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- Convenors:
-
Inna Yaneva-Toraman
(Heriot-Watt University)
Tuomas Tammisto (University of Helsinki)
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- Stream:
- Irresponsibility and Failure
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 31 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel considers agriculture in infrastructural terms. We explore how do infrastructures as socioeconomic, political, and technological arrangements appear in the rural and how ethnography can bring into view ways in which citizens, states and companies negotiate their obligations to each other.
Long Abstract:
This panel asks what happens if we consider some forms of agriculture in infrastructural terms? How do people understand specific assemblages of vegetation as infrastructure and how can this widen our understanding about infrastructure as a category of things, whatever their form or history? Within global development discourse infrastructure is still considered a measure of development and an assemblage that can enhance local economies and livelihoods. From mobile towers to electric grids, from water dams to pipelines and roads, infrastructure of all kinds play central role in political ideology and embody local and national dreams of modernity and progress (Anand 2017, Harvey & Knox 2015). Their presence or absence evoke feelings and discussions about citizenship, belonging, and responsibility. The growing multidisciplinary literature on infrastructure has shown that they are best understood as socioeconomic, political, and technological arrangements (Leigh Star 1999, Larkin 2013) that are simultaneously ecological and relational (Mukherjee 2020).
But how do they appear in the rural and what can they tell us about the failures and successes of agricultural projects in bringing positive social change? How is land mobilised for the creation of certain infrastructures that benefit or restrict local communities? How are new forms of agriculture built on existing agricultural systems? Whose ir/responsibility is their establishment, and in what way are they produced from or produce social, ecological, or economic failure? How might an ethnographic focus on agricultural infrastructure bring into comparative view the ways in which citizens, states, and companies negotiate their obligations to each other?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 31 March, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the role of the farmers' visions of the future in unfolding the rural landscape. In particular, it shows the link between the agricultural choices and the perception of ecological and entrepreneurial failure and hope
Paper long abstract:
This article is based on ethnographic research conducted in the Alessandria province, in northwestern Italy, with a focus on its rural development and the perspectives of its inhabitants.
This paper links the characteristics of the rural landscape with how farmers' imagine their future and the future of their farm. In the general context of economic stress that the sector is experiencing at a local and national level, the socioeconomic challenges impact on the farmers and affects their very perception of the rural landscape, marking a turning point of the future of agriculture.
The paper explores how the farmers' visions of the future relate to their connection with the rural landscape. It analyzes the meanings associated with the different cultivations and which factors have the greatest influence on defining their visions of the future and, thus, their entrepreneurial choices. In particular, it looks at individual working life expectancy and longevity of the company as decisive factors in either advancing or withdrawing their agricultural activities.
In so doing, the paper suggests what entrepreneurial strategies tend to adopt for their farm, building different landscapes in a context of deep ecological transformation. The paper further develops the theoretical and methodological contribution developed in the research project SASS - CUP H42F16002450001:
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the practice of rearing animals on urban rooftops in Egypt. I argue that the value of a rooftop animal lies in knowledge of its feed: What an animal has been fed dictates its taste, reflecting multispecies relations as an essential component of culinary infrastructure in Egypt.
Paper long abstract:
Urban rooftops are a vital source of meat proteins for a large number of lower-middle class families in Egypt. Given the lack of trusted and affordable meat and poultry, my interlocutors use their rooftops to rear sheep, chickens, geese, rabbits, and goats among other animals. This research uses ethnographic fieldwork to explore the significance of rooftop multispecies relations for rooftop-reared foods. I argue that the value of these rooftop animals lies in [knowing] their past: Rooftop animals' intricately-known, nurtured, and controlled feed is what gives them their distinctive taste, one which is always superior to store-bought animals. This rooftop nurtured feed is understood first through a religious worldview in which my interlocutors regard themselves as God’s viceregents on earth, responsible for feeding and caring for rooftop animals and later eating them to sustain their bodies as part of wider eating ecologies. Secondly, rooftop nurtured feed is a significant component of a female responsibility that I propose calling “bread-nurturing”: Unlike an idealized male responsibility of bread-winning, it is the female responsibility to secure and preferably rear/nurture nutritious and delicious food for her household. Urban rooftops illustrate that questions around economic/material dimensions of food and ecological ones are far from distinct or dichotomous. This research opens up space for an engagement with culinary infrastructure of food in Egypt which, instead of food systems and supply-demand, explores networks of people and species, knowledges of food, and social conceptions of taste as essential to a revisited anthropology of food in Egypt and beyond.