vegetable · foodway10 bonds · 10 sourced

yam

isu · ji · inhame · yam

So the word travelled on the ships while the plant stayed home, and the thing now called yam in English is usually not one.

sweetsavouryveganvegetarian

Cultural layer

Origin

West Africa; true yams of the genus Dioscorea, domesticated in the yam belt running through Nigeria, Ghana, Benin and Cameroon, and unrelated to the sweet potato

Routes

Carried on slave ships as provisions, which is how the West African word for eating reached English as the name of a different plant; Nigeria still grows the majority of the world's yams

Context

The New Yam Festival, Iri Ji, marks a harvest with enough weight to organize a calendar around: nobody eats the new yam before it is celebrated. Meanwhile American supermarkets sell an orange sweet potato and label it yam, which is a different genus on a different continent. So the word travelled on the ships while the plant stayed home, and the thing now called yam in English is usually not one.

Behind this layer

Longthroat Memoirs (Yemisi Aribisala, 2016)

In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa's Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Judith Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, 2009)

Route

Pending

The routes are written. They are not yet mapped.

This entry's cultural layer already names where it came from and how it moved. What it does not yet carry is that movement as structure: ordered waypoints with real coordinates, and a mechanism on each leg. Until it does, the layer stays an empty slot rather than a drawn line, because a map built from prose would be a guess with a projection under it.

1 of 404 entries carries a mapped route · nutmeg is the prototype

What renders here when it lands

Waypoints
Ordered places, each with its kind
Coordinates
Real positions, with the gazetteer they came from
Segments
From, to, and the mechanism that moved it
Confidence
Documented, attributed or contested
Summary
What the route argues, in a sentence

Rite

The New Yam Festival opens the eating year. Across Igbo communities the Iri Ji marks the point at which the new harvest may be eaten and not before, the eldest man or the priest taking the first piece, and the calendar of the community is organised around it. Yams are counted as wealth and given in bride price. Achebe opens Things Fall Apart on a man's yam barn because it is a statement of standing, not of appetite.

Longthroat Memoirs (Yemisi Aribisala, 2016)

Names · co-equal, marked by how each one travelled

Foodway

Present as a living food culture.

isuEndonymYoruba · West Africa
jiEndonymIgbo · West Africa
inhameColonial tradePortuguese (from West African nyam, to eat) · Atlantic trade
yamMarketEnglish (same root) · global market

Peoples

IgboYoruba