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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnography and apprenticeship in rural China, this paper examines how changing human-microbial-environmental relations amid agrarian change reshape local fermentation practices and the situated figures microbes take on as hygienic risk, unruly vitality, and unstable productive force.

Paper long abstract

This paper is based on my ethnography in Hujiang, a village in southern China, where I used apprenticeship as a method to learn three fermentation practices alongside villagers: vegetable pickling, rice wine brewing, and organic composting. Through this practical engagement, I examine situated human-microbial-environmental relations within everyday fermentation practices and ask how these relations are being reconfigured in the course of agrarian change.

In Hujiang, fermentation practices historically worked through collaboration with microbial processes in interconnected ways: they preserved perishable crops and extended their edibility, easing seasonal food shortages; and they reworked agricultural waste, such as animal manure, into usable forms. Through these functions, fermentation linked crop production, food preservation, livestock feeding, and soil fertilization within a metabolic network that sustained ecological cycles and rural livelihoods.

Today, this network no longer operates smoothly. Microbial processes are increasingly reworked by food safety regulation, market valuation, and input-intensive agricultural modernization. These frictions are reflected in changing figures of microbes, whose dangerousness as hygienic risk, unruly vitality, and unstable productive force are foregrounded differently across practices, and also in villagers’ livelihood struggles and shifting ecological conditions. In pickling, microbes appear as a nitrite risk; in rice wine brewing, as an unruly force translated into measurable value through the hydrometer; in composting, as a slower process displaced by agrochemical inputs. Apprenticeship allowed me to encounter these shifts directly and to place villagers’ livelihoods and ecological conditions within a shared metabolic network of microbial processes.