Oral transmission of knowledge
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Oral transmission of knowledge is the passing of knowledge from person to person by speech, demonstration and shared work instead of by written text. For cannabis it covers how growers learn to select and save seed and to tend a crop, how makers of ganja, charas and hashish learn their techniques, and how users learn the ritual and social uses of the plant, within families, from hereditary specialists and teachers, among peers and from outsiders. In the ganja tract of Naogaon, in present-day Bangladesh, the knowledge and skills of cultivation passed from one generation of farmers to the next,[1]: 108 and the geographer Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy writes that the knowledge of how to make Moroccan hashish is held by communities and usually passed on orally.[2]: 7
Hereditary specialists in the Bengal ganja tract
Ganja is made from the unfertilised flowering tops of female plants, so the male plants must be found and pulled before they shed pollen. In the ganja tract around Naogaon this was the work of men called poddars. In 1893 the botanist David Prain called them "special men" who claimed to recognise the sexes long before the plants matured and who went round each field three or perhaps four times in a season, taking out what they said were male plants. Prain could not say how they told the plants apart, but in a field he examined closely he found not a single male plant.[3]: 4
The historian Utathya Chattopadhyaya calls the work parakdari. The men who did it came north from Jessore each season for the task,[4]: 36 and poddar and parakdar were both caste names and hereditary titles of families that held and passed on the agro-ecological knowledge of ganja cultivation. Their labour was often the most closely scrutinised and the most highly rewarded in the cultivation cycle.[4]: 77
Interviews made with former growers more than 30 years after licensed cultivation in Naogaon ended in 1987 call the same specialists "ganja doctors". They had no formal training, relied on their own experience and told male plants by their rounder, sparser leaves and wider spacing between branches.[1]: 99, 104 They did not remove every male: growers had to hand seed for the next season to the Ganja Society office, and they also kept seed for food.[1]: 108
Making the drug
Prain called ganja manufacture in Bengal an elaborate system that passed unchanged from one generation of cultivators to another. He did not expect a change he proposed, after watching the work for a single season, to find favour with the dealers and consumers whose verdict counted for more than the cultivators'.[3]: 17
Hand-rubbed charas, made in the Indian subcontinent by rubbing the flowering plant between the palms until resin builds up on the hands, is slow work: by Robert Connell Clarke's figures, one collector gathers 10 to 25 grams in a full working day, against about a kilogram of sieved hashish in a few hours.[5]: 418 The best quality depends on skilled rubbers who collect only the resin glands and no other plant matter, and a careful rubber makes about 5 grams of it in a day.[6]: n. 14
In Morocco the resin is separated by threshing and sieving the dried plant. Chouvy and the sociologist Kenza Afsahi, following Clarke, consider these techniques most likely to have been brought from Lebanon, where sieving was also the method of the Bekaa valley.[5]: 418 Chouvy argues that the recipes and techniques of Moroccan hashish cannot be patented, being widely known for decades and passed down by word of mouth within communities.[2]: 7
Families and peers
In rural Jamaica in the early 1970s, the anthropologists Vera Rubin and Lambros Comitas found that childhood was the only stage of life in which ganja use passed between generations: adults prepared ganja tea for the children in their care. Boys were warned against smoking, but their first experience of it was usually in the company of friends of their own age or a little older.[7]: 53
In a cannabis-growing village in Trinidad, the anthropologist Ansley Hamid met middle-aged Indo-Trinidadians, only recently become growers, who did not use the drug and disapproved of its use by their adolescent sons. The sons had been taught to use the ganja their fathers grew by a few young Afro-Trinidadians living in the village.[8]: xxiv
Teaching across communities
Cultivation can also be taught by newcomers. A Greek official statement quoted by Stefanis, Ballas and Madianou traced the cultivation of cannabis for hashish at Orchomenus to the neighbouring district of Mantinea, where immigrants from the East, among them Egyptians and Cypriots, had taught the cultivation and processing of the crop.[9]: 313–314
In the Rif new seed has arrived the same way. The hybrid varieties that have replaced much of the kif plant there were, in Chouvy and Afsahi's assessment, most likely brought in mostly by foreigners and by Moroccan traffickers.[5]: 420, 422
Devotional instruction
Among the Bauls of Bengal who follow the bartamān-panthī path, esoteric practice is taught by the śikṣā-guru, the guru of instruction; the guru who confers the robes of renunciation teaches nothing.[10]: 138, 145 Manuscripts of practice exist, but Jeanne Openshaw found them to be an optional supplement to oral instruction: gurus were often unfamiliar with such texts and confident when they taught by word of mouth.[10]: 210 Followers of this path class ganja as "cooling" and, when smoked, "upward-moving", against alcohol, which is "heating" and "downward-moving".[10]: 208
Loss and recording
When a crop is banned, the chain from one generation of growers to the next can break. Licensed ganja cultivation in Naogaon ended in 1987. By 2023 the last generation of farmers who had grown it had been away from the crop for more than 30 years and were ageing. Fewer of them held the expertise each year, and their accumulated knowledge was being lost.[1]: 99–100, 108 A study published that year recorded the Naogaon system of cultivation and production from interviews with these farmers.[1]: 99
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Rahman, A.M.D.; Matsushima, K.; Uddin, S.B.; Sarwar, A.K.M.G.; Nemoto, K. (2023). "Traditional Cultivation and the Production System of Cannabis by the Ganja Society in Naogaon, Bangladesh". Tropical Agriculture and Development. 67 (4): 99–109. doi:10.11248/jsta.67.99.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Chouvy, Pierre-Arnaud (2024). "International property rights for Cannabis landraces and terroir products. The case of Moroccan Cannabis and hashish". International Journal of Drug Policy. 129 104479. doi:10.1016/j.drugpo.2024.104479.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Prain, D. (1893). Report on the Cultivation and Use of Gánjá. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press – via National Library of Scotland.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Chattopadhyaya, Utathya (June 2026). Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India. Oakland: University of California Press. doi:10.1525/luminos.276. ISBN 9780520425699.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Chouvy, Pierre-Arnaud; Afsahi, Kenza (2014). "Hashish revival in Morocco". International Journal of Drug Policy. 25 (3): 416–423. doi:10.1016/j.drugpo.2014.01.001.
- ↑ Chouvy, Pierre-Arnaud (2019). "Cannabis cultivation in the world: heritages, trends and challenges". EchoGéo. 48. doi:10.4000/echogeo.17591.
- ↑ Rubin, Vera; Comitas, Lambros (1975). Ganja in Jamaica: A Medical Anthropological Study of Chronic Marihuana Use. The Hague: Mouton. doi:10.1515/9783110812077.
- ↑ Hamid, Ansley (2002). The Ganja Complex: Rastafari and Marijuana. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. ISBN 0-7391-0360-1. LCCN 2002004715.
- ↑ Stefanis, C.; Ballas, C.; Madianou, D. (1975). "Sociocultural and Epidemiological Aspects of Hashish Use in Greece". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 303–326. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.303.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 Openshaw, Jeanne (2002). Seeking Bauls of Bengal. University of Cambridge Oriental Publications. Vol. 60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521811255.