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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:
How might irrigative infrastructure facilitate communication between different temporalities as well as human and non-human actors? To what extent do modernist precepts relating to infrastructure pose an obstacle to agricultural production in ancestral or indigenous communities?
Paper long abstract:
While water is a national common resource in Peruvian law, for irrigators in the Lima province of Huarochirí, water belongs exclusively to the sacred [pre-Hispanic] ancestors who govern the irrigation canals. This paper explores the ways in which these diverging ideologies inform approaches to maintenance work on the irrigative infrastructure in Andean communities. Through this approach, I seek to foreground the kinds of invisible legal climates necessary for the construction and maintenance of infrastructure (Appel 2018).
For Harvey and Knox (2015), infrastructural systems only ‘work’ when they produce smooth flows, obscuring the complex relational mechanisms on which those flows rely. For canals in Huarochirí to ‘work’ and transport water from intakes to fields, communities must collectively repay their debts to the sacred ancestors through fulfilling their ritual responsibilities. Any work on the canals begins by ritually pacifying the ancestors. Modernist state-funded development projects must also comply with customary laws associated with the Inca era; dismissive urban engineers who fail to comply with customary law see their projects fail. Collaborators explained the ways such ideological dissonance materialised in the canals. These instances of ontological excess acknowledge canals as relational domains, where economic futures are dependent on adherence to precepts that pre-date the nation. The Inca era is idealised as a time when the canals ‘worked’.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the water infrastructure in the making by focusing on the efforts to restore the wetland, affecting agricultural activities and water-people relations. The paper explores the flows and changes in the waterscape at the crossroads of multiple scales of governance in Kalimantan.
Paper long abstract:
The paper discusses how human work produces wetland as an infrastructure in the swamp areas of Indonesia. Rivers are an important basis for the social and economic life of the Ngaju Dayak, an indigenous population inhabiting the swamp area of Southern Borneo. They engage with the small rivers crossing the swamp forest by fishing, collecting forest products, and gardening near their settlements located along the Kahayan River, one of the largest in the province. Today, large parts of the swamp forests have dried up due to canals made by regional and national development and extractive schemes and local environmental practices, thus producing agricultural or garden landscapes. Drawing from anthropology of water and infrastructure, the paper explores the water infrastructure in the making by focusing on the efforts of a recent restoration project to restore the land to wetland, thus affecting agricultural activities and water-people relations in the area. Thus, the paper explores the flows and changes in the waterscape at the crossroads of multiple scales of governance and commodification.
Paper short abstract:
How and why do adivasis of India continue to remain landless despite possessing title-deeds? Drawing attention to paper-infrastructures—titles, land records and registers—that undergird restitution practices, I argue that documentary artefacts obscure subtler manifestations of dispossession.
Paper long abstract:
At a time when calls for effective land governance and titling reforms are emphasised upon by both neoliberal agenda and social movements, title-deeds are considered to grant unambiguous control and ownership of land. Based on thirteen-months of archival and ethnographic fieldwork—in adivasi hamlets and state bureaucracies in Telangana, India— my research questions this claim by drawing attention to how adivasis who have participated in restitution programmes (intended to correct historical injustices through the restoration of land) continue to remain landless despite possessing titles? Focussing on paper-infrastructures (Hull 2012, Mathur 2016)— title-deeds, land records and registers— which are considered outcomes of successful practices of restitution, I argue that documentary artefacts can perversely obscure and co-produce conditions of landlessness they otherwise seek to remedy. Further, these paper-infrastructures, which undergird restitution practices, make it impossible for the adivasis to claim to be ‘landless’ because the documents suggest otherwise. Thus, a population of title-holding adivasis emerge who are owners of land, but devoid of its possession. The inability to possess the restored land, despite the title, complicates how landlessness manifests and how dispossession takes shape. I suggest that the discursive and representational practices of restitution—notably through the production of documents—curate an infrastructure of paper that obfuscates the subtler modalities through which contemporary dispossession operates. By interrogating the documentary practices deeply embedded in restitution schemes, I problematise theoretical conceptualisations of land and elucidate how paper features in adivasis’ relationship with land and experiences of landlessness.
Paper short abstract:
The paper illustrates how the Baining of Papua New Guinea understood plantation-style oil palm agriculture as infrastructure that can reveal, reclaim, and safeguard their customary land. It explores the link between agriculture, infrastructure, and development through the notion of permanence.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how the Baining of Papua New Guinea understood the link between development, agriculture, and infrastructure. After years of colonial resettlement programs, land reform, and piecemeal encroachment in the Baining region, many local communities were displaced, dispossessed, and left to live at the fringes of economic development with little or no access to essential goods, services, or infrastructure. Reflecting on the uneven geographical development of the province, the Baining understood their position as one of lack and exclusion, whereby the only way they could bring development to themselves was by reclaiming their customary land. This paper shows how with the ineffectiveness of land title deeds to remove the squatters and provide land access to the Baining, they turned to agriculture as a form of vegetal assemblage that could finally reveal and restore their land claims.
First sought in cocoa, and later in oil palm, their dreams of development have contributed to their transition from shifting cultivation in non-bounded ancestral ranges, to petty commodity production of bounded plots, and finally, to rentier economy characterised by ecological and social change. The paper traces how Kairak-speakers participated in and understood this process through the lens of visibility and invisibility, and permanence as opposed to decay. It illustrates how development was associated with "permanent" things and itself required permanent infrastructure. Similarly, the paper argues that for Kairak-speakers, the permanence of plantation-style oil palm agriculture characterised its potentiality to deliver restitution of their land and inward flow of development.