Joanna Davidson

My research is motivated by empirical problems, informed by ethnographic complexity, and framed by an eclectic engagement with anthropology and allied humanistic fields. I have channeled these interests into a sustained ethnographic project in rural West Africa where I began by examining how Jola villagers in Guinea-Bissau were responding to environmental and economic pressures that threatened to erode not only their livelihoods but their core religious, moral, and political institutions. My first book, Sacred Rice (Oxford University Press 2016), told this story through the social dramas of three central characters, rekindling a tradition of ethnographic writing that reveals theoretical insights through the intimacy and intricacy of individual life histories. Keeping pace with how these challenges continued to unfold in this region led me to explore several shifts in women’s lives, including increases in widowhood and transformations in marriage. This resulted in two edited volumes: Opting Out: Women Messing with Marriage around the World (Rutgers University Press 2022), co-edited with Dinah Hannaford, which analyzes the global phenomenon of women eschewing marriage in places where it has long been obligatory, and Pathos and Power: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Widowhood in Africa, Past and Present (Ohio University Press, 2025), co-edited with Benjamin Lawrance, which focuses on widowhood as an underexplored and often mischaracterized dimension of most African women’s lives. These projects prompted new questions about the connections among marriage, naming, and death that frame my current book-in-progress. Bringing ethnographic insights from rural West Africa into conversation with interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities and interpretative social sciences, I am writing a book of interwoven essays that consider the tensions and relationships between speaking and silence, visibility and invisibility, the named and the unnamed, the living and the dead.