体现工程：20世纪马里的性别劳动、食品安全和品味

系列：新非洲历史
这项开创性的案例研究突出了非洲妇女的聪明才智和劳动，展示了马里农村妇女在殖民时期、环境危机和后殖民统治期间如何利用技术确保粮食安全。
劳拉·安·特瓦吉拉（Laura Ann Twagira）倡导将马里农村妇女理解为工程师，从而摒弃了非洲妇女作为没有技术知识或接触机会的主体的一贯形象，相反，她揭示了一段关于性别、发展和即兴创作的隐藏历史。通过这样做，她还大大扩大了非洲科学和技术研究的范围。
特瓦吉拉以尼日尔农业项目办公室为例，认为女性使用了适度的技术（如研钵和杵或金属罐），并组织女性劳动力来创建、维护和再造一个复杂且高度适应性的食品生产系统。虽然女性经常将节省劳动力的技术纳入她们的日常工作中，但她们并不认为自己的体力劳动是发展叙事中经常出现的问题。相反，女性的具体技术和知识对于她们将以出口生产为中心的发展项目转变为满足当地口味和消费需求的环境资源的能力至关重要。
Embodied Engineering: Gendered Labor, Food Security, and Taste in Twentieth-Century Mali
Series: New African Histories
Foregrounding African women’s ingenuity and labor, this pioneering case study shows how women in rural Mali have used technology to ensure food security through the colonial period, environmental crises, and postcolonial rule.
By advocating for an understanding of rural Malian women as engineers, Laura Ann Twagira rejects the persistent image of African women as subjects without technological knowledge or access and instead reveals a hidden history about gender, development, and improvisation. In so doing, she also significantly expands the scope of African science and technology studies.
Using the Office du Niger agricultural project as a case study, Twagira argues that women used modest technologies (such as a mortar and pestle or metal pots) and organized female labor to create, maintain, and reengineer a complex and highly adaptive food production system. While women often incorporated labor-saving technologies into their work routines, they did not view their own physical labor as the problem it is so often framed to be in development narratives. Rather, women’s embodied techniques and knowledge were central to their ability to transform a development project centered on export production into an environmental resource that addressed local taste and consumption needs.

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