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- Convenors:
-
Cristiana Bastos
(Universidade de Lisboa)
Seth M. Holmes (University of Barcelona, ICREA, UC Berkeley)
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- Discussant:
-
Deborah Heath
(Lewis Clark College)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Music Building (MUS), Harty Room
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Addressing food systems, we emphasize the role of ethnography in current discussions about the plantationocene, the legacy of plantations, the current circuits of migrant labor and capital-intensive monocrops, and potential future relationships between humans, non-humans, bodies and environment
Long Abstract:
In this panel, we welcome papers that address contemporary food-production systems, their human and non-human actors and the co-production of plants and people. We aim to address social, political, economic, historical, cultural and botanical aspects of food systems, including the role of ethnography in current discussions on the plantationocene and the legacy of plantations, current circuits of migrant labor and capital-intensive monocrops, and the relationships between humans and non-humans, bodies and environments. Papers may analyze and theorize the racialization of labor-people-plants, the embedded and embodied structures of social inequality, the transformed landscapes of the capitalocene, and the uprooted commons of the plantationocene. We also aim to highlight the hopeful endeavors of reparation through sustainable food production and contemporary forms of land distribution from communal land projects to alternative relationships with land, food and agricultural production.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Anu Krishna (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Paper short abstract:
This paper is an ethnographic illustration of the life and labor on a cardamom plantation. The paper highlights how caste-class-gender relations of the Indian society serve as a prerequisite for the production of cardamom, which is one of the most expensive spices on the international market.
Paper long abstract:
Indian small cardamom is known as the ‘Queen of Spices’. It is the most expensive spice on the international market after saffron and vanilla. Known for its scent and savor, the spice cardamom is the kiln-dried capsules of Elettaria Cardamomum (L.) Maton, which is a rhizomatic shrub. Traded on the international market with the grade name ‘Alleppey Green’, cardamom is native to the Cardamom Hills of India. Cardamom is a shade-loving rhizome that grows under the canopy of shade trees in the cardamom plantations. Cardamom plantations are an exercise of perfect geometry, the landscape is ordered to control the growth of cardamom rhizomes as well as the workforce. On its journey from cardamom plantations to our favorite beverages or confectionaries, there goes no cardamom capsule without being touched by women plantation workers. Work on a cardamom plantation is gendered, in other words, it is considered as ‘women’s work’. This paper is an ethnographic illustration of the nature of the relationship between the spice (cardamom) and the plantation workers who are engaged in the nurturing and tending of cardamom rhizomes for generations. By describing this relationship, the paper explains how the class-caste-gender relations in Indian society make possible cardamom production. In doing so, the paper highlights the intergenerational relationship between the people (workers), place (plantation), and the product (cardamom). Such that, each cardamom capsule speaks the tale of many women whose hard-manual labor produces it, but who are pushed to the margins of existence in an otherwise lucrative commodity chain.
Koteswara Rao Kodirekkala (National Institute of Technology Rourkela)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will examine the status of traditional and "neglected" millets and their cultivation and consumption trends in India. It identifies the constraints, challenges and opportunities for their use to achieve sustainable food and nutritional security towards the Sustainable Development Goal 2.
Paper long abstract:
There is a growing concern about crop diversity and millet crops on one hand and a gradual erosion of such cultivation on the other. Millet crops are recognized in diverse ways. For some stakeholders, they are climate-smart crops, climate-resilient crops, contingency crops, eco-friendly crops, nutraceuticals, nutri-cereals, smart crops/foods, etc. They are vital to coping with environmental stresses and socio-economic and health problems, providing nutritional and food security, and a good risk management strategy for resource-poor marginal cultivators. For others, millets are referred as "neglected millets", "underutilized millets", etc. They are undervalued as coarse grains, minor crops, "minor millets". For some others, millets are stigmatized as "marginalized grains", "marginalized millets", marginalized crops, crops of/for the poor. At the empirical dimension, on one hand, the traditional producers of millets - tribal and rural folk, are lacking/losing interest in the cultivation and consumption of those grains as they are undervalued at the local level and are forced to abandon them for no profitable market and income. On the other, there is a/an (re)invention of tradition, as millets' nutritional values and health benefits are realized. People from the educated sections and urban areas are showing interest in millets. It became a traditional strategy for modern problems. Thus, there is a paradox of millets. Therefore, this paper examines the status of traditional and "neglected" millets and their cultivation and consumption trends. It identifies the constraints, challenges and opportunities for their use to achieve sustainable food and nutritional security towards the Sustainable Development Goal 2
Rachel Smith (Aberdeen)
Paper short abstract:
I contrast three land-people-plant nexes in which Ni-Vanuatu have been engaged. First the 19th century labour trade to overseas plantations. Second, 21st century seasonal migration to New Zealand and Australia. Third, hopes surrounding homegrown kava, an ‘indigenous’ and symbolically potent crop.
Paper long abstract:
This paper contrasts three horticultural regimes in which the people of Vanuatu, in the southwest Pacific have engaged, and the transforming people-plant-land relations on which they are based. Firstly, the often brutal regional plantation regimes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the sugarcane plantations of Queensland and Fiji. Second, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in a rural Vanuatu community with a high degree of engagement in New Zealand’s and Australia’s Pacific seasonal horticultural worker programmes, to discuss Ni-Vanuatu hopes for development, but also experiences of often exploitative and exclusionary racialised labour regimes that sometimes evoke echoes of colonial plantation regimes. Thirdly, drawing on recent fieldwork, I discuss hopes and anxieties surrounding homegrown kava, an ‘indigenous’ crop, imbued with aspects of personhood and ritual and spiritual significance. In 2019, kava became Vanuatu’s biggest export commodity, inspiring hopes of alternative developments and economic self-reliance (Smith 2021) founded on customary land, and traditional knowledge. However, anxieties remain including kava’s ‘scalability’, saleability, and sustainability.
Rodrigo C. Bulamah (Universidade Federal de São Paulo)
Paper short abstract:
The purpose of this presentation is to shift our gaze to other aspects of wood charcoal production in the Haitian mountains. Focusing on the leftover economy and its connections to life and death, I wish to discuss how hope is cultivated and how new 'counterplantation' futures are anticipated.
Paper long abstract:
Wood charcoal represents the basis of the Haitian energy system. It is estimated that 70% of the energy demand in the country is supplied by this fuel, used mainly in urban and peri-urban kitchens. On this topic, charcoal production is portrayed by elite national groups and global humanitarian agencies as irrational and responsible for a supposedly uncontrolled deforestation in the country. However, the charcoal chain is mediated by techniques and affects that involve vital processes, different regimes of property and inheritance, economic and ecological calculations in addition to the agency of spirits that inhabit trees and other elements of the landscape. Focusing on the leftovers of charcoal economy and its connections to local concepts of life and death, I wish to discuss how hope is locally cultivated and how new 'counterplantation' futures are anticipated.
Tamar Blickstein (Marie Curie Fellow, Ca' Foscari)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how the current "soy boom" in Argentina is shaped by settler colonial attachments to the racial regimes of previous plantation monocrops like cotton, revealing the continuities of the plantationocene, and a tendency that I call "monocultures of the settler mind."
Paper long abstract:
The global shift to large-scale mechanized agribusiness models is often imagined as a new kind of frontier--one that departs from the labor-intensive plantations that once institutionalized racialized hierarchies of exploitation, and from the settler farming homesteads of indigenous dispossession. Nevertheless, the logics of previous plantations and homesteads continue to shape the way today's capital-intensive food systems are managed and imagined by local actors on the ground. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper considers how the current "soy boom" in Argentina is reinforced by settler colonial attachments to the racial regimes of previous plantation monocrops like cotton, revealing a tendency that I call (playing on Vandana Shiva's famous phrase) "monocultures of the settler mind." This paper contributes to ethnographic understandings of how the plantationocene unfolds in the postplantation era of agribusiness.