Paper short abstract:

Tracing the infrastructuring of the raspberry value chain since Yugoslav socialism, I uncover infrastructural continuities across temporal ruptures from socialism to capitalism, but also how the valuation of raspberries changes, when they circulate across political boundaries.

Paper long abstract:

The paper traces how raspberries became a major export commodity in Serbia since socialism. Focussing on the double embeddedness of global commodity chains in kinship and the state, it argues that in former Yugoslavia the raspberry economy was co-produced by state-financed science and technology and the work and tacit knowledge of farmers. This cooperative innovation became privatised and radically dispersed in the market capitalist era, so that Serbian raspberries became a major transnational competitor - the red gold of Serbia. This fragmentation also laid the foundations for the sector's present problems: overproduction, loss of 'singularity', and competition over labour. While since the 1990s the cheapness of Serbian labour has become a competitive advantage for the sector, its also limits its reproduction, as labour increasingly outmigrates to EU countries or is employed on the work benches of Western firms at home. The theoretical contribution lies in stressing the entangled roots of state, kinship, and raspberries in human and other agencies. By focusing on co-production, the making of an agricultural commodity chain is analysed as profoundly political, being embedded in complex moral economies of kinship, work, territory, knowledge, and power. The research was funded by the Riga Stradins University, the European Regional Development Fund and the Latvian postdoctoral research grant 1.1.1.2/VIAA/2/18/271 "Comparing Vital Capitals: An anthropological analysis of the global value chains of sea buckthorn and raspberries".