Indigenous farming transitions, sociocultural hybridity and sustainability in rural Senegal

For many centuries, the indigenous agricultural and cultural systems of the Serer people of Senegambia ensured soil fertility, crop rotation, tree preservation, mixed farming and herding, yielding one of the highest population densities in the pre-colonial Sahel. In the 20th century, as population grew, soil fertility declined and climate change produced regular droughts, Serer farming systems changed to creatively combine many indigenous techniques with some modern practices. The Serer hybrid farming system that emerged especially after the late 1960s is demonstrably more productive than modern or indigenous techniques practiced in pure form (Faye et al., 2020). Given the productivity of hybrid farming techniques, this article asks: Who adopts them? And under what circumstances? Building on years of participant observation supplemented with a survey of 742 Serer farmers, I tested several competing explanations from neo-liberal, feminist, and cultural ecological approaches to understand why and among whom hybrid farming occurs. Multiple regression analysis shows a strong relationship between cultural syncretism and hybrid farming. Farming techniques are not just a matter of isolated, individual choice, but also work through the social and cultural systems that support agriculture. The more these systems reflect established patterns of mixing cultural elements, borrowing from outside and blending into and transforming Serer tradition, the greater the likelihood that farmers will use hybrid techniques. These findings have implications both for agricultural sustainability and for recognizing the sociocultural embeddedness of seemingly individual choices.