Paper Short Abstract:

In Argentina, alternative farmers worry about pollution caused by the soy-boom; concerns voiced in conspiracist tones. Eschewing ‘conspiracy’ as a comment on veracity, I treat it as a descriptor of Argentine political culture, and as a speech genre that foregrounds causality, agency and culpability.

Paper Abstract:

In rural and peri-urban Argentina, farmers worry about the health effects of the boom in soy agriculture that has so radically altered landscapes since the late 1990s. Working with agroecologists, alternative farmers that use the symbiotic relations in ecosystems to produce without the use of chemicals, these concerns were frequently repeated to me, often in distinctly conspiratorial terms. They would speak of corrupt dealings between agro-industrial polluters and the government; of coverups and suppressed knowledges; of diseases caused by pesticide spraying, but also by vaccine application and the construction of 5G towers. In this presentation I do not use the term conspiracy to comment on the veracity of my interlocutors’ claims, nor am I discussing the belief in any one specific conspiracy. Instead, I use conspiracism to describe Argentine political culture, and also to name a narrative genre that foregrounds direct-causality, agency and culpability. I explore how the generalized political atmosphere of conspiracism in Argentina shaped my interlocutors’ conceptualizations of responsibility. In doing so, I suggest, they developed a coherent means to critique socio-ecological harms – the diffuse, structural nature of which would otherwise impeded holding actors to account.