About

Joanna Davidson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Boston University, with affiliations to the Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program, African Studies Center, Kilachand Honors College, Global Development Policy Center, and the Boston University Center for the Humanities. Her research is motivated by empirical problems, ethnographic complexity, and an engagement with anthropology and allied humanistic fields. She has conducted a sustained ethnographic project in rural West Africa, focusing on how Jola villagers in Guinea-Bissau respond to environmental and economic pressures that threaten their livelihoods and core religious, moral, and political institutions. Her first book, Sacred Rice, published by Oxford University Press in 2016, explores these issues through individual life histories, revealing theoretical insights. Her work has also examined shifts in women’s lives, including increases in widowhood and transformations in marriage, leading to edited volumes such as Opting Out: Women Messing with Marriage around the World and Pathos and Power: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Widowhood in Africa. Currently, she is writing a book of interwoven essays that analyze tensions and relationships between speaking and silence, visibility and invisibility, the named and the unnamed, and the living and the dead, drawing ethnographic insights from rural West Africa and engaging with interdisciplinary scholarship.

Research topics

• Social Science
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Art
• Gender studies
• Anthropology
• Psychology
• Aesthetics
• Ethnology
• Law

Selected publications

• 8. Messing with Remarriage

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2023-01-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2023-01-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Frontmatter

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2023-01-20

  book-chapterOpen accessSenior author

  Press fills a gap in research by examining the politics of marriage and related practices, ideologies, and interpretations, and addresses the key question of how the politics of marriage has affected social, cultural, and po liti cal pro cesses, relations, and bound aries. The series looks at the complex relationships between the politics of marriage and gender, ethnic, national, religious, racial, and class identities, and analyzes how these relationships contribute to the development and management of social and po liti cal differences, inequalities, and conflicts.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Patient Safety

  Comprehensive healthcare simulation · 2021 · 1 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Psychology
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• Firing the canon: a history of women’s pioneering role in anthropology

  Journal of Southern African Studies · 2020-10-23

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In a black-and-white photograph on the cover of Andrew Bank’s Pioneers of the Field: South Africa’s Women Anthropologists, Hilda Beemer Kuper stands upright and chin forward, hands behind her back,...

  PublisherDOI

• The problem of widows

  American Ethnologist · 2020 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • Sociology

  ABSTRACT How does an ethnographer inquire about a social category that is neither named nor recognized as such? The Ejamat Jola language has no word for widow , even though more than a third of households in the Jola villages of Guinea‐Bissau are occupied by women whose husbands have died. Over years of fieldwork, I have tried to explain why widows were not named or even seen by Jola villagers. Chronicling how each of my explanations was undercut by both Jola responses and my own critical scrutiny, I recount the impasses of an ethnographic quest and show the gradual process of gaining insight into experiences that cannot be encapsulated by either local or anthropological models. The unspeakable can signal not only profound fragilities in social relations but also openings for new social formations beyond the normative bounds of received cultural categories. [ widows , marriage , gender , production , reproduction , silence , ethnography , Jola , Guinea‐Bissau , West Africa ]

  PublisherDOI

• “People Insult Me – Oh My!”: Reflections on Jola Women’s Story-Songs in Rural West Africa

  2019-05-06 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Jola women in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa, regularly compose short story-songs about themselves that become a kind of abbreviated anthem associated with a particular individual. Friends and neighbours all know each other's songs and often sing them while working in the rice paddies or gathered around a collective rice bowl and some palm wine after a long day's work. Usually only two lines, these story-songs encapsulate a moment or episode in each woman's life, often encoding a rebuke to someone who has offended them or cryptically revealing that they have overheard gossip about themselves. This mode of storytelling highlights the intersubjective dimensions of Jola social life in ways that evoke Hannah Arendt's notion of storytelling as a form of ethical discourse. Through a nuanced interpretation of Jola women's story-songs, I propose to expand our understanding of where stories might reside, how they are pragmatically deployed, and how a particular form of storytelling might reveal more general insights into the transformative power of stories.

  PublisherDOI

• Women in Guinea-Bissau

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History · 2019-07-25

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Guinea-Bissau, a small West African country, is home to a multiplicity of ethnic and religious groups with complicated historical entanglements along the Upper Guinea Coast and across European and Afro-Atlantic orbits. Generalizations about women’s lives, given both the longue durée of its precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial history and the diversity of its social systems, are quite easily countered by contradictory—or at least more nuanced—renderings. Nonetheless, it is possible to discern some broad commonalities and continuities, especially in market-related roles and activities. Guinean women have been enterprising traders—sometimes gaining economic and political prominence—since precolonial times and throughout the prolonged Portuguese colonial presence in the region. In particular, Luso-African women, known as nharas, revolutionized and dominated trade in coastal settlements from the 17th to the 19th centuries, but their political and economic autonomy was ultimately curtailed by increasingly repressive colonial policies. Guinea-Bissau’s unique struggle for independence—spearheaded by the revolutionary leader Amílcar Cabral and achieved through an 11-year military struggle against the Portuguese—opened up opportunities for women’s liberation from both Portuguese colonialism and customary patriarchal strictures. Although Guinean women participated in the Luta da Libertação in unprecedented ways, they struggled to maintain an active role in nation-building after formal independence in 1974. The Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde’s (PAIGC) rhetorical commitment to gender equality remains an unfulfilled promise in the postcolonial period, as chronic political instability, deleterious economic policies, and largely unfavorable structural adjustment programs have tended to worsen women’s overall conditions. Women have continued to carve out creative roles in an expanding neoliberal marketplace, often becoming intrepid—although always precarious—players in the informal sector. Although women have gained several protective legislative rights since independence—such as the prohibition of forced and child marriage, and easier access to divorce—these have been implemented unevenly. Guinea-Bissau’s human development indicators are among the lowest in the world, especially for women: life expectancy for women is 59 years, childbirth is the leading cause of women’s mortality, and literacy among women is at 44 percent. The failure of the postcolonial state to fulfill Cabral’s egalitarian vision has not only marginalized women’s political and economic status within the country, it may have contributed to the overall weakening of key state institutions, ultimately enticing international narco-traffickers to its shores in the early 21st century and entrenching a drug economy amidst the ruins of the country’s capital city. The gendered roots of Guinea-Bissau’s present woes cannot be ignored.

  PublisherDOI

• AFA's Live Annual Review 2017

  Anthropology News · 2018-05-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Multidisciplinary Approaches to Research on Bullying in Adolescence

  Adolescent Research Review · 2016-09-15 · 29 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Rick de Graaff

  9 shared

• Søren Wind Eskildsen

  9 shared

• Fabio Galati

  University of Southern Denmark

  9 shared

• Teresa Cadierno

  University of Southern Denmark

  9 shared

• Samantha Ayers-Glassey

  University of Waterloo

  9 shared

• Jon B. Cole

  University of Minnesota

  8 shared

• Jonathan L. Burstein

  8 shared

• Diane P. Calello

  Rutgers New Jersey Medical School

  8 shared

Awards & honors

• Jeffrey Henderson Senior Research Fellowship, Boston Univers…
• Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching, Boston University,…
• National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipend,…
• Neu Family Award for Excellence in Teaching, CAS, Boston Uni…