This article examines the temporal relationality between seed savers and seeds. It shows their use of the vocabulary and praxis of attunement to reclaim slowness and lethargy as key temporal dimensions of their ancestry and indigenous self-actualization and mobilize against the corporate food regime
Long abstract:
Critical STS scholarship has examined the temporal dimensions of capitalism by focusing on its speed. Using gender and class as the central categories of analysis, they have shown how the acceleration of time is crucial to further paid and unpaid labor exploitation. However, less attention has been given to how acceleration is a constitutive feature of the making of techno-modernity and, as such, operates as a mechanism of racialization of both human and more-than-human worlds. Drawing from the work of seed savers in Colombia and their temporal relationality with the seeds, I attempt to expand this realm of nascent scholarship production. Seed savers reject the paradigm of acceleration embedded in agricultural technologies to increase the speed at which plants grow and the quantity and “quality” of their production. Using a vocabulary and practices of attunement between the human and more-than-human world, they reclaim slowness and lethargy as key temporal dimensions of their ancestry and indigenous actualization. I base my analysis on my engagement with seed savers in Colombia for the past ten years and the ethnographic work that I carried out with them over the course of two years.