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- Convenors:
-
Germain Meulemans
(Centre Alexandre Koyré)
Elise Demeulenaere (CNRS)
- Discussant:
-
Jamie Lorimer
(University of Oxford)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Environment
- Location:
- Examination Schools Room 7
- Start time:
- 20 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel invites papers that bring microbial creativities into anthropological conversation, and explore the methodological and ontological implications of working with microorganisms in making or unmaking food, artefacts, or materials.
Long Abstract:
In recent years, scholars across the humanities have turned their attention towards microbial communities and the multiple ways in which the lives of bacteria, fungi, yeasts or protozoa shape and are shaped by cultural, political, or economic forces, and intertwine with human livelihoods (Helmreich, 2009). This panel welcomes papers that explore 'microbiosocialities' (Paxson, 2008) from the angle of engagements with microorganisms in making or unmaking food, artefacts or materials.
Engagement with the work of microbial communities has long been central to the practices of making cheese, compost, bread, wine, beer, or other kinds of materials, food and beverages, but also of 'unmaking' and disintegrating things considered as waste. Anthropologists and practitioners sometimes understand these practices as plays on relations of collaboration, symbiosis or co-dependency, which in turn take place within loops of relations to wider environments such as landscapes or terroirs. The panel will question how taking seriously the life of microbial communities leads us to rethink common understandings of craft and practices of making. It will explore how processes of transformation of matter, such as fermentation, decomposition or aggregation, conjure up new possibilities for understanding food and other materials. Contributors may address how practices are being reconfigured as new technologies allow makers to sense microorganisms in other ways. They may also question changes in narratives of controlling microorganisms as politics of food sanitation take a 'probiotic turn' (Lorimer, 2017), and detail the ways in which people and organisms' agency, mutability and ambivalence resist control and cooperation.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper introduces the panel, drawing on our respective fieldworks with ecological engineers and cheese makers. We attend to the contradictory impulses of utility and attachment in making with microorganisms, and to the effect of sanitary norms and the emergence of a 'second modernity.'
Paper long abstract:
We draw on our respective fieldworks with ecological engineers engaged in constructing soil, and raw-milk cheese producers to show how the story of making soil or cheese is a process of struggling with materials and microbes, and how makers learn to take the life of microbial communities seriously. Ecological engineers attempt to grow fertile soil in order to cope for global soil loss. They refer to microorganisms as 'collaborators' in making soil, and describe them as 'fellow ecosystem engineers'. Humans 'indirect action' to fertilize soils consists not in bringing nutrients to plants, but in feeding the microorganisms which in turn transform unaggregated materials into well-structured soil. In this, humans find themselves caught up in two seemingly contradictory impulses: selecting 'useful' types of organisms and framing the construction process in a robust way, versus the constant opening up of new attachments to microorganisms.
The contradictions brought about by attempts to enframe microorganism's action are also palpable in the case of the modernization of raw milk cheese production. Here, the electrification of farms and the European sanitary norms resulted in a drop in raw milks' microbial richness. To cheese makers, this milk is 'too clean', or even 'dead'. Because milk does not ferment as well, they need adding commercial starter cultures, which results in less typical and tasty cheese. Cheese producers, technicians and scientists thereby cultivate or promote a new attentiveness to microbism, which Demeulenaere interprets - following Ulrich Beck - as the invention of a second modernity for raw-milk cheeses.
Paper short abstract:
Natural farming movements in India develop novel technologies of soil recuperation. I argue that the novel techniques (ferments) and understandings of the cow-soil-microbe complex are complicated by bionativism or the mapping of multispecies belonging onto narratives of Hindu Nationalism.
