Paper short abstract:

This talk describes ethnographic and visual material about rice beer making in rural Assam, India. Indigenous fermenters perform sacred mythologies that connect people, land and the forest amidst ecological destruction, political oppression and industrialising food and health systems.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation presents ethnographic, and time permitting, video material about indigenous rice beer makers in rural Assam, Northeast of India. It describes fermentation as a process that necessitates a more-than-human framing where microbes are foregrounded as central characters. The talk explores cultures of cultures – the social practices of microbes and the microbes of social practices.

Looking at fermentation in this context, at the back of my mind was a question how people understood the metabolic process taking place in the transformation of the ingredients. In science parlance, the microbes, and a possible lay theory of microbes. While my questions to understand microbes were via the proxy of fermentation, the story was never just about microbes; microbes were situated in broader socio-economic and political relations. Fermentation practitioners’ lay theories of microbes are not merely microbiological but present cultural analysis situated in the political climate of increasing populism and sectarianism in India, as well as the Earthly destruction known as the Anthropocene. The presentation describes the fermenters performing sacred mythologies and spirituality that connect people, land and the forest, as well as putting forward critiques of capitalism that link ecological extraction, political oppression, modern health care and industrialisation of food production.