Grains from Grass by Lisa Cliggett presents an ethnographic portrait of age and gender as variables in survival among the Gwembe Tonga of southern Zambia. In a highly textured portrait, Cliggett demonstrates the different strategies pursued by women and men throughout their life cycles to offset recurrent hunger, poverty, and resource inadequacies. The depth of ethnographic treatment here is possible because Cliggett is heir to the legacy of data from Elizabeth Colson and Thayer Scudder on families in the Gwembe Valley from 1956 onward. She begins her account with longitudinal data on socioeconomic and domestic relations prior the building of the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River in 1958 and the subsequent resettlement of the Tonga. In contrast to the period immediately after resettlement, the Gwembe are now grappling with drought, extreme poverty, environmental degradation, declining standards of living, and food insecurity. In this ethnography, Cliggett helps fill the information gap on African gerontology by generating a framework for understanding the different strategies of the elderly for mobilizing, controlling, and manipulating resources as the young around them migrate in search of jobs and survival. She gives readers powerful visual images of the rural crisis: the debilitated grain storage bins that serve to discourage those seeking handouts of food during the hungry times and the frail old woman gleaning grains from grass to fend off starvation.

The dominant issues are how the Gwembe Tonga exercise agency and negotiate their fates within the context of scarcity, but the corresponding shifts in matrilineal family relations provide the leitmotif throughout the book. Notably, Cliggett eschews the structural focus on matrilineality in favor of the bigger picture of individual behavior, viability, or vulnerability. Utilizing Michael J. Watts and Hans-Georg Boehl’s model of vulnerability, she compares the processes “that make some groups suffer more than others” (p. 50). This allows one of her primary comparisons to be what men and women mean when they say that they are “old,” and how this label reflects the subtleties of gendered autonomy, agency, and dependency. In contrast to the popularized images of female-centered corporate lineages from other parts of the matrilineal belt and West Africa, the Gwembe Tonga mukowa (matriclan) is challenged by the male lutundu (patrinuclear family), which generally acts as the residential unit. Men acquire power as they marry polygynously and give cattle as bridewealth, whereas women acquire few resources as they help support households and children and incur the risks of marginalization or abandonment.

Cliggett examines how men and women cope with the variable “space and time of vulnerability” (pp. 47–77). In the villages, women work for pay on others’ fields or brew beer and make pottery and woven baskets to sell at the informal markets on the edges of funerals and weddings. Although old men control the supernatural, old women’s rituals, songs, and ancestral knowledge related to the “cult of the shades” remain important even as tradition wanes. Cliggett says that although the presence of matrikin in a village helps women sustain themselves, even an old women living alone can use the threat of her zyelo spirits to coax assistance or food from young people. In fact, old women may have more strategies for “begging survival” than old men because of how they are integrated into the social, ritual, and supernatural dynamics of village life. Those old men who have managed to garner resources through control of labor now find themselves victimized and impoverished by munganga (witchfinders) who have accused them of evil doing and who charge fees for cleansing.

Cliggett has produced an extremely sophisticated ethnography that is interspersed with theoretical and methodological insights, that is accessible to students, and that shows the “extreme costs that local people pay as a result of seemingly well-meaning development endeavors” (p. 6). She has excellent syntheses of issues related to the anthropology of development, globalization, resource flows, and supernatural retributions, in addition to a counterintuitive take on the experience of aging in Zambia. Perhaps inevitably, the reader is left wanting to know more about the interpenetration of political, economic, and health challenges in contemporary Zambia, about how matrilineal dynamics vary across the country, and about whether the rural crises are transforming culture in fundamental ways or merely producing temporal adjustments to stress. Nevertheless, Cliggett has made an extremely welcome contribution to the anthropology of aging and given readers a rich ethnographic portrait of the challenges of rural Zambia.

[tables, illustrations, maps, references, notes, index.]