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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:
This paper explores the more-than-human infrastructures of coffee and subsistence agriculture. Interrogating the frictions of neoliberal and indigenous ideas of place and person, I argue that local assemblages of coffee are challenged by interventions that deny local agricultural potentialities.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I consider agricultural assemblages of places, persons, and coffee as more-than-human infrastructures through the experience of Biangai speakers along the upper Bulolo River of Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. Interrogating the frictions of neoliberal and indigenous ideas of place and person, I argue that local practices of coffee production for international markets are challenged by external interventions that favor individuality, alienability of land, and the separation of nature from culture. Rivers, trees, animal cohabitants, ancestral forces, etc. are assembled together with transportation, telecommunications, local processing facilities, etc. to form distinctive networks of production. While coffee sometimes fits uneasily within Biangai practices of land tenure, it has found a productive fit within local socio-ecologies.
However, under the rubrics of Corporate Social Responsibility and a weak government, these multispecies infrastructures are challenged by business / farming training programs, cooperative social structures and neoliberal regimes of land and resource management. The role of a larger multinational mining company operating a gold mine on the land of the Biangai is particularly prominent as they sponsor much of the training offered to the coffee growers, and support large international coffee buyers who work in the area. While local practices have proven effective in production, infrastructures that are decentered from socio-ecological realities of garden and place-based relationships are fostered at the corporate and state level.
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers onion cultivation and trade as an infrastructural assemblage against the backdrop of agrarian crisis in rural India. In particular, it addresses the question of ir/responsibility in the near complete privatization of agricultural production from seed to storage.
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers onion cultivation and trade as an infrastructural assemblage against the backdrop of agrarian crisis in rural India. I analyze the infrastructure of cultivation from seed to warehouses, from tube-wells to price subsidies - the networks of people, plants and technologies that feed the nation. In particular, it addresses the question of ir/responsibility in the near complete privatization of agricultural production from seed to storage. Although the Indian state now encourages farmers to engage in high-value horticulture through the National Horticulture Mission, farmers rely almost entirely on caste networks and private capital to enable successful cultivation and sale of onions. These social, ecological and technological networks are crucial to agrarian development. However, the unevenness of infrastructural access further exacerbates inequalities of caste and class in the countryside and further deplete the region's aquifers. And yet, more and more farmers turn to onion cultivation in the hope of spectacular profits from its high yields and high prices - buying new varieties of seed, building storehouses, renting trucks to take produce to the market. The onion encapsulates rural aspirations for progress and prosperity , symbolizing hope for a better future. This paper therefore examines this agrarian assemblage as an infrastructure of hope that symbolizes the precarity and possibility of commercial cultivation in the context of state abandonment.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines a communal cocoa project in Papua New Guinea not only as a source of income, but as an infrastructural strategy by the community. With it, the community seeks to control their land and labour and end frontier conditions under which labour and resources are made cheaply available.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines a cocoa project of a Mengen community in Pomio (Papua New Guinea). The project was locally initiated and funded by an NGO as part of a grant given to the community for its conservation efforts. The community members wanted to plant cocoa in order to develop a reliable source of income that could be combined with swidden horticulture, their main livelihood activity. In the past, people had cultivated copra, but with falling commodity prices and the deterioration of buying infrastructure, copra production in the area had ceased to be profitable. Pomio is a remote, rural and poor district with large forested areas and limited state services and infrastructure. From the 1990s the area has been a frontier for logging and plantation companies to procure cheap labour, land and resources.
I examine the communal cocoa project in relation to local land use, previous forms of agricultural production and the shifting frontier conditions. With the cocoa project, the community sought to reverse the frontier conditions and consolidate their control of their own land and labour. The cocoa project, like previous cash crop production, was for the community not only an inalienated source of income, but part of a spatial and infrastructural strategy of establishing ‘doors’, as people called them. These ‘doors’ were places that strengthened the community’s presence in a particular area and points of access to other important places, better transport and markets.