Paper long abstract:
In response to agrarian crisis, small-scale farmers in India are experimenting with novel technologies of soil recuperation. This paper focuses on the so-called Zero Budget Natural Farming movement in Kerala started by its inventor and guru Subhash Palekar, a farmer from Maharashtra. This paper argues that an onto-epistemological shift happens when natural farmers learn a novel appreciation of soil as a living thing, or as Palekar puts it, as annapurna, holy mother soil. ZBNF shifts attention and practices from feeding plants and animals to maintaining the health and fertility of soil with the help of microbial agents. The microbial turn in soil care is a remarkable shift from mainstream practices in India. Soil care is rethought a fundamentally relational activity that requires humans, cows, plants and microorganism to work symbiotically for mutual benefit. A core technology of this movement is a fermented brew of cow dung, urine, sugar and pulses, the so-called nectar of life (jīvāmṛta). The movement's novel microbiopolitics (Paxson) of soil care (Puig de la Bellacasa) is implicated in what I call bionativism or the mapping of multispecies belonging onto narratives of Hindu Nationalism. Microbial soil restoration work only with native cows (Bos indus). Only Bos indicus, they claim, has the miraculous high microbial count in their dung and urine that makes it possible to cultivate 30 acres with one cow. Focusing on the cow-soil-microbe complex, I trace the entanglements of biophilic and probiotic perspectives on soil care with bio-nationalist conspiracy theories about alien plants, animals and sciences.
Paper short abstract:
A fungus threatens Philippine banana plantations. I argue practices of "producing despite" push us to understand plantations as being shaped through more-than-human interactions. This in turn opens a window to imagine new and unknown futures.
Paper long abstract:
Since around 2010 a parasitic fungus (fusarium oxysporum cubense TR4) is attacking monocrop banana plantations in the Philippines. Banana companies, government authorities and international scientists respond to a supposed "Bananageddon" with disease containment interventions and resistance-breeding. These responses are based on an exogenous framing of the disease, as inflicted by an external intruder (the fungus) to an otherwise stable and controlled plantation environment. This framing sustains a modern imagery of the plantation as a space in which man and nature can be mobilized as 'alienated' (i.e. 'as if the entanglements of living did not matter', Tsing 2015) production factors in a benevolent process of capital accumulation. Alternatively, in this paper I suggest the haunting presence of the fungus - microscopic, enduring and highly mobile - draws us to the more-than-human interactions that shape plantation geographies; and to imagine new and unknown futures.
The paper builds on fieldwork throughout 2015-2018 with sector participants in the Philippines and abroad, engaging with the fungus in a variety of ways. In their practices of "producing despite" the fungal threat different types of growers mix science-sanctioned advice with on-field experimentation and knowledge-sharing in daily interactions with neighbors, suppliers and friends. While possibly encouraging further spread of the fungus, these practices also generate their own forms of knowledge and new opportunities for innovation and accumulation. More radically, thinking with the fungus encourages some people to question the modern agro-industrial plantation altogether, alternatively grounding their agro-ecological advocacy and practice in the "more-than-human" entanglements of plantation soils.
Paper short abstract:
Analysing an ethnographic case of a vaccine trial against bacterial diarrohea taking place in West Africa, this paper analyses new social forms and living-with microbes at a time when microbes are becoming resistant to antibiotics.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores new social forms generated by the global increase of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and discusses potentials and pitfalls of the 'probiotic turn' at the face of antibiotics becoming redundant. In the post-antibiotic era, we argue, it is vital to gain a granular view of the various practices of relation-making between humans, animals and microbes as they are affected by the threat of AMR.
The foci of this paper are the social and microbial encounters taking place during a vaccine trial taking place in West Africa, that aims to prevent bacteria-borne diarrhoea and the development of drug resistant microbial strains. We analyse encounters between Northern European tourists, who double-act as participants in the trial, with local populations. As part of the trial, the tourist-cum-research volunteers spend two weeks in the region chosen for its moderate levels of infectious diseases as well as its historical, cultural significance. While holiday-making in the region, these participants become exposed to various new bacteria, often via food; some fall ill with diarrhoea, while others don't.
Based on ethnographic research from 2017-2018, we seek to understand how all those involved in the trial understand microbes and anti-microbial resistance. Their ways of living-with microbes reveal different modes of discussing, embodying, embracing, and resisting encounters with the local, both human and microbial. While for some this is an opportunity to strengthen their immunity, others continue to wage a Pasteurian war on microbes. Here, living-with microbes entwines with questions of development, race, and purity.