Presentation short abstract

In South Korea, native seeds now circulate across ecological and administrative regions through grassroots exchanges. These movements unsettle origin-based notions of nativity. This paper examines how activists redefine nativity by shifting from adaptedness to adaptability.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how the concept of “native” seeds is being reshaped by seed-saving activists in South Korea. While nativity has traditionally been defined through adaptedness—understood as long-term ecological and cultural fit within a particular place—native seeds today circulate widely across diverse ecological and administrative regions through grassroots exchanges, as fewer farmers are able or willing to keep cultivating them. Such movements, however, unsettle the normativity of territoriality: the seeds must remain “native” despite their geographic transference; otherwise, the very rationale of conservation becomes unstable. One response to this tension—native seeds can no longer remain “native” while still needing to be categorized as such—has been to modify the concept of nativity itself. Since the late 2010s, grassroots organizations have attempted to redefine nativity to accommodate problems encountered in practice, such as the loss of identity during transference or uncertainty surrounding the genealogy of seed stocks, including their originals. These redefinitions tend to be operational and oriented toward what can be verified within shorter time frames—often less than a decade. Historical verifiability becomes less central, while phenotypic stability gains importance, and adaptability rather than adaptedness comes to be treated as the defining feature. One consequence of this principle-based redefinition is the reification and transferability of ecological and contextual characteristics themselves—rendering seeds a kind of “nature” that can be moved around.