An ethnography of hunger: Politics, subsistence, and the unpredictable grace of the sun By Kristin D.Phillips, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018. 242 pp. $28.00 (paperback). ISBN: 9780253038371

In her powerful monograph, An Ethnography of Hunger, Kristin Phillips contends, “Despite all the daily hype about development by international aid organizations, national politicians and the village elite, it is subsistence and the management of risk that for many rural villagers is the key project of everyday life” (p. 5). Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in the Singida region of rural central Tanzania, Phillips' book centers subsistence and the strategies rural residents employ to “sustain life in the face of mounting unpredictability and increasingly precarious livelihoods” (p. 6). Food can mean nourishment, labor, or the achievement of adulthood; it can communicate friendship, generosity, or the promise of allegiance; it can send messages of obligation, identity, alliance or adultery. It can be conceived as money, belonging or development. And these meanings shift from season to season, moment to moment, and person to person. (p. 104) The second half of the book builds on this context to advance Phillips' core argument: that “subsistence citizenship” provides a theoretical framework to explain the “sociopolitical practices that allow people to survive episodic hunger and/or to protect themselves against it in rural African contexts” (p. 109). Chapter 4 describes subsistence citizenship during a time of acute famine, from 2005 to 2006, when Phillips conducted her most sustained period of fieldwork. She shows how residents deftly mobilized to access vital food aid during this crisis by drawing on notions of the state's paternal obligation to its people before turning to human rights advocacy and refusing to labor in community development projects. Chapters 5 and 6 cover the period 2005–2010, when “demand on villagers to contribute labor and resources to development projects snowballed amid normal seasonal food insecurity and years of irregular rainfall and more intense food crisis” (p. 131). As a result, relations between the state and citizens further ruptured, as human rights-based discourses replaced claims to political patronage as the key discourse of political engagement. This shift reached its crescendo in 2010, when rural Singidans for the first time elected someone outside the ruling CCM party, Tundu Lissu, to represent them in Parliament. Lissu ran on a platform of citizens' rights to services and against exploitation models of community development. Yet, once in office, Lissu was limited in his ability to access state resources for constituents. Although he was re-elected in 2015, many residents questioned whether his representation was worth losing access to patronage relationships that, while sometimes corrupted, also brought results. Across these chapters, Phillips demonstrates the power of long-term ethnographic fieldwork to build social theory. Staying with her case for more than a decade enables her to reveal important shifts in rural residents' sense of precarity and their experience of development, as “participatory” approaches grow more coercive over time. She shows how residents adapt their political engagement, jettison longstanding patronage relationships for mobilization around a depersonalized notion of rights, and then ultimately find ways to “code-switch between these two ostensibly distinct modalities of membership in the nation…to achieve subsistence” (p. 174). A critic might ask how the subsistence politics Phillips observes in Singida play out in relation to other regions of Tanzania. Such comparative analysis would indicate whether and how her concept of subsistence citizenship applies to other cases and contexts. Also, as someone relatively new to the field, I craved a more detailed description of her methods and analytical choices at key junctures in the study. For example, she indicates that she didn't initially set out to study hunger but adopted this focus in the field in response to events. It would have been helpful to students reading the book to learn more about how she made this shift. How did it impact the bodies of literature she used to situate her study, for example? How did it change the spaces she chose to conduct fieldwork or approaches to data analysis? Despite these quibbles, An Ethnography of Hunger remains an outstanding example of the practice and promise of ethnographic research. Thick with description and theoretical insight, it is also a highly enjoyable read. Students and experienced scholars alike are sure to benefit from this excellent contribution to the field of anthropology. Jonathan Marino is a doctoral candidate in Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.