe food insecurity. In response to change, they can take out loans—offered by "strangers"—to continue farming rice, or they can "diversify" and farm alternative crops. Low rice yields largely condemn those who accept a loan to farming solely to pay their debts, a "poverty trap" that most cannot overcome. However, the majority of farmers in our study area accepted seed and tractor loans, arguing that rice is "the only way" to offer their children a better life through education—even as no children from the villages have procured waged jobs—as it is the only commercial crop that pays school fees. We argue that thinking in terms of fetishes offers a constructive analysis of the dissolution of total social phenomena. Devoting the next generation to the new "fetish" of education is paradoxically dependent on retaining one's commitment to the old fetish of rice, allowing the usurious stranger to profit from this paradox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implementation of child rights legislation in the African nation of Sierra Leone has revealed children articulating novel values for education and labor. Corporal punishment was used to reinforce for children the importance of schooling and uncompensated household labor to their development as people. With its legal banning, children are forming values that conflict with those held by elders and with rights doctrine itself. They differentiate between productive “work,” useful because it is remunerated and skilled or improves their social connections, and the drudgery of uncompensated “labor,” which reinforces their low social position. Toil such as road works and mining can be “work” if it is valued and remunerated, while the desultory job market, equally desultory classroom experience, low social status, and poor pay of teachers renders formal education subjected “labor.” This highlights children as strategic users of rights and as agents in determining what comprises their own best interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "Braided Worlds" by Alma Gottlieb and Philip Graham.