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- Convenors:
-
Roger Norum
(University of Oulu)
Dmitry Arzyutov (The Ohio State University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 6 College Park (6CP), 01/035
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This transdisciplinary panel considers the "social lives" of seeds, plants, animal bodies, and other elemental matter of the agricultural process, and their role in global food security, biodiversity conservation, and climate change mitigation in the Anthropocene.
Long Abstract:
Given the looming uncertainties of agricultural and climatic crises, critical and creative thinking about the futures of the Earth's land is essential. The relations and mobilities of elemental granular matter integral to agricultural processes such as seeds, soils, animal bodies, and other organic substances have begun to receive due attention from anthropologists. This panel addresses the roles played by such matter's material and imagined "social lives", exploring the meanings, within ecological systems, of how these entities are used, circulated, exchanged and mobilized across various social and cultural settings. Drawing on varied data, concepts, methods, and contexts, papers here will discuss the everyday social and cultural dynamics of matter, and their material infrastructures and ecological interventions, which together provide fodder for global food security, biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation, and futuremaking in the Anthropocene. For example, papers might consider the processes and practices behind global seed vaults, plant genomics laboratories, meat factories, organic farms, or even space station biospheres; or they might look at how the material elements of environmental change (i.e., permafrost melting, soil degrading, water rising) alter relationalities of species and built/non-built environments in designing human and more-than-human futures. In line with 'transformative' thinking on Wicked problems, we encourage authors to consider transdisciplinary modes of anthropological engagement (e.g. incorporation of other disciplines' concepts/methods; knowledge and practices of local/Indigenous communities; interventions with artistic or activist forms). The panel champions emerging work on beyond-human ecologies, infrastructure studies, environmental archives, biosemiotics, and planetary futures.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Roger Norum (University of Oulu) Greg Grant (University of Oulu)
Paper short abstract:
This introduction to this official SIEF panel discusses the background to the panel idea and sets a theoretical groundwork for the papers to come
Paper long abstract:
This introduction to this official SIEF panel discusses the background to the panel concept and sets some theoretical groundwork for the papers to come
Huiying Ng (Rachel Carson Center, LMU Munich)
Paper short abstract:
Composed across multiple materialities in the context of Southeast Asian border landscapes, this paper questions and refines the concept of re-peasantisation, and asks how feminist intergenerational structures take up the work of organising futures-in-common.
Paper long abstract:
Platform capitalism and land financialisation have created new scenarios for power to work at a distance, making the asynchronous experience of shared time acutely visible. This paper draws on supply chain studies’ attention to infrastructural instability to theorise the Mekong river as a holding space of structural stability: organizing the seasonal transformations of an ecological commons, bringing mica and flood sediments from upstream tributaries to seasonal wetland forests. Here, trees and riverbank gardens grow after the monsoon, becoming food and shelter for birds and people. Upstream dam infrastructure blocks these sediments, and water releases for cargo shipping disrupt the growing conditions for a submarine riverine weed. Elsewhere, Chiang Rai's red soil slips away along the hills. As Akha learn to live with coffee—a cash crop they are asked to grow in place of banned opium—they have also learnt to grow it for a commercial market. But learning to increase coffee’s yield for a commercial market departs from caring for the land; and Akha are still caught between cash crop and national park mapping that leaves little room for biocultural structures of stability. Specialty coffee markets, organic produce and medicinal herb production offer other options, but require planning and intergenerational agreement to synchronise cultivation, harvest, and markets, while managing the liabilities of input-dependent commercial crop markets. Composed across multiple materialities in the context of Southeast Asian border landscapes, this paper questions and refines the concept of re-peasantisation, and asks how feminist intergenerational structures take up the work of organising futures-in-common.
Dmitry Arzyutov (The Ohio State University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper deals with the intertwined notions of temperature and temporality in building Arctic agricultural projects.
Paper long abstract:
This paper presents a historical anthropological account of how the (Russian) Arctic got involved in a number of scientific experiments on polar agriculture. Despite its remoteness, "eternal" cold, and the image of the "uncultivated," the North has, however, a great potential for building and maintaining the global agricultural infrastructures. The notions of temporality and temperature which are at the centre of my reflections are not only etymologically intertwined, but also have an epistemic intersection (cf. Rovelli 2018) which is of importance for understanding the histories of Arctic agricultural projects. I argue that human attempts to control seed growing seasons through multiple regulations including air and soil temperatures constitute the polar agricultures and epistemologies of food security in the North and beyond. In the first part of my paper, I examine the history of agricultural experiments with cultivating plants in the frozen ground in the High North and how they have eventually changed the environmental profile of the Russian Arctic. The second part of the paper is dedicated to a parallel history of building underground permafrost seed, fish and meat storages which antropocenically allow to slow down vegetation period and organic rotting. The junction of the two fed into the unique contemporary project of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault built in an abandoned mine which serves today as the planetary agricultural archive poetically called the "doomsday ark".
Bertram TURNER (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Paper short abstract:
Organic manure is a coproduction of plants, animals, humans, and microbes. In the Moroccan Souss, it has become an integral part of cash crop supply chain infrastructures. The paper traces the social life of manure from its origin in agro-forestry to its use in industrial cash crop production.
Paper long abstract:
The Souss region in Morocco has been designated a UNESCO biosphere reserve on account of its worldwide unique argan forest ecosystem. At the same time, it is also a ‘Garden of Europe’, i.e. the site of high-standard agrobusiness cash-crop production. Manure constitutes one of the links connecting these mutually constitutive landscapes. Organic animal-plant manure constitutes a material matter in downstream cash crop supply chain infrastructure. It integrates small-scale conventional agro-forestry in highly technicized cash crop agribusiness thereby transforming it. Manure production not only used to be an important component of a sophisticated conventional system of agroforestry; it proves also indispensable for the fertilization of irrigated land in high-end modern cash crop production where chemical fertilizers cannot replace it successfully. However, this demand for manure has significantly contributed to the demise of small-scale agriculture and the exploitation of a protected forest ecosystem for a capitalist agroindustrial infrastructure. Today, in some remote areas of the Moroccan Souss manure production has turned into an important, if not the main source of revenue for local people and conventional agriculture has been reduced to mere manure production, which means the combination of barley cultivation with livestock raising in the argan forest. Barley, although the signature staple food of local Amazigh people, is now cultivated in order to use the straw for manure composting. The paper explores the social life of manure from its base in agro-forestry to its use in industrial cash crop production and the concomitant transformations of multispecies relationalities.