Presentation short abstract

This paper reflects on the more-than-human aspects of the concept of everyday degrowth. Drawing on ethnographic and environmental change research in Sumatra, I show how agroecological relations contribute to seed and food sovereignty, land struggles, and Land Back in ways relevant for degrowth.

Presentation long abstract

This paper reflects on the more-than-human and other-than-human aspects of the concept of everyday degrowth, which posits that there exists a latent political potential in mundane, cooperative, and ecologically attune ways of living. Drawing on ethnographies of smallholder and landless peoples’ agroecological practices in Sumatra, I show that everyday forms of agroecology contribute to vital political horizons of seed and food sovereignty, land struggles and Land Back in ways relevant for theories and practices of movements for land and degrowth.

I present three “ethnographic encounters” in Sumatra to substantiate my argument. Ethnographic encounters are a method to bring together the ethnographer and the interlocutor across difference that can denaturalize dominant colonial Western political economic categories and bring forward the heterogeneity of lived experiences. In the first ecnounter, I retell the practices of an enthusiastic seed sharer, and the lived meanings of this persons seed practices. In the second, I retell the practice of tending to a tree-sapling homegarden nursery as an act of care to sustain food forest lifeways. The third is a retelling of a famous Javanese political-movement poem, about the meanings of grass-life as compared to the material qualities of plastic-life.

Taken together, these specific encounters with what are widespread practices of seed sharing, tree tending, and literary representations of plants show how common, everyday experiences contribute values of mutual and ecological care